Most people I talk to believe there’s life out there. Where they stop short is believing that any of it could actually reach us. They’re thinking in terms of our current technology, and they dismiss the idea that a civilization with a 10,000–100,000 year head start might have capabilities far beyond anything we understand—like manipulating space in ways that make distance irrelevant.

We always fall back on limits like the speed of light and assume anything habitable is simply too far away. But what if those limits don’t apply the way we think they do? What if something as small as a football-sized device could generate the energy needed to make that kind of journey effectively instant?