First images from Euclid are in

Some of that zooming in made me feel pretty damn uncomfortable. It really is f'ing massive out there huh. Makes me wonder what this is all about, I'm sure it's something, I wonder what. :)

The actual problem is that we were made early enough to begin to understand the full scale of it, but we're still not mature enough to go out there and explore it. Therefore, you can reason that now is the right time to get behind anything that pushes us beyond the Earth.

These distances are well outside the scope of exploration. Getting to the next solar system is already a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Getting to the next galaxy? Forget it. Getting to these galaxies we see in the picture? Absolutely no way. I know people like to be optimistic about these things but it's honestly pure wishful thinking.

Once we have fusion reactors, it won't be.

Fusion reactors won't really help. Sure, you can accelerate indefinitely - but only at maybe 1G or a bit more if you don't want to kill the occupants. Then you have to flip and decelerate. Unless we find a way to freeze/stasis people, the limits are still shockingly small.

We'd need to start cracking some kind of jumping/FTL/etc technology to have any hope of real exploration.

Well... you don't need to freeze people if you can travel at a substantial fraction of c, because of time dilation.

Caveats:

1. It's really, really hard to supply enough energy to go that fast, even with fusion power.

2. Your passengers won't be able to go home again, because by the time they get back everyone they've ever known will be long dead.

3. Even if you could go that fast, you'll eventually hit a speck of dust and disintegrate.

F=ma

At 1% the speed of light (approx 3000000 m/s) and a medium-mass dust (1x10-5 kg, stationary), not enough force or area to dent steel (350 N/mm^2), but over time, lots of dust could cause erosion (quick math/estimates).