What is really needed for a civilization to move to the stars are barely sub-light ships and a way to absorb the momentum from your starship at each end of your trip so that it can be re-used. A large ring around a solar system like a particle accelerator that can shoot your ships to another system and at that other system have a ring ready to catch your ships.
A group called "The Living Universe Foundation" got started from a novel called "The Millenium Project" or something like that by a guy named Savage. In his book he has an 8 step program to seeding the galaxy with humans.
That lens would be far too weak, I'm afraid. It's big, sure, but its power is poor. Remote galaxies are a much better bet, but they're no help looking at galactic sources.
X-ray interferometry has the potential to resolve the event horizon of a supermassive black hole in the nucleus of a nearby galaxy and at the center of our galaxy. This is equivalent to
- resolving a feature the size of a dinner plate on the surface of the sun,
- observing a 100 km emission knot on the surface of Alpha Centauri,
- imaging the disk of a star in the Magellanic CLouds,
- mapping in detail the accretion disk at the center of the Milky Way,
- directly measuring the parallax of a star in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, or
- resolving one-tenth of a light year at the far extent of the visible Universe.