The Speculist

Hmmm, seems a good time to push my new low impact galaxy colonization program using arks (ie, huge space ships with most of the resources a growing colony would need) travelling at a mere few hundred kilometers per second and over distances of a few lightyears at most. The idea is that you make a strong effort to colonize systems that travel at a large relative velocity to you and are pretty close to you.

For example, the system with the largest known relative velocity, Wolf 424, a pair of red dwarfs travels with a relative velocity of a bit under 2 lightyears per millenia (almost 600 kilometers per second). Sometime in the next 10k years, it'll pass with two light years of us.

The idea is that you first send a number of probes to the system to gauge how difficult it'll be to colonize and what you'll have available. I'm not sure, but it appears that the system is metal-poor, so you'll probably have to bring your own resources. And the stars are too red to support photosynthesis. Such is life.

Once you have everything figured out, you send the missions, a series of "arks". They settle in and get established using whatever is there.

Once that is done, then you refurbish the arks and start scouting all the systems that Wolf 424 passes by. At it's speed, I think you'll pass near new systems every 1k or so years on average (I haven't figured out the math so very crude guess). You can also use these near passes to pick up metal and other resources you might need. Ie, send something out, start up some mines, and send stuff back.

Stars with the huge relative velocity of Wolf 424 are rare, but there are slower stars that still have a good speed to them. You should be able to manage a propagation rate through the galaxy of a good part of a lightyear per millenia.

In addition to Wolf 424, there are a few other stars passing very close to the Solar System over the next hundred thousand years.

The current local systems are interesting too. Barnard's star has a good relative velocity of 150 km/s and it will get a bit closer. I think it has some sort of asteroid belt too so it doesn't have the resource problem that Wolf 424 would have. The Alpha Centauri triple star system is closest, of course, and both major stars have a habitable zone (ie, where liquid water could exist). But the system has a low relative velocity to the Sun and wouldn't make a good choice for a star hopper.