Or go part of the way and stop. Interstellar space is riddled with bodies. Sol's Oort cloud extends out to a light-year or so, but the fringes of it mix with A

Or go part of the way and stop. Interstellar space is riddled with bodies. Sol's Oort cloud extends out to a light-year or so, but the fringes of it mix with Alpha Centauri's. It's mainly composed of cometary nuclei and ejected rocky masses, so it's rich in low-mass elements: hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen... all the elements of life. The total mass is on the order of tens of times the mass of the Earth, except unlike Earth, all that mass is accessible. Finding estimates of the separation between objects is pretty hard, but the ones I've seen very from ~5 light seconds up depending on where you are and how big a body you're interested in. About half a light year out, it seems that there's likely to be a decent sized body (10s of kilometres across) within 30 light seconds. Larger objects are less common, but here's an estimate of there being about 10^5 moon-sized objects per star: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2687 http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2687 It's surprisingly hospitable out there, too. The environment never changes, you don't really need to worry about radiation (except for the occasional supernova), and cooling is easy. Travel is easy, too: space is nearly flat, so you don't need to worry about transfer orbits: boost in a straight line, then decelerate and stop. Travel time is solely a function of how much energy you want to put in. Most objects are moving pretty slowly, too, way under a kilometre per second. You need to be able to fuse hydrogen, of course. Or engineer yourself to use less energy. It would be entirely feasible to build a ship, travel six months to a year, and then settle on a decent sized body and found a colony there. A few generations later, your children head off again. Eventually your child civilisation has hopped rocks all the way to Alpha Centauri, but of course by then the idea of living near a star would be utterly alien to them. Personally, I think that when we discover proper alien intelligences, it'll be here: probably in the form of computational nets of bacteria-like organisms, living very slowly and efficiently, spreading via spores from rock to rock in the darkness. So much safer and more reliable than the fast, hot, dangerous worlds down on the edges of the solar fire...