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.