Metaverse - the Utopia Trap of Civilization

Of late, the novel concept of the "Metaverse" has exploded in popularity online, drawing widespread attention from the tech and investment communities and even entering the public consciousness. You have likely heard of the Metaverse to some extent; "the Oasis" from the film Ready Player One is a version of it.

The concept of the Metaverse was, in fact, born as early as 1992 in the famous American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson's novel, Snow Crash. The book describes a virtual world parallel to the real one—the "Metaverse"—which possesses all the forms of the real world. Today, capitalists are merely recycling and hyping up old concepts like the Matrix or Second Life. Capitalists are happy to reap the profits brought by the Metaverse trend while using this high-tech opiate to further pacify and marginalize the masses, thereby securing the class structure.

Although the Metaverse appears to be an inevitable trend based on current development prospects and people's demand for virtual reality, today's technology is far from sufficient to support humanity's entry into such a virtual world. Even "the Oasis" in Ready Player One, which requires VR equipment to enter, is merely a single step into the world of the Metaverse.

Technologies like network communications, virtual reality, AI, and blockchain have not fundamentally touched the core of the Metaverse; at most, they are just paving stones on the road toward it. What will truly knock on the door of the Metaverse is the birth of technology akin to the "brain in a vat" concept, where stimulating the brain alone can generate sensations. If a person can simply lie in bed, connect to a signal, and experience authentic feelings through electrical stimulation—that will be the real turning point for entering the Metaverse.

To understand this, one first needs to know the Fermi Paradox. In short, it is the paradox that super-civilizations that humanity should be able to notice must exist in the universe, yet we have not encountered any to date. Two explanations for this are the Super-Observational Theory and the Great Filter Theory. The former suggests that super-civilizations exist in a way that makes them unobservable to us, such as by entering a higher dimension, thus explaining the paradox.

The latter, the Great Filter Theory, is a theoretical model for the progression of life in the universe. It posits that there is a filtering mechanism in the cosmos. In the process from the emergence of life to the appearance of a Type III civilization, there is a wall that almost all life will hit. This wall is an extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, stage in the long process of evolution that causes life to face annihilation. This stage is the Great Filter. This is of critical importance to humanity, as we do not yet know whether we are before, after, or even within the Great Filter.

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom believes: "No news is good news. Even discovering simple life on Mars would be a catastrophic signal, because it would drastically reduce the probability that we have already passed the Great Filter. If we were to find fossils of complex life on Mars, it would be the worst news ever printed, because it would mean the Great Filter is almost certainly ahead of us—and this would lead to the destruction of our species." On the matter of the Fermi Paradox, Bostrom believes, "The silence of the night sky is golden."

The Great Filter can take many forms, similar to the "apocalypses" in the Marvel series Loki, where the moments of civilizational destruction Loki hides within are the lower bound of the Great Filter. For carbon-based life and a societal development model like humanity's, this could be virtual reality/the Metaverse, nuclear war, the ultimate "end-producer" at the terminus of capitalism, an AI rebellion, or even something as simple as the failure to evolve from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells. The upper bound, however, requires a leap of imagination beyond carbon-based life to silicon-based life, stellar life, electromagnetic life, or even force-field life. What could cause the extinction of such god-like beings is difficult to conceive from a human perspective. Furthermore, the Great Filter might not be a single event but a collection of events that lead to a civilization's demise.

Given humanity's current historical progress and technological level, the Great Filter I can imagine that is closest to us is the Metaverse. In the Metaverse, all real-world resources are just lines of code—the darkest of utopias is born. Our brains are connected to virtual reality. When you can obtain everything you've ever dreamed of in your imagination, would you still endure the hardships of the real world? When the seven deadly sins are no longer shackles, when morality and law are torn asunder, when desires are unleashed, human nature will revel in a virtual reality of infinite resources. This is an offer that no intelligent species like humanity, in the stage of developing its productive forces, can refuse. But it is all a beautiful, virtual mirage. If we indulge in it and become complacent, human civilization will ultimately wither and die in the virtual realm.

The Metaverse essentially abandons the development of productive forces, merely circling around pre-existing productive forces and relations of production. And all who attempt to construct relations of production by bypassing productive forces will perish according to the laws of history. If the broad direction of human development cannot break free from the inward turn of a Metaverse, the result is that humanity will inevitably vanish amidst self-deconstruction and zero-sum games.

A closed, isolated system, due to the law of entropy, will eventually tend toward chaos and disorder. Undertaking interstellar travel, however, is a decision that breaks this closed system, resolving all internal, unsolvable problems by opening a "door" to the outside.

"Any future without space travel is a bleak one, no matter how prosperous Earth becomes," said Liu Cixin at the Clarke Award ceremony. Liu Cixin believes that the meaning of human existence lies in outward expansion. Humanity should continuously expand its living space into the depths of the universe, constantly asserting its existence—that in itself is meaning. Yet today, we are sinking into the comfort zone of information technology, becoming more and more inward-looking. "If this inward-looking trend develops to its extreme, the world will become a picture where the Earth's surface has returned to forests and grasslands, and life is prosperous, but not a single person can be seen. Meanwhile, in some basement, there is a supercomputer, and inside this computer live tens of billions of people, just like in The Matrix. Once this image becomes reality, human life will lose all meaning. Unfortunately, humanity is heading in this direction."

This is, in fact, a well-worn question. Why do we read? Why do we climb mountains? Why do we go to space? Wouldn't it be better to use that money to improve our food, clothing, and housing? When people protest about why funds for space exploration are not used for the public's livelihood, the fate of humanity in a future Metaverse is already sealed. And as for those who support space exploration, when the Metaverse arrives and the temptations of the virtual world continue to mount, how far can they, driven by curiosity, truly go?

Imagination is the only human ability that comes close to divinity. Yet everything created in the Metaverse is based on things that people already know. The sea of stars, however, is what lies beyond human imagination and is worthy of our aspirations—the vast, starry sky can forever hold our infinite imagination.

Only when the grand direction of human civilization's progress is the sea of stars will the Metaverse not be a castle in the air. Otherwise, the day the external material world collapses will be the day the fish, barely surviving in their virtual puddle, are trapped and die. But choosing the sea of stars allows us to create a Metaverse at any time to reduce material consumption. For instance, future interstellar colonization could involve a fully automated colony ship carrying a Metaverse system with billions of human consciousnesses to conduct deep space exploration. A Metaverse freed from complacency can also become a booster for reaching the sea of stars. Similarly, the Metaverse might grant humanity true choice, allowing Kant's theory of free will to be practiced, thereby becoming the very threshold for a human to truly become human.