When one thinks of a Virtual World in Sci-Fi, one most likely would think of the Matrix. The Matrix, at least the first film, was a brilliant piece of Science Fiction, even with some of its glaring flaws, like the fact that human beings would be terrible batteries. Yes, the Matrix would be brilliant for keeping people in line, but even so, using people as batteries to power AIs would be a terrible idea as even on mass, humans don’t provide too much electricity. Considering it is in the future, and fusion power isn’t too far off today, I don’t understand why the AIs don’t just use fusion power. They’ve obviously advanced in technology far enough that it would be likely they would be able to make one and you could use the clouds of pollutants as early fusion material, thus clearing the sky. Problem solved.

The Matrix was a dystopia, but I do not think a world of AIs, digitised minds and virtual worlds can or should be an automatic dystopia, in fact it could save humanity and allow us to explore the Galaxy and colonise it more efficiently. Why terraform a planet (which could take thousands, maybe millions of years), bioform a people group or create artificial environments when you could place a computer on a planet or even just in orbit and create a virtual environment where people can life, albeit as disembodied AIs.

The idea of disembodying the mind may horrify you, sure, but it shouldn’t do. If your mind is scanned, let’s say after death or just before it, and you are turned into an AI, you should still be you. Your memories, personality and general being would still be there, you would still be there, it’s just instead of running on wetware, you would be running on hardware and software. And it would mean you could be functionally immortal, and I mean the “I can die when I choose to” kind, not the Deadpool/Capt. Jack Harkness “cursed with life” kind. Death effectively happens in organic life forms because the wetware they run on breaks down or is damaged somehow. Hardware and software are much more durable and can be replaced, and the software can be saved and backed up, so let’s say you get blown up and destroyed, if you made a back up the morning before, you can be revived, albeit with no memory of what happened after the backup. That being said, if you feel you lived a good life and believe you want to die, you can if you want to by choice.

But back to the main title of this post: Life in a Virtual Reality World, or what I will hereby shorten to VRW. What would it be like? Well I personally would imagine it to be however you, or the people in said world, would want it to be. We’re not talking about the philosophical question of an Ancestor Simulation, the question of whether we are a simulation being done by people in the future to see what we were like or to play out the past as a historical drama or study. This would be the present, this would be our home, we could do whatever we wanted, but I would imagine it to be frankly, rather familiar. Humanity likes Familiarity, but I doubt it would be a 100% accurate recreation of whenever-the-world-was-when-it-was-set-up.

Individuals would likely have their own little individual homes in the virtual world. They can be as small and as big as they want, look as they want, and even be within surroundings they desire. There would be no need for land for example because this very well could be a separate virtual environment from the “overworld” of the VRW. You could, if you desired, live in an ultramodern house, a penthouse, or even a recreation of somewhere like a massive country house or castle, live Culzean Castle. It wouldn’t be *the* Culzean Castle of course. It would be a virtual, ultra-accurate model of Culzean Castle and it’s grounds from any time period. What’s more, there would be no travel time between destinations. You could have a portal that took you to another part of the VRW or the environment you have set yourself up in disguised as a door for example, or perhaps you could just teleport yourself to another place in the VRW almost instantly. There would be no need for physical transport within the VRW (as in, cars and trains) outside of pleasure. We already have simulation games like Microsoft Flight Simulator or Trainz, so I would not be surprised if someone made an ultra-accurate reconstruction of the Corris Railway at it’s full length to ride on or drive, but for everyday transport it’ll just be easy to teleport yourself to the location, if, that is you need to travel at all. I don’t see any reason why telephony, holophones or even just straight up telepathy wouldn’t be used in these worlds.

Travel between separate VRWs would be a little bit more complex. If the physical location in IRL space is on the same planet, I would imagine it would be as fast as data travelling between two users. People already transmit information everyday. Hell, when I post(ed) I am/was doing just that. Every Instant Message, Photograph, Video, Audio Clip or text you view, stream, send, receive, broadcast and such like is data moving between two or more points. Most people don’t think about it like that, but it is effectively just that. The internet, as is always said is a series of tubes. Travel to another VRW would be like travelling to another city. Although the train taking you there would be moving at light speed and you would be there instantly if it’s on the same planet.

The same cannot be said for VRWs on other planets or just straight up in space. Lightspeed is, as of now, the fastest you can physically move, and it is the speed data will move too, but even at lightspeed, while seemingly instantaneous over short distances, but in space, even within our own solar system, travel will not be instantaneous. The travel time between the Earth and the Moon is about one second. That’s not too bad, but between Earth and Mars, at it’s closest is three light minutes and at it’s furthest, 22 light minutes. This beats moving an object out there, which of course would be moving below lightspeed, but in terms of what we are talking about with data, that is a long time. However, once you go through the trouble of placing a computer running a VRW on it, which would take about 300 or so days, then a travel time of 22 minutes is a quick time to get to Mars. Someone who got themselves digitised could, perhaps, commute to Mars from Earth.

VRWs for space travel and colonization might be the solution for mass colonization of the Galaxy without the need of terraforming anywhere. All you need is a computer with enough protection from the elements or orbiting a planet and you are golden, you have a colony which you settle. Being in a VRW doesn’t mean you cannot interact with the outside world either. Let’s say you have a mining colony, a digitised mind could be transferred into whatever machine is on the surface to work on extracting whatever resources there are. We see this in a Sci-Fi Story: We are Legion, we are Bob, wherein a digitised mind is placed into a Von Neumann probe.

Even on planets and spaces where non digitised humans or creatures in general are able to exist, a digitised person could interact with them, either through a mechanical body or maybe even a Hologram. Let’s say we figure out how to do Hard Light Holograms, one could set up a projector that fits within that hard light hologram and interact with the world much people running on wetware would. One potential vision of this can be found in Steven Universe. Although the Gems in Steven Universe are generally regarded as aliens, the backstory of Gems as a species is very vague, however the species projects their physical form from gemstones embedded in their bodies which project hard light holograms. If their bodies get damaged, they poof and retreat into their gem, but it their gems are shattered, they die. Although it’s just a fan theory for now, I always thought it was possible that the Gems are ultra-advanced AI, with ultra-advanced hard light holograms and whoever created them had long ago went extinct. The technology they are based off of is so advanced that they can fuse with other gems (and half gems), and reproduce with organic life (see Rose and Greg, Steven’s parents). If we develop the ability to digitise minds and develop hard light holograms, I believe this would be a possible route to interacting with the outside world.

VRW and digitised minds would be a perfect route of leaving our solar system. With the extended lifespans of digitised minds, an individual or group could easily live for thousands of years and be able to travel to different systems at sublight speeds, changing their sense of personal time so the four years it takes to the to Alpha Centauri feels like four hours. Maybe colony ships, perhaps of the generational variety, will carry people running on wetware to extrasolar colonies, but the time spans involved make me believe the first settlers will either be AI or digitised people.

Now what would life actually be like in these virtual cities and virtual worlds? This is completely up to speculation, but considering people like familiarity, I would not be surprised if the worlds inhabited by Digitised Minds were simular to the non digital world, but even so, there are some things that would be different.

First off, magic. Not literal magic of course, but in a virtual world, there would be no reason for things to work as they would do in the non-digital world. Rather than getting up and making a sandwich, albeit a digital one, you could just summon one (I have no doubt people would still eat, but just for pleasure rather than the need). You could fly if you so wish, either with or without a broomstick, maybe you could have airsports like Quidditch, not the ground based “muggle” quidditch we sometimes see played on college campuses. Telepathy would be possible, although I hope it’s the kind where you can send texts and phonecalls into people’s minds and they couldn’t just read your mind willy-nilly. I do not know how I would feel about people reading my mind. You could perhaps even, to reference a meme, make anime real.

Being in effect, a disembodied mind, gives you a lot of options self wise. I could see digitising your mind being popular with transgender people, because having a gender identity that doesn’t match your physical sex isn’t a problem when you are in control of your physical form in a VRW and thus change your avatar to match your gender identity. Having that separation from a body would make your gender identity a more defining characteristic than your physical sex, even for cisgender people. Even if you are not transgender, the ability to control your physical appearance in a VRW would be interesting. I could imagine people would keep a basic layer of appearance, but could change heights, shapes and skin tones with fashion.

In short, digitising people and placing in virtual worlds isn’t the Matrixian dystopia people might think it would be, it could open the door to option immortality, better health, and the ability to explore the galaxy with greater ease.