“BTW, I just don’t believe it is practical to travel more than a light year or two at best,...”
Why?
Seems to me that to make interstellar travel & communications practical, you have to have harnessed space/time to your advantage, giving you relatively unlimited range. This may be why we never hear from others - they are transmitting at something beyond light speed while we are listening at light speed & below.
I've always thought this is the answer to "where is everybody?". Up until now, we've been looking in the radio spectrum for messages. Radio waves only travel at light-speed; so it'd be a pretty crummy means of interstellar communization. We're already on the verge of instantaneous communication via quantum entanglement (sometimes rather confusedly called teleportation). Perhaps when we latch on to whatever communication method might be out there we'll find the "airwaves" flooded with extra-terrestrial transmissions.
Ain’t never going to happen. Even if you assume that was in priciple possible I remember reading an article in Scientific American several years ago that discussed a possible plan to send a probe to Alpha Proxima the closest star other than the Sun. They proposed a fusion powered rocket. They calculated that the space ship would be massive—a spherical fuel tank about a mile in diameter. The payload would be a camera weighing a few ounces. You’d run the rocket engines full time for 50 years. In 50 years, the probe would arrive at Alpha Proxima, the closet star at 4.5 light years. But it would be traveling at about 10% of the speed of light and would zip thru the solar system in a few hours. So you ca see the difficulty involved in interstellar travel. Vast amounts of fuel. Long missions. Tremendous speeds. And technology which is visionary. And that just gets us to our nearest neighbor.