Only photons, which are mass-less, can move at the speed of light. Anything with even the slightest mass cannot, as not enough energy exists in the Universe to get something with even the mass of a quark to move at lightspeed. Our portion of the Universe is of relatively the same age as Earth, so even if a civilization developed on a galactic neighbor, it would have had to develop technology far faster than us Earthlings. Alpha Centauri is our closest neighboring star, and it's something like 4.3 light years away. We'd be the only choice for any Centaurians to visit, as other stars are too far away, but that would mean they evolved far faster than us. If a civilization evolved somewhere in our closest neighboring galaxy (Andromeda) the fastest anything could get into the Milky Way is 2 million years....and then any entity would have 500,000,000 billion Milky Way stars to choose from, making our Sun kind of like choosing one particular grain of sand on Waikiki Beach. The US launched Voyager 1 back in the late 1970s. It has been going away from Earth at 20,000-28,000 mph for all that time, and has finally just reached the edge of our own solar system. It would take another 120,000 years or so just to get as far as our closest star, or 54 billion years to reach Andromeda, which is nearly 4 times as old as this current Universe. Now I might entertain the possibility that a civilization in the Alpha Centauri system was faster developing AI than us Earthlings, and maybe they sent a fast moving probe to check us out, but that's about it.
