The Interstellar Real Estate Industry

There is a lot of real estate on habitable exo-planets around other stars. Rather than compete for the limited territory on our rock, the Earth, we better explore new territories in interstellar space. Extending the footprint of our civilization from a single planet to interstellar scales is possible, as envisioned in my recent book titled “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/interstellar-avi-loeb" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Interstellar</a>”. My previous book was titled “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/extraterrestrial-avi-loeb?variant=39935330418722" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Extraterrestrial</a>”. Should my next book be titled “Intergalactic”? Probably not. Travel on intergalactic scales is constrained by the accelerated expansion of the Universe. As I showed in a <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acd9b0" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">recent paper</a>, chemical rockets cannot carry us beyond our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, even if they travel indefinitely at their limiting speed of tens of kilometers per second. The reason is that beyond Andromeda, galaxies are receding away from us faster than chemical rockets, and our spacecraft will never catch up with them. For a while we could still detect light emitted by these distant galaxies, but even that privilege will end once the Universe will age by another factor of ten. At that time, all distant galaxies <a href="https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Future_of_Our_Universe/Future_of_Our_Universe_300.pdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">will recede</a> away from us faster than light assuming that the cosmological constant will remain constant, as indicated by current data. <a href="https://avi-loeb.medium.com/the-interstellar-real-estate-industry-1dd4015b492f">Website</a>