It would be impossible not to. The things are everywhere.

Oh boy, where to start on this. I started writing a point-by-point response, but you'd do better to read some books on the topics. You've taken a few facts out of context, gotten others wrong, and misunderstood pretty much everything.

By the way, the observable universe is not 46.5bn light years across, it is actually about 90bn light years across. You were thinking of the radius, the distance from us to any point on the horizon.

This is possible for a few reasons. First, the Big Bang did not come from a singularity. It happened everywhere, all at once. The early universe was already a significant portion of its current volume.

Second, space itself expands. The rate of expansion of space is accelerating. This is where Dark Energy (not related to Dark Matter) ties in. The expansion of space accounts for why the radius of the universe is greater than 13.8bn light years, and why the horizon is effectively receding faster than the speed of light. The expansion of space is contributing to the red-shift that we measure to determine how fast objects are moving.

Dark Matter has little to do with hypotheses of FTL travel. Dark Matter is as-yet unobserved mass that appears to form primarily in halos around many, but not all, galaxies including our own. While we have not directly observed it, we still have significant observational evidence of its existence. We might never directly observe it as there may not be enough of it around the Earth for us to get usable data about it. It may even be repulsed by normal matter, in which case we really will never directly observe it.

There I go, writing a response when you'd really do better actually reading credible books on the topics. Maybe start with A Brief History of Everything by Bill Bryson. A lot of his book is not quite correct, but it is close enough and you can go from there to figure which parts are accurate and which are not. Just taking a few popular works from my own bookshelf I'd recommend In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbon, The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll, The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman, and The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg. These are all decent popular works as I recall. They won't replace a an actual undergraduate education, but they will at least give you a general introduction to cosmology, particle physics, and more importantly the processes and history of the science of physics. You could also benefit if you read some works on rational skepticism to help separate out the bullshit.

Also read some of the biographies and popular works written by the legends in physics, but keep in mind that even the greats had their flaws and logical failures. Stay away from anything that tries to tie quantum physics to the supernatural, or string theory in general because that is rich territory for nonsense. Even some of the mainstream theoreticians in string theory are nuts.

It's more complicated than that. It isn't just that it takes light 2.5m years to span the distance from our perspective. Light also travels at the speed of causality, and nothing that occurred in Andromeda can reach Earth before the light.

This is like asking what leprechaun farts taste like. What you're asking for is a solution to an impossible scenario. There is no correct answer.

We have a very limited understanding of the first 3.5bn years of life on Earth. Nearly everything that can be studied is from the most recent 500 million years. There is insufficient data to extrapolate from.

It’s fun to speculate about the wider universe, but its all meaningless outside of fantasy. At the moment the question of life and civilizations beyond Earth is a black box that we’ve hung a mirror on.

That is a lot of speculation to base on a sample of 1.

The area of our search for extraterrestrial life extends only a few lightyears, while just our galaxy is 100k to 200k ly across and 1,000 ly deep. If the universe were a city it would be somewhere truly expansive like Beijing, and our search for advanced civilizations would be the equivalent of shining a flashlight into one dark corner of one small closet in one old apartment tower on the outskirts, and then declaring that nobody else lives in the whole city.

An important resource for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

Humans, duh. The ones who become dominant through experimentation and advancement. If you plant your feet and demand that everyone respect your immovability, you're gonna get left behind.

Mars colonization is a ridiculous fantasy, but orbital and lunar mining and industry are likely in the next century. The point of mining the moon or asteroids is not to find resources that we lack on Earth, it is that those resources don't have to be launched from the Earth. With enough mining and manufacturing capacity in orbit we could build solar arrays and science experiments that just aren't possible on Earth. Particle accelerators to dwarf the LHC, laser interferometers that are many times longer and more sensitive than LIGO.

We could produce an entire new way of life that doesn't require polluting the Earth for every little luxury.

Gravity does not pull objects down. It distorts space.

Those are still among the most common causes of death in old age.

Mankind? No. Our creations? Perhaps.

Biological humanity will never escape this system, but intelligent machines could colonize the galaxy in a million years. It's one reason why we know that there are no super-advanced civilizations currently residing within our galaxy, +/- 1 million years.