  The ease of interstellar rocket travel is an issue with implications for the
long term fate of our own and other civilizations and for the much-debated
number of technological civilizations in the Galaxy. We show that the physical
barrier to interstellar travel can be greatly reduced if voyagers are patient,
and wait for the close passage of another star. For a representative time of
$\sim$1 Gyr, characteristic of the remaining time that Earth will remain
habitable, one anticipates a passage of another star within $\sim 1500$~AU.
This lowers the travel time for interstellar migration by $\sim$ two orders of
magnitude compared with calculated travel times based on distances comparable
to average interstellar separations (i.e., $\sim$1 pc) in the solar vicinity.
We consider the implications for how long-lived civilizations may respond to
stellar evolution, including the case of stars in wide binaries, and the
difficulties of identifying systems currently undergoing a relevant close
encounter.
  Assuming that life originates only around G-type stars, but migrates
primarily to lower mass hosts when the original system becomes uninhabitable,
the fraction of extant technological civilizations that exist as diaspora can
be comparable to the fraction that still orbit their original host stars.
