The Metaverse: The End of Human Development

1. Hello, Metaverse

In 1992, in the science fiction novel "Avalanche" by American writer Neil Stephenson, the concept of the metaverse was formally proposed. The novel depicts a "metaverse" composed of digital virtuality. The metaverse is parallel to the real world, and every person in the real world will have a parallel identity in the virtual world. This description was labeled as "science fiction" when the novel was published, but, to the author's astonishment, it may have taken less than thirty years from science fiction to reality.

In 2021, the Metaverse will be full of hustle and bustle. From Zuckerberg's high-profile announcement of changing the company's name from "Facebook" to "Meta", to the first bunch of leeks harvested by the capital market under the concept of "Metaverse", to scholars bringing the Metaverse into the classroom of university research. This may indicate that the metaverse does not seem to be far away from us. So, what exactly is the metaverse?

There is currently no authoritative definition of the metaverse, and researchers have given different definitions to the metaverse from different perspectives. Roughly speaking, the most popular understanding of the metaverse is to mirror the physical world to a virtual world composed of numbers and the Internet through high-tech means including AI, VR, digital twins, and blockchain. Whether it is an individual's identity, senses, ideology, or social system, economic structure, or political organization, we in reality will find a new "we" in the virtual world.

This fusion process can be called an immersive experience, and the final result of the changes is the metaverse. Therefore, the emergence of the Metaverse blurs the boundaries between the subjective and the objective, which is a complete subversion of human's previous cognition. A new era may be coming.

The birth of the Metaverse is not just a fantasy of some people, but the development of human productivity to a certain stage, forming a dual drive of technology supply and market demand, and with necessary policy support, jointly promoting the "first year" of the Metaverse 's arrival

First of all, with the promotion of the new technological revolution, human computing power has been greatly improved, and advanced computing control systems such as high-power graphics cards, high-frequency chips, and supercomputers have emerged, which constitute the necessary technology supply for the Metaverse.

Secondly, with the promotion of Internet services and the digital economy, people's production and life have become increasingly dependent on the Internet, which has spawned a large number of data resources and provided the necessary scenarios for digital virtualization. This reliance on the web, along with large-scale data collections, constitutes a market demand for the Metaverse.

Finally, many national governments have successively introduced policies and measures to provide financial support and publicity guarantees for the exploration of the Metaverse, and seek to standardize the governance of the Metaverse to resolve potential social risks. It can be said that the emergence of the Metaverse is a subversive innovation of human beings to the real world on the one hand, and a revolutionary exploration of the future world at the same time as the level of productivity has been greatly improved.

2. Humans are just a brain

Pangu created the world and opened up a new era of the world. So, what state will the opening of the metaverse be like? At present, many people have painted this still chaotic picture. Although this description is full of abstraction, just like today we are talking about Internet technology to ancient emperors, but there are still some vivid pictures that are gradually being gradually displayed in front of the world.

First, the first stage of the metaverse is a digital representation of the real world. Right now, what we can appreciate is that we live in an era of "code". Every person, every place, every thing will be coded to form one digital node after another, which will be woven into the ubiquitous network ecology together.

Just imagine our digital life scenario: at 8 o'clock in the morning, you with ID number 123 walks out of the house, goes to the office whose coordinates are located at abc, turns on the computer numbered 678, and enters the network channel whose IP address is def. In the following two hours, you transmitted, accessed, and downloaded N pieces of data, while the monitoring probe on the wall generated a digital code for the real you, and took pictures of your real-time body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, etc. data. Afterwards, your consumption, rides, and access to your home will all be recorded with data. Finally, these data are completely packaged and sent to the data center in the background, thus outlining your digital nodes and forming the network ecology of a day's life. This digital expression is an intuitive reflection of today's digital economy, and it is also the initial stage of human beings entering the metaverse.

Secondly, the second stage of the metaverse is to build virtual scenes and create virtual characters. Compared with the initial stage, this stage has to put on a virtual "coat" to the digital nodes, which has gradually detached from the real physical world. Through manual modeling, frame-by-frame debugging, digital rendering, etc., we can build a 3D or 4D scene that can meet our needs, including the people we want to see, the scenery we want to see, and the activities we want to experience; at the same time, as the receiver of the terminal, VR glasses will be further reduced, portable, and even replaced by new forms. In this scenario, we will coexist with virtual scenes and virtual characters, or "virtual" itself