If faraway galaxies are ever auctioned off, you might think they’d be exorbitantly expensive. However, I think the market price of an average galaxy would only be equivalent to between $250 and $25,000 invested in the stock market today. (epistemic status: my modal guess, pretty weakly held)
Assumptions:
The world has about $260 trillion of investable assets in early 2026, and ~$500T of total assets.
Upper bound: There are something like 20 billion galaxies in the accessible universe (it contains 20B times the baryonic matter in the Milky Way). If galaxies are worth the same as all assets, Milky Way sized galaxies would each be worth $25K each. If investable assets, $13K each.
Since there are only 8B people, you can buy 2.5 galaxies if you have the world mean wealth (currently ~$60k) and invest it well
Lower bound: If galaxies are too cheap (say <1% of world assets), whoever is in power say 1,000 years later will declare the auction manifestly unfair and get the trades reversed, or just shoot down the galaxy owners’ space probes.
People will have a range of discount rates, especially at the long end, with some valuing a galaxy 10 billion light-years away similarly to one only 5M light-years away, others valuing the 5M LY galaxy more, and others (e.g. living traditional human lifestyles) placing negligible value on both compared to the Earth. Therefore, I expect the market price to be somewhere between the lower and upper bounds.
The main reason the conclusion wouldn’t hold is if most people can’t invest in assets that grow at the average rate. This would lead the scenario Dwarkesh wrote about, where so many of the galaxies are owned by either the ultra-wealthy or AIs that very few people will own even one galaxy—or, of course, AI takeover. I also find this plausible.
Another complication is that much of the accessible universe is only barely accessible, and by the time a probe gets there, the Earth is no longer accessible. 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. However, the outer galaxies will get an even lower price.
Continued ability to reinvest near-term profits from currently available assets (or from UBI) into entities that will be relevant in the future is questionable, while literal stakes in current entities will be killed by dilution over astronomical time (when valued as fractions of the whole).
Fun exploration, though I don’t believe the underlying assumptions at all. The biggest disconnect I see is the belief that the current mean individual wealth can be made to retain that fraction of total wealth over any significant time period, including massive changes in number of wealth-holders, and in what “wealth” can even be measured in.
There is no long-term passive wealth mechanism. It always requires quite a bit of attention and management, and then gets transferred to the managers rather than the nominal owners. Or, often, to the revolutionaries or vendors who are able to capture it.
This is problematic, EVEN IF the concept of “ownership” can be applied to galaxies and human-comprehensible owning entitites.
I mostly agree. And you can do better with better investments. I observe that this does not imply that scope-sensitive altruists should accumulate capital in order to buy galaxies: buying one millionth of the lightcone costs around $20M invested well now (my independent number; Thomas says $5-500M iiuc). And I think there are donation opportunities 100x that good for scope-sensitive altruists on the margin.
I would contest the frame here. In particular I think it won’t hold up because things won’t stay as capital-bound as they are now, and that seriously messes with the continuity required for today’s investments to maintain their relative portion of the pie. What do you think of this part?
(EDIT: Okay I think you are referencing this sort of thing with “most people can’t invest in assets that grow at the average rate”, but I still take issue with some picture in which everything is apportioned to assets that grow or something like that.)
To expand: I think today’s capital earns its gains mostly because it is a required input, which thereby gives it a lot of negotiating power. And I think this falls off pretty sharply in time, in the limit of technological development.
(I should say, so long as it remains the case that we need lots of coordinated work to build compute engines to run intelligence, “capital” seems to remain meaningful in the old ways. But a lot of things seem possible with a nanofactory and the right information about how to use it, and at a point like that eld-capital isn’t a relevant bottleneck.)
And while we can imagine some way that neo-capital continues to project its force in a profit-grabbing way in the future, I think the mechanism is pretty different than today, and probably has to involve more literal force, and is unlikely to have solid continuity with today-capital.
Can you be more specific about what the bottlenecks are when capital and labor are no longer bottlenecks?
If different factions control different amounts of mass and energy in the industrializing solar system, won’t that also translate into military power if they need to? This is true even if the economy is doubling every 6 months or faster, though if it’s doubling every 2 weeks, maybe things are different.
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.
Most likely smaller probes powered by lasers. I don’t actually know whether it’s feasible or not, just wanted to gesture at the ideas that conditional on galaxies actually being auctioned:
if distant MW sized galaxies are nominally sold for less than $250 each, this would mean that either ~nobody wants them or the market basically expects the trade to be reversed
if a tiny minority buys the galaxies for cheap, whoever is in power would eventually realize the true worth of the galaxies and may try to reverse the trades
If faraway galaxies are ever auctioned off, you might think they’d be exorbitantly expensive. However, I think the market price of an average galaxy would only be equivalent to between $250 and $25,000 invested in the stock market today. (epistemic status: my modal guess, pretty weakly held)
Assumptions:
The world has about $260 trillion of investable assets in early 2026, and ~$500T of total assets.
