Wow, that's a really comprehensive, deep and dense collection of information. For anyone really interested in the science of this who doesn't necessarily want

Wow, that's a really comprehensive, deep and dense collection of information. For anyone really interested in the science of this who doesn't necessarily want to digest the raw math, I highly suggest Isaac Arthur's Youtube channel eg [1][2]. People tend to fall into a number of traps when dipping their toes into this topic. The first one is the trap of wishful thinking, which is the primary reason for pretty much any attempt to come up with a theory for FTL. Most of these people just don't understand what the domain of a function is. Just because you can plug a negative number into an equation that is otherwise over real numbers doesn't mean that makes sense or is valid. Second, people oversimplify. I see on this thread and others claims like "if we just accelerate at 1G we can get pretty much anywhere relatively quickly". So that's true superficially but the energy requirements for that are so vast even if you have perfect mass to energy conversion that a significant percentage of your ship's mass is fuel. To me, laser highways seem like the most likely form of far future interstellar travel. That's largely predicated on commercially viable fusion power however and that's not a given. Failing that, you're talking about variations of what are essentially generational ships. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXiitWK_6Qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXiitWK_6Qg [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6BQSgidbmc&t=1526s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6BQSgidbmc&t=1526s