If the stars were given out today
Barring any grand revelations about the apparent cosmic order, it seems prima facie likely that the Earth-descended life effectively "takes" the Milky Way, and possibly even an appreciable portion of the affectable universe - roughly 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.. If those were appropriated today, proportionally to everyone's current wealth, how much would everyone get?
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. Specific estimates:
- UBS's estimate of approximately 450 trillion USD of wealth in 2022
- 2x10²¹ as the number of stars in the affectable universe
- 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.
The latter two numbers strike me as sensible upper and lower bounds for the number of stars we will likely colonize.
Given those, 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
| Net worth | Share of population | Share of global wealth | Total number of stars | Average number of stars per person |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Less than 10k | 39.5% | 0.5% | 1.0 × 10¹⁹ | 3.2 × 10⁹ |
| 10k - 100k | 42.7% | 12.6% | 2.5 × 10²⁰ | 7.4 × 10¹⁰ |
| 100k - 1m | 16.3% | 39.4% | 7.9 × 10²⁰ | 6.0 × 10¹¹ |
| More than 1m | 1.5% | 47.5% | 9.5 × 10²⁰ | 7.9 × 10¹² |
Table 2. Allocation of stars per net worth groups, the Milky Way scenario
| Net worth | Share of population | Share of global wealth | Total number of stars | Average number of stars per person |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Less than 10k | 39.5% | 0.5% | 5.0 × 10⁸ | 0.16 |
| 10k - 100k | 42.7% | 12.6% | 1.3 × 10¹⁰ | 3.7 |
| 100k - 1m | 16.3% | 39.4% | 3.9 × 10¹⁰ | 30 |
| More than 1m | 1.5% | 47.5% | 4.8 × 10¹⁰ | 400 |
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
| Net worth | Number of individuals | Share of global wealth | Average number of stars per person, affectable universe | Average number of stars per person, Milky Way |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1bn - 50bn | 2638 | 2.5% | 1.9 × 10¹⁶ | 931,514 |
| More than 50bn | 26 | 0.6% | 4.9 × 10¹⁷ | 24,547,009 |
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.