Yes, but...the analogy I like to use is to imagine that we are tiny creatures living in a hole in a vast sheet of ice. Our hole is ~1 au in diameter, Proxima Ce

Yes, but...the analogy I like to use is to imagine that we are tiny creatures living in a hole in a vast sheet of ice. Our hole is ~1 au in diameter, Proxima Centauri is 270k au away. So if the hole is 1cm wide the next hole is ~2.7km away. That's a long way for a microbe to walk, but it's not outside the realm of possbility if the ice is very, very flat and it can make tiny ice skates such that you don't need to spend energy to maintain speed. Of course, the real problem with the analogy is that the fastest you can go 1 cm in this universe is about 8 minutes. So the absolute shortest time it takes you to travel that 2.7km is 4.2 years. That's a few hundred cm per year. But in reality the best we could possibly do is a few tens of cm per year (e.g. c/10), and even that's in the realm of science fiction. On the bright side, humanity has the Solar system all to itself with wonderful natural barriers to invasion and conquest. So we have time to figure out how to not blow ourselves up and/or stop dismantling our life support system to make Ikea furniture.