Only for sufficiently small values of anywhere. Even near-light-speed communication in fiber optics has detectable and significant delay just in crossing a continent. A trip made physically by humans every day.

Near-light-speed travel to the Moon would take a few seconds. Near-light-speed travel to Mars would take longer than my drive to the grocery store. These are not "instantaneously."

I'm talking about time dilation. From the perspective of the pilot of a near light speed ship a trip across the galaxy would be instantaneous.

It's instantaneous at 100% of light speed (impossible for massive objects). At "near" light speed, you need seventeen nines (0.99999999999999999c) to bring a trip across the galaxy down to a subjective day. I'm not sure how near your idea of "near" is. You also need instantaneous acceleration at both ends, which is quite a requirement.

OK. Only Pluto in a few hours, Mars in a few minutes, and the moon in less time it would take for me to reach the toilet from my living room.

Not literally instantaneous, but still practically instantaneous at the scale of the solar system.

> Near light-speed travel will allow a person to go anywhere instantaneously

Only if you ignore the enormous acceleration/deceleration forces needed for this.

Surprisingly it's not that much. At a constant 1G acceleration you could travel across the galaxy (100k light years) in 12 years (from your reference frame)[0].

I definitely agree that such travel would require enormous amounts of energy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_ac...

also, "instantaneously" is a stretch on a galactic scale. 299792000 m/s isn't as fast as it sounds if you need to cross the entire galaxy.

Time dilation doesn't matter here.