Why is FTL necessary for interstellar travel? If you could go even 1% c then you could make journies that are multiple light years on the scale of centuries. It’s not until 50% c does time dilation start playing a significant role, but it would allow making a 10 l-yr journey in 17 years.

Nature doesn’t care if we think there should be aliens or FTL travel. Nature doesn’t like casualty violated and that means we’re all going to be following its rules on the speed of causality. There are no cosmic-scale sentient forces that can shape space-time near us or else we would have noticed in observations decades ago.

I disagree, I think it probably would for humans.. but what about other advanced organisms? Maybe they have very long lives. Maybe their biology is more conducive to 'suspended animation' or some other form of hibernation. Maybe they've digitized their minds and can suspend execution of their thought processes for tens of thousands of years. Maybe their social traits (ant like hives perhaps?) make generation ships feasible while they would collapse into strive for humans.

So Competitive Quake/Counter Strike/ThingsKidsPlayTheseDays:-) will fund research into FTL transport for <1ms ping.

Sadly, I could see it. Some billionaire somewhere wants "The Best" latency numbers and wants it on their yacht...