Each second of cosmic delay forfeits a hundred trillion potential lives

Evidence

Bostrom goes on to estimate that a future spacefaring civilization could ultimately grow so large that every second of delay in the present is equivalent to the forfeiting of a hundred trillion human lives that could have been lived, if only we’d been able to make use of all that wasted energy and matter sooner. — Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, 1353

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth verifying Bostrom’s arithmetic and assumptions around the hundred-trillion-lives-per-second estimate.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, 1353