I am in the camp where I think its more likely that traveling faster than light is less likely than there being a way to travel faster than it. Im not even sure if space really is expanding faster or if we figure out at some point it was something where it seemed like it was but it wasn't. That means travel would pretty much have to be something like colony ships or seed ships or something with non crewed leading the way. Its taken 5 billion years for the eath to get us here but the galaxy is only like twice that since it settle down (these are realllly rough). there is this thing about if a species went balls out on colonization it could be done in like 100k years but a more reasonable one where they take a few hundred years to build up in each solar system before moving out more is like 50 million but I personally would push it out further to 1billion. heck many would fail or break away or whatever. communication would still be speed of light and likely slower with relays and such. Im going to say a billion. Then we are in an oddly in pretty empty part of both the galaxy and the universe so who knows. Maybe there is some thing happening in most of the universe and we are like on this wierd island. Like those tribes that last I knew were still around that we try to not let the modern world interfere with.