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No it's not, you can e.g. decelerate from nearly .5C over the course of about 20 years with a magnetic sail.
This is an odd objection to me given that the "aliens" in the conventional narrative supposedly act exactly as humans do towards, say, apes (trying to observe them discreetly but slipping up in embarrassing ways, occasionally knocking them out with mysterious weapons and taking biopsy samples or tagging them, doing hybridization experiments, etc.) and if anything that seems suspiciously anthropomorphic. It seems to me we should expect aliens to behave weirdly, if they were truly from a distant world in some way.
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