If the stars were given out today

For some reason, most people don't turn out to be concerned with the vast, vast amounts of thermal energy being dissipated into nothingness by the roughly 2 × 10²¹ stars in the affectable universe.This figure, as well as the most other figures about the affectable universe, comes from the wonderfully readable paper by Toby Ord The Edges of Our Universe. Note that here I'm using the estimate of 20 billion galaxies in the affectable universe and the common estimate of 100 billion stars per galaxy. As for myself, each of the 3 galaxies we lose each year from the affectable universe hurts me much more than any finite Earthly ill - though rate of the loss might be even greater, as we might not be losing them just to the expansion of the universe, but also to the expansion of aliens whose affectable universes intersect our own. This post is not, however, about the imperative to put all that unused energy to useful work, but rather to a related thought experiment: if we colonized the universe today, and divided up all the stars proportional to everyone's current Earthly wealth, how much would everyone get?

(A fair warning that I am thoroughly uninterested in making any kind of a political point about the distribution of wealth - I am just curious to see the numbers.)

I'll mostly be using figures from UBS Global Wealth Report 2024. I won't be stressing about getting to the most accurate numbers across the board - the intent is to be roughly correct about the order of magnitudes. So let's first take UBS's estimate of approximately 450 trillion USD of wealth in 2022; and for the amount of stars, we'll use two numbers: the aforementioned 2x10²¹ as the number of stars in the affectable universe, as well as an estimate of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. Those estimate strike me as sensible upper and lower bounds for the number of stars we will colonize.

So 1 USD gets you about 4.4 million stars in the affectable universe, but it takes about 4500 USD to get a whole star in the Milky Way. Elon Musk (net worth 432bn as of Bloomberg Billionaires Index from December 31, 2024) gets about 100 million stars even if it's Milky Way alone.

UBS Global Wealth Report further provides information on wealth distribution. Properly speaking, their report is based on 52 markets, comprising (by their estimate) 92.2% total global wealth, but again, I'll simplify the details and the orders of magnitudes should still be correct. Results on per-group basis are presented in the tables below. All net worths are in US dollars.

Table 1. Allocation of stars per net worth groups, affectable universe scenario

Table 2. Allocation of stars per net worth groups, the Milky Way scenario

In the affectable universe scenario, there are so many stars to go around that it's hard to imagine anyone's appetites not being satisfied - even those with net worth below 10k USD get about 3% of the Milky Way worth of stars, while the middle class mostly gets at least a few Milky Ways worth.

Lastly, the UBS report also gives some information on the very wealthy. The below table summarizes how they fare.

Table 3. Allocation of stars per the very wealthy groups

So in the affectable universe scenario, each person with net worth between 1 and 50 billion gets around 200 thousand Milky Ways worth of stars, while each > 50 billion one gets around 5 million Milky Ways.