Lets assume we develop the capacity to create virtual worlds that are near indistinguishable from the real world. We hook you up into a machine and you now find yourself in what effectively is a paraller reality where you get to be the king of your own universe (if you so desire). Nothing is off limits - everything you’ve ever dreamt of is possible. You can be the only person there, you can populate it with unconscious AI that appears consciouss or you can have other people visit your world and you can visit theirs aswell as spend time in “public worlds” with millions of other real people.
Would you try it and do you think you’d prefer it over real world? Do you see it as a negative from individual perspective if significant part of the population basically spend their entire lives there?
A very cool vision, but people would still have to live and grow food somewhere, and generate absurd amounts of energy. Assuming we can do vertical hydroponics and cold fusion, the centers of human civilization could be massive, but isolated and surrounded by unspoiled nature.
The question, then, is what stops people from multiplying endlessly and covering the planet in fusion-fueled mega-structures?
Our declining birth rate, presumably
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I’m greedy, I’d like more than one please
Education in the form of a cultivated social desire to live in harmony with our planet and not overpopulate it? I’m really not sure! I know I’m a romantic but a boy can dream. There has to be a more sustainable way for humans to live on earth though. Virtualization or dematerialization is the most realistic way for us to have our cake and eat it too.