A star of 15 solar masses exhausts its hydrogen in about one-thousandth the lifetime of our sun. It proceeds through the red giant phase, and eventually becomes a red supergiant. In their final stages, supergiants may explode into supernovae. The collapse of these massive stars may produce a neutron star or a black hole.

Betelgeuse, located at the shoulder of Orion, is the best-known example. It forms part of the winter triangle seen from North America. Its celestial coordinates are RA=5 h 52 m , dec=7° 24'.
Betelgeuse has a luminosity about 10,000 times that of the Sun and its radius is calculated to be about 370 times that of the sun. If it were positioned at the center of our sun, its radius would extend out past the radius of Mars, about 2 astronomical units! It has a surface temperature of about 3000 K as determined from its blackbody radiation curve. Betelgeuse is about 310 light years away from the Earth.

Betelgeuse is alot further away than Alpha Centauri. If our survival depended on getting there, I couldn't even guess how we'd make the journey. However Betelgeuse could explode tomorrow, or in 10,000 years, so we don't have forever to figure it out. That is, unless we are prepared to wait much longer, and travel much further. At this stage, I don't see much hurry, but I'm just speculating. The ability to travel that distance would imply tha we have to ability to travel within that sphere as well. The Hipparcos satellite measured the distances to 28,000 stars within 300 lightyears. That's a VAST interstellar empire, even by hard-core science fiction standards!

Dude.

Of course, if we can make the jump to the nearest star, then the biggest problem is solved, and it is really only a matter of time to perform a geometric colonization of that spherical volume. All this is riding on some radical evolution towards a form that can survive the extreme conditions in the corona and cores of stars themselves. Surely not biological. Maybe machines grown on biological templates. After that, mutation, migration to substrate realities, and then to agglomerations of non-solids, electrified plasma layers in stars, and so on. Migration upstream, like salmon.

Somewhere along the line, we spread throughout interstellar space. I think.