The perspective that we will likely explore the universe using artificial beings is on the right track. Our species is at the stage of flinging hunks of metal

The perspective that we will likely explore the universe using artificial beings is on the right track. Our species is at the stage of flinging hunks of metal and meat at nearby rocks and planets, whereas the problem of space exploration means ultimately that we are trying to cohere information across distances measured in light years. The former problem is interesting and exciting, but the latter problem is the one that we can probably find solutions for in the span of a couple of lifetimes. How it could plausibly have been solved by other civilizations is they figured out a way to transmit information to set off the operations that would resolve to the building of the other end of a communications channel. It reminds me of how relative time was fictionalized in the movie Interstellar, where hundreds of thousands of years here pass over a relatively very short period far enough away, to where (inverting that perspective) if we came up with a quantum device that entangled with some distant photons to set off the reactions that would yield a civilization in 100m of its years, if it were far away enough, we might even hear back from them in a few lifetimes. That's sci-fi speculation, and someone can correct my misunderstanding of general relativity, but I'm saying it might be more plausible to in-effect compute with distant parts of the universe than to solve the problem of preserving meat in cans and how we propel them through it.