If we decide utility requires many information round-trips with the rest of the colonized universe (for cultural exchange or something), the supply of valuable galaxies will be lower, and so the price will be higher.
I’m pretty unsure. Maybe the blueprint for optimal hedonium requires 10% of the universe’s compute to find, and it’s twice as good as the best blueprint for hedonium that one galaxy can find on its own.
I doubt there’s any physical artifact that has that property?
Maybe there are mathematical objects that can only be discovered by brute search, even in the limit of technological maturity, that have values that have terrible scaling properties (trillions and trillions of times more input for a 2x improvement). But even that seems like a stretch.
Why would that be? Can’t we just simulate them?
I’m pretty unsure. Maybe the blueprint for optimal hedonium requires 10% of the universe’s compute to find, and it’s twice as good as the best blueprint for hedonium that one galaxy can find on its own.
Isn’t that a completely unrealistic possibility?
I doubt there’s any physical artifact that has that property?
Maybe there are mathematical objects that can only be discovered by brute search, even in the limit of technological maturity, that have values that have terrible scaling properties (trillions and trillions of times more input for a 2x improvement). But even that seems like a stretch.
Noting that you said that you’re unsure.
If the scaling is better, the difference would be more than 2x, so the point would hold even more.