This may sound like a dumb/naive/foolish idea today (2018), but I think humans will build heaven soon enough. My friend and I were talking about this thought the other day…
Virtual reality will only continue to improve at an accelerating pace over the next few days. If you have not already put on a pair of VR goggles and played around in flight simulator, do it. Now. It is incredible already…and while there are some limiting factors in today’s state (time limit, side effects, etc.), I imagine that on an infinite time horizon, we will solve those challenges.
Accepting the assumption that the technology will, at some point, be a fully immersive, incredible experience – I think we will see some ready-player-one type stuff. In other words, I think humans, on this earth, will live in entirely in virtual reality. They will grow up in VR. They will “work” (if we even have to work) in VR. They will socialize in VR (idk if with real other people).
There is effectively this rabbit hole of scenarios in which VR takes over the world and renders a large percentage of society’s advances…useless? We will need an entire new set of laws and governments that transfer to this virtual world.
Before I start sounding more like an idiot…a few more clarifying thoughts:
1 – I do not believe that everyone is going to live in VR (especially not anytime soon). I do, though, think that a non-zero (aka significant) percentage of the developing world (today) would opt for a cleaner, safer, freer virtual world where people are not bound to where they were born.
While it is easy to say from the comfort of Silicon Valley (or most of America) that the world is too good to give up, there are a lot of problems in this world. Problems that, for many, are inescapable.
In the virtual world, people will be freer and it will become more of a meritocracy.
2 – I think perhaps the biggest challenge in transitioning to this virtual kingdom will be the following: how will we govern it? Who will own it? How will government be set up? Etc.
These laws will be extremely difficult to program into the network.
3 – We will build heaven in that we will build utopias that exist online. We will effectively create a religion around VR.