People don't seem to understand that VR was always an element of dystopian fiction. It's one of the things we do when we are confined to Earth. The others are gambling (with apes?), drugs, mindless hedonism (there's an app for that), following cults and crazy ideologies (Qanon? flat Earth?), pointless political intrigue, and war both physical and cultural. There will be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Starship is the most important project at this point in human history. Without a frontier there is nothing but meaningless conflict, repetition, and stagnation. We will sit here on Earth and basically masturbate until some black swan event destroys our civilization or even our entire biosphere. That event could be something stupid we do, an asteroid, a gamma ray burst, who knows... but it doesn't matter. If we stay here intelligent life dies.
I think Starship is even more important than fighting climate change, since winning that battle still leaves us trapped in a cyberpunk dystopia that just happens to be a little more sustainable. That means instead of global warming trashing our civilization we might get a few more centuries of pointless masturbation before something else kills us.
Edit:
Keep in mind too how frontiers work. Novelty is imported from the frontier back to the old culture. The frontier revives everything. It's like going for a hike in the woods or a trip to a new city, but at civilization scale. Even if only 0.001% of humanity ever goes to space, I predict a civilization-wide effect.
As an added bonus as far as we know there are no natives in our immediate region of space. The "new world" of Europe's great age of frontier exploration was not a pure frontier, and it came with the moral baggage of war and displacement. The new frontier is pure. It's all exploration, no conquest. It's going to be more like the settling of the Polynesian archipelago (by the original Polynesians) than the European age of colonialism.
Anyway what a crazy rant from an article about VR... but I think it's relevant. Every time I hear about the metaverse or NFTs or some other bit of wank this is the thought that runs through my head.
We must have very different thoughts about the timescale on which settlement of other planets is likely to happen. To have a complete civilization that is not dependent on earth, means many tens of millions of people living elsewhere - you just can't have a self-sustaining space-faring civilization without a base that large. I'd guess this is at least several thousands of years out, and thus nearly completely irrelevant because our civilization won't last that long on its present course; we really have to solve the energy and carbon crisis because we can't run from it.
VR may actually be part of that solution, though in a very dystopic fashion - reducing energy consumption of individuals could maybe be more tolerable if everyone is jacked in.
The best argument I know against expanding into yet another frontier is expressed in the Eagles song "The Last Resort". The basic message of that song, as I understand it, is that we ruin every new frontier we conquer. Or as the closing words of the song put it, "you call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye." So maybe the universe is better off if our damage is limited to our own little planet.
Then again, that song also said, "there is no more new frontier," seemingly ignoring space, so maybe Don Henley was just being overly pessimistic.
I think the pushback to that is basically the philosophy of The Big Lebowski, which ends up being some flavor of Stoicism (John Goodman's character has a strong opinion on both the Eagles and nihilists). Attributing evil to man for thriving and expanding is a bit strong; of course it's more fun to be the first one in a new territory, but we're not bad for striving to do it.
Not so crazy actually. I mostly agree with you. I can’t be bothered to work in IT anymore if it isn’t directly attached to something physical that makes our ecosystems better.
If this were isolation in a digital universe you'd end up with eternity in a questing/grinding RPG or something similar. That sounds like hell if it's even a form of consciousness. Eventually something happening in the outside world would destroy this system and everyone would die.
There are open, growing, learning upward ascending futures and closed, repetitive, conflict-ridden downward spiral futures. Some kind of consciousness uploading without expansive contact with the real universe is the latter.
> If this were isolation in a digital universe you'd end up with eternity in a questing/grinding RPG or something similar.
It's not set in stone that the digital universe with trash content for the lowest denominator audience (MMO RPGS), the same way that Mars colonists aren't doomed to spend their time on the red planet sucking Elon Musks dick.
Starship is the most important project at this point in human history. Without a frontier there is nothing but meaningless conflict, repetition, and stagnation. We will sit here on Earth and basically masturbate until some black swan event destroys our civilization or even our entire biosphere. That event could be something stupid we do, an asteroid, a gamma ray burst, who knows... but it doesn't matter. If we stay here intelligent life dies.
I think Starship is even more important than fighting climate change, since winning that battle still leaves us trapped in a cyberpunk dystopia that just happens to be a little more sustainable. That means instead of global warming trashing our civilization we might get a few more centuries of pointless masturbation before something else kills us.
Edit:
Keep in mind too how frontiers work. Novelty is imported from the frontier back to the old culture. The frontier revives everything. It's like going for a hike in the woods or a trip to a new city, but at civilization scale. Even if only 0.001% of humanity ever goes to space, I predict a civilization-wide effect.
As an added bonus as far as we know there are no natives in our immediate region of space. The "new world" of Europe's great age of frontier exploration was not a pure frontier, and it came with the moral baggage of war and displacement. The new frontier is pure. It's all exploration, no conquest. It's going to be more like the settling of the Polynesian archipelago (by the original Polynesians) than the European age of colonialism.
Anyway what a crazy rant from an article about VR... but I think it's relevant. Every time I hear about the metaverse or NFTs or some other bit of wank this is the thought that runs through my head.