Can we ever exit the Milky Way and travel to another galaxy?

Yes and no and yes and no… OK, my mind has just exited the Milky Way! So here we go!
Before answering the question, let’s rewind and see where we reside inside our spiral galaxy. First of all, the Milky Way is the second largest galaxy in our Local Group (second only to Andromeda), with several satellite dwarf galaxies orbiting it or in collision with the Milky Way. Inside this 100.000 ly wide (or 150-200 kly wide, according to another theory) and 1000 ly thick galaxy, we reside at approximately 26.5 kly away from our galactic center and about 25 kly away from the rim. Furthermore, remember!, our Solar System is not located on either one of the two main galactic arms of the Milky Way. Instead, we are located more or less in the middle of the Orion Spur, a sub-arm fractured from the Sagittarius main arm. If you feel depressed by knowing we don’t belong to any of the two main arms (Sagittarius and Perseus), well, don’t! We live in a pretty unpopulated region of our galaxy, far away from the radiation of our galactic center and also far away from most of the intergalactic radiation. The Goldilocks of the Milky Way!
If we wanted to travel outside our galaxy, we would probably die for a myriad of reasons. Let’s cancel all dangers space might pose to our journey, we still die of old age without being able to reach the edge. In this case we would have to build a self-supporting spacecraft for our grand-grand-…..-grandchildren to be able to reach the rim (those were a lot of grands, by the way). The question was about reaching another galaxy, and that’s Andromeda, which is still pretty far away from the Milky Way, but about to collide with our galaxy in about… 4 billion years! Not even Keanu Reeves will live that long to be able to witness it! Honestly! So here you go! If we ever find the means to travel on such long distances, our best chances are the dwarf galaxies orbiting our own, or wait for another 4 billion years for Andromeda to visit us into a grand galactic merger.

We cannot and probably will never ever have the possibility to even dream of reaching any other galaxies except for the ones mentioned above, because the space between galaxies is expanding faster than the speed of light. If we started to travel towards some distant galaxy, once outside the Milky Way we would be lost in the darkness of space for all eternity, and I mean this literally! The space around us would expand so fast that we would not be able to turn back towards the Milky Way, nor go towards another galaxy. Instead we would just look in despair to see our galaxy fading away in the distance, together with everything else!… while listening to “Baby“… by Justin Bieber… on repeat!… the horror! – Roman Alexander

(The question was originally asked by Aaron Kuhn)