Yes, it's a staple of hard science fiction. It's generally assumed that interstellar cultures are isolated, extremely long lived, and/or have solved the problems of practical interstellar travel (maintaining high thrust, dealing with radiation, not going splat on a dust particle at .99999c).
It's interesting to note that a traveler on a spaceship that can maintain 1g of acceleration would experience 14 years subjective time while traversing 1480 light years. (According to http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.htm...)