Upper bound: There are something like 20 billion galaxies in the accessible universe (it contains 20B times the baryonic matter in the Milky Way). If galaxies are worth the same as all assets, Milky Way sized galaxies would each be worth $25K each. If investable assets, $13K each.
Since there are only 8B people, you can buy 2.5 galaxies if you have the world mean wealth (currently ~$60k) and invest it well
Lower bound: If galaxies are too cheap (say <1% of world assets), whoever is in power say 1,000 years later will declare the auction manifestly unfair and get the trades reversed, or just shoot down the galaxy owners’ space probes.
People will have a range of discount rates, especially at the long end, with some valuing a galaxy 10 billion light-years away similarly to one only 5M light-years away, others valuing the 5M LY galaxy more, and others (e.g. living traditional human lifestyles) placing negligible value on both compared to the Earth. Therefore, I expect the market price to be somewhere between the lower and upper bounds.
The main reason the conclusion wouldn’t hold is if most people can’t invest in assets that grow at the average rate. This would lead the scenario Dwarkesh wrote about, where so many of the galaxies are owned by either the ultra-wealthy or AIs that very few people will own even one galaxy—or, of course, AI takeover. I also find this plausible.
Another complication is that much of the accessible universe is only barely accessible, and by the time a probe gets there, the Earth is no longer accessible. 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. However, the outer galaxies will get an even lower price.
Continued ability to reinvest near-term profits from currently available assets (or from UBI) into entities that will be relevant in the future is questionable, while literal stakes in current entities will be killed by dilution over astronomical time (when valued as fractions of the whole).
Fun exploration, though I don’t believe the underlying assumptions at all. The biggest disconnect I see is the belief that the current mean individual wealth can be made to retain that fraction of total wealth over any significant time period, including massive changes in number of wealth-holders, and in what “wealth” can even be measured in.
There is no long-term passive wealth mechanism. It always requires quite a bit of attention and management, and then gets transferred to the managers rather than the nominal owners. Or, often, to the revolutionaries or vendors who are able to capture it.
This is problematic, EVEN IF the concept of “ownership” can be applied to galaxies and human-comprehensible owning entitites.
If you skipped one coffee per day, you could save up enough cash to buy a galaxy!
I mostly agree. And you can do better with better investments. I observe that this does not imply that scope-sensitive altruists should accumulate capital in order to buy galaxies: buying one millionth of the lightcone costs around $20M invested well now (my independent number; Thomas says $5-500M iiuc). And I think there are donation opportunities 100x that good for scope-sensitive altruists on the margin.
I would contest the frame here. In particular I think it won’t hold up because things won’t stay as capital-bound as they are now, and that seriously messes with the continuity required for today’s investments to maintain their relative portion of the pie. What do you think of this part?
(EDIT: Okay I think you are referencing this sort of thing with “most people can’t invest in assets that grow at the average rate”, but I still take issue with some picture in which everything is apportioned to assets that grow or something like that.)
To expand: I think today’s capital earns its gains mostly because it is a required input, which thereby gives it a lot of negotiating power. And I think this falls off pretty sharply in time, in the limit of technological development.
(I should say, so long as it remains the case that we need lots of coordinated work to build compute engines to run intelligence, “capital” seems to remain meaningful in the old ways. But a lot of things seem possible with a nanofactory and the right information about how to use it, and at a point like that eld-capital isn’t a relevant bottleneck.)
And while we can imagine some way that neo-capital continues to project its force in a profit-grabbing way in the future, I think the mechanism is pretty different than today, and probably has to involve more literal force, and is unlikely to have solid continuity with today-capital.
Can you be more specific about what the bottlenecks are when capital and labor are no longer bottlenecks?
If different factions control different amounts of mass and energy in the industrializing solar system, won’t that also translate into military power if they need to? This is true even if the economy is doubling every 6 months or faster, though if it’s doubling every 2 weeks, maybe things are different.
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.
Won’t those probes be heading off toward their galaxies at a noticeable fraction of the speed of light?
I guess you mean shoot them down with high intensity lasers?
Most likely smaller probes powered by lasers. I don’t actually know whether it’s feasible or not, just wanted to gesture at the ideas that conditional on galaxies actually being auctioned:
if distant MW sized galaxies are nominally sold for less than $250 each, this would mean that either ~nobody wants them or the market basically expects the trade to be reversed
if a tiny minority buys the galaxies for cheap, whoever is in power would eventually realize the true worth of the galaxies and may try to reverse the trades