Why would it be impossible? I think it is extremely improbable, but not what I would classify as impossible.
I know very little about physics, but it is my understanding that from everything we know about physics, the light speed constrain just isn’t ever going to go away. That there isn’t really a work around to that. However, working within that framework, I can still easily imagine a scenario where we could be attacked.
Imagine there is an advanced species that lives somewhere in the Alpha Centauri system, and they want to attack us. Sure, from what we know about physics, they aren’t going to ever be able to travel faster than light. But can we be certain there is no way to travel very fast?
I think we could probably, with current technology, have something traveling through space at around 150,000 mph. The Galileo probe was at one point traveling like 106,000 mph through space.
At that speed, it would still take something like 20,000 years to reach earth.
But what if we had something going at like, 33,000,000 miles per hour? That’s how fast you would have to be going to get from Alpha Centauri to earth in 30 years. That’s only 5% of the speed of light.
Thirty years is a long time in the life of a human. But maybe a life form evolving on AC lives for 300-400 years. For them, it’d be a significant journey, but if they were a race that just wanted to conquer, it wouldn’t bother them.
Or maybe it’s a hive-mind type species, in which case maybe they could send a big vessel that functioned as a self-sufficient hive, traveling through space. Within the hive, over 30 years many of them would be born, grow up, and die, but the hive itself would be alive and functioning. Ready to conquer when it got to earth.
Better yet, imagine such a species that starts out as small eggs that can burrow into soil and eventually grow into fearsome insectoid monsters. Or imagine an alien race advanced enough in biology to create such a thing. They could just launch thousands of things the size of a space probe and land them on earth. They would then burrow into the ground and a few years later millions of them explode out of the earth (functioning as a hive mind) and kill everything, then the alien race that created this “weapon” sends some colonists on the slow 30-year boat to Earth.
Working under the current constraints of human biology and physics, sure it is impossible. But change the biologic factor (life cycle, way we reproduce, maximum age) and advance the technology some (but without exceeding the speed of life) and it’s not impossible by any means.