In the past weeks the idea of a Metaverse was hyped extremely. A lot of people wrote articles and made videos about it. What it would mean for the future and which crypto coins to invest in to get the maximum amount of profit of the current rally. In this article I want to approach a different direction. I want to talk about what the Metaverse actually is from a more scientific point of view. With that being said, I am not a professional scientist nor am I an expert in the Metaverse space so I might be wrong in a few facts or assumptions.
What is the Metaverse?
With this out of the way let’s get started by understanding what the Metaverse actually is. Everyone is expecting the Metaverse to be a virtual place where people can meet up and do digital things. The closest idea to a Metaverse that everybody has is the movie “Ready Player One”. Essentially, a digital world where everything is possible, and everybody can do whatever they want. But what if the Metaverse is not a place? What if the Metaverse is a timestamp in the evolution of humanity? A moment in human history where “the singularity” takes place and the Artificial Intelligence that we are using gets smarter than the humans. I know it sounds like the next Terminator movie or something but stay with me here.
Over the past few years every aspect of our lives has become digitalized. Whether it is connecting with friends over Facebook or work that we can do from home with tools like Microsoft Teams. Everything develops in the digital direction. Another example would be Instagram where we create the perfect version of ourselves that would live on in the digital world when we would die. Even the assets we buy have become digital. NFTs are replacing art, Bitcoin is replacing gold and Bored Apes are the new Rolexes. This is because most of the people already are spending most of their times in the digital world and so the flexes have to be digital as well. That would lead us inevitably to a point where the digital self will be more important than the real-life self.
Just think about it: Since we discovered/ invented (however you want to look at this) the Internet, we are constantly developing and merging into the Metaverse. We started off with big PC which had potato graphics and we developed into a portable version of a computer (=smartphone). With smartphones we can do whatever we want on the Internet. While this is basically given in the modern world, about 15 years ago nobody would have expected this amount of progress. This means that we could argue about whether the Metaverse is already here or not.
This goes into one theory about the Kardashev scale. On this scale there are three civilizations. Right now, we are evolving from a type 0 to a type 1 planetary civilization. This is a moment in time where we get most of our energy from our closest recourse: the sun. In this civilization, the Internet is a type 1 communication system and the metaverse is a type 1 interface for all of it and what we are interfacing is a world in the future.
To go a little bit deeper, lets also take the theory on the human identity by John Locke into consideration. Here, there are three concepts: Life, Liberty and Property. In this theory, in order to balance the role and the power of government there has to be a social contract by the government to protect those three basic concepts. Now if we look at our current governments: they protect life, sure. But to what extend? In some cases they even take lives so this is currently not fully given which indicates that the government has too much power in this regard. Furthermore, the governments should protect our liberty (I can already hear the U.S. government screaming at the horizon :P). This basically means the freedom of the people, but we all know that this could also be easily taken away with a few of regulations or laws. The last concept would be the people`s property. Here, it is very clear that we do not have control over our property and it could be taken away at any point with a non-satisfactionary reason. An easy example would be: Even if you own a house, if you do not pay property taxes it could be easily taken away which is sort of an illusion of ownership. This means that the current system is somewhat porous.
With that being said, the Metaverse would be a reinvention of our control of the three mentioned concepts. Here, liberty would be something like the interpretation of who we want to be. It gives us the freedom to reinterpret ourselves in any way we want and it would not be bound by physical law. Furthermore, we would have a reinvention of property. A good example would be, like I mentioned before, NFTs or Bitcoin. Here we have the total control over these assets and these values can not be devalued by the printing of money or similar things.
Conclusion
So to close of this article I want to mention that this article was more on the philosophical side. I think it is sometimes interesting to thing about these things and while I am not always one hundred percent sure whether everything was correct, I still wanted to share my thoughts. I think that we already have some kind of metaverse going around but I can see that in the future it will just have an even bigger part of our lives and maybe even generate jobs and function as a target where the world wants to develop itself. With the current rate of new inventions it would not surprise me to see a more sophisticated world in my lifetime but I guess we just have to see.
What do you think? Do you agree with my point of view? Are we already living in the metaverse?
Published by ga38jem on
Publish0x|LeoFinance|Steemit|read.cash
On 19th November 2021
Sources:
https://twitter.com/shaanvp/status/1454151237650112512
https://roboheartbeat.com/2012/09/10/michio-kaku-on-the-science-fiction-in-video-games/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#:~:text=Current%20status%20of%20human%20civilization,-Total%20World%2C%20Annual&text=Physicist%20and%20futurist%20Michio%20Kaku,100%2C000%20to%20a%20million%20years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity#:~:text=John%20Locke%20considered%20personal%20identity,the%20soul%20or%20the%20body.&text=According%20to%20Locke%2C%20personal%20identity,substance%22%20nor%20on%20the%20soul.