It makes me sooo sad that (whoever) introduced this stupid light speed limit so we can’t visit those places. Ever. Maybe in the next reality.
Similarly, we are not aware of any physics-based reason that prevent the design, construction and maintenance of computing substrates that renew themselves over billions of years. There are certainly political, cultural, social, even energy limitations, but nothing quite as hard as the c limit.
So theoretically, we can hope to even in this reality to eventually create versions of our selves that reside in computing substrates and "wake up" for "interesting" events along a multi-million year journey. Perhaps they run in a low-power mode, where 1 day in real universe == 1 second in the substrate. In that context, even if we never go faster in that future than our current technology's Juno space probe, a trip to Alpha Centauri is "only" 17,785.27 years, or 12.35 years subjective substrate time, enough to get excited about and study the torrent of increasingly-fine-grained data pouring in from the real world about the destination.
If the galaxy is relatively teeming with these compute substrate hibernation ships, then that presents interesting possible resolutions to the Fermi Paradox: what we are doing today on Earth is not "interesting" enough to the automation on these alien ships, or we are deemed interesting, but even the nearest ship within our light/EM cone is still thousands to tens of thousands of years away.
It gets even more interesting if we figure out how to "decant" substrate consciousnesses into physical bodies.
Even at that glacially-slow crawl of the Juno space probe, it would still take "only" 383,551,218 years to traverse the Milky Way's 100,000 light years. Put up against the ~13 billion years of the Milky Way's existence, that means spreading across the Milky Way is still within the realm of not-ruled-out-by-physics.
https://www.eveonline.com/article/introducing-time-dilation-...
gravitational lensing by Sun, just need to put the telescope at least 550 AU from the Sun.
https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/ultimate-space-tele...
"And using the Sun as a lens would result in much greater magnification. Instead of a single pixel or two, astronomers would get images of 1,000 x 1,000 pixels from exoplanets 30 parsecs, or about 100 light years, away. That translates to a resolution of about 10 kilometers on the planet’s surface, better than what the Hubble Space Telescope can see on Mars, which would allow us to make out continents and other surface features."
To the GGP point of light speed limit - that is only true for static fixed spacetime. The spacetime expansion/contraction doesn't seem to have that limit (this is how we have far-far galaxies receding from us at the speeds higher than c). Just an issue of engineering that into a practical drive ...