multi-verse may be here sooner than anyone thought..

[Harte]

I heard they brought the requirement for the Alcubiere drive closer to the mass of the voyager probe.

Using Dark Energy, yes. Once we find what Dark Energy is maybe it could be done.
BTW, it's not the mass of that probe - it's the energy equivalent of that mass. Of course, it's much smaller than earlier energy requirement estimates, but it's Dark Energy being manipulated, and we don't know for certain what that is or if it even exists.

Also there's evidence to suggest that the multiverse itself is collapsing, or at least in part. I doubt that it'd be possible or beneficial in any sense for every observed/observable universe to be condensed into a single reality.

You may have your multiverses confused. There are about half a dozen different things that use the term "multiverse" in their descriptions, from the "many worlds" interpretation of QM, to the multiverse of bubble universes, to the multiverse of branes in M-Theory.

Harte