Mind blown. Look, I'm not an astrophysicist or anything, but I've gotta think aiming the message such that it would even find Earth would be quite an endeavor as well. And what if you sent it and Earth was on the other side of the sun when it arrived. Or what if Jupiter was in the way. Good luck getting through that magnetic field. You watch these shows about space probes and such they send within our own solar system and it's like an hours long process just to get info back to Earth and then send a few lines of computer code back to the craft to tell it what to do. People think it's just like the movies where some long haired blond hacks the keyboard a few times and bam, the Voyager just turns on a dime. Nope. Not true.
At the end of the day, I think it's safe to surmise that VTHawk really talked out of his ass about leaving the galaxy if we could just travel at light speed. To me the ability to generate speed is probably the least of our concerns. You know, I once saw a documentary about space where some folks were traveling to a planet called Alderan. Unbeknownst to them, the planet had exploded prior to their arrival. They were in the middle of an asteroid belt. But those folks had maps. Our hypothetical craft wouldn't have that. Good luck dodging asteroids in deep space when you're going the speed of light. Call me a cynic, but I think you might need more computing power than currently exists on Earth just to come up with a collision avoidance system at those speeds. You better have one helluva windshield on a craft like that. Frankly, I don't even know how it could work. You couldn't use a laser or radar because the speed of the craft would be so high that the laser couldn't even outrun the craft. Radar of course would be worthless because you'd be moving so much faster than the waves. VTHawk really needs to sharpen his pencil before coming in here with bullshit.
