“Nick Bostrom: How big is the cosmic endowment?” by Zach Stein-Perlman

Superintelligence, pp. 122–3. 2014.

Consider a technologically mature civilization capable of building sophisticated von Neumann probes of the kind discussed in the text. If these can travel at 50% of the speed of light, they can reach some stars before the cosmic expansion puts further acquisitions forever out of reach. At 99% of c, they could reach some stars. These travel speeds are energetically attainable using a small fraction of the resources available in the solar system. The impossibility of faster-than-light travel, combined with the positive cosmological constant (which causes the rate of cosmic expansion to accelerate), implies that these are close to upper bounds on how much stuff our descendants acquire.

If we assume that 10% of stars have a planet that is—or could by means of terraforming be rendered—suitable for habitation by human-like creatures, and that it could then be home to a population of a billion individuals for a billion years (with a human life lasting a century), this suggests that around human lives could be created in the future by an Earth-originating intelligent civilization.

There are, however, reasons to think this greatly underestimates the true number. By disassembling non-habitable planets and collecting matter from the [...]

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First published:
March 28th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GLD5AiiQJqFbKX9vo/nick-bostrom-how-big-is-the-cosmic-endowment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.