This begs the question - is there a maximum "star cluster" size, beyond which a post-meat society on starship(s) would be unable to obtain more energy?

In essence, given some function that takes in:

- a graph of stars/blackholes (energy sources), with:

- the distances between each energy source

- the expected remaining lifetime of the source

- (optionally) the probable locations of new sources, and their expected time to maturity

and:

- a set of starships, with:

- the maximum material lifetime of the starship (e.g. of solar panels)

- the percentage of material renewal possible at each node

- the energy consumption of the starship

is there a finite longest path, that is meaningfully smaller than the universe?

And what is the probability that we will encounter a life-bearing planet on this path, which we will have to mine to oblivion to enable the renewal of our starship(s) for the survival of our own species?