Happy Sixth Birthday, Second Life!

Second Life is wonderful in many ways, and the variety of builds and ideas on the SL6B sims points up a basic truth about human beings: we like to be busy, and we build and create and fill everything up.* One function of virtual worlds in the future might well be taking pressure off the real world. In a way it could be like Grendel's Children above Avaria sim: humans could busily jam virtuality full of experimentations while leaving the earth unsullied (or at lease less so).

My video explores briefly the idea that in the future we will be able to experience things we have now (we don't think of this as an Edenic time yet it may come to be thought so) but subsequently lost by creating their virtual counterparts. That's a dire view, but the one above is more hopeful. Take yer pick :-D

I spent a few minutes trying to look around, but today is not a good day for that as it just opened. I left after teleporting somewhere to a futuristic build and hearing Abba's "Dancing Queen" - I hope the future has better music :-D

*I've long wondered when, exactly, we would stop making so much new and start valuing/reusing old things - go to any thrift shop and it just seems like there's enough already in existence to equip us for ages. We are drowning in our ever more rapidly discarded - well, anything. Even houses; right now, when it's very difficult to sell a house around here, someone has clearcut an area and intends to build a housing development purely for cashflow reasons (as far as I can figure out). The state government leases buildings which are built by speculators to maximise profits in the tax depreciation period. If we set things up to place value on the earth itself things would not be so ugly or so profitably destroyed.