Here's an idea that's been kicking around in my mind for a while: what if it's not that it takes such a tremendous amount of time to travel anywhere interesting in the universe, but that our perception of time is just too fast? Perhaps to an alien race a thousand (or million) years seems like a second. Wikipedia suggests that our perception of time does get (slightly) slower as we age [1], so maybe living significantly longer could do this to us as well. Finally, it seems that our perception of time is largely shaped by the Circadian rhythm; if life evolved somewhere with a much slower "cosmic clock" could that also cause a much slower time perception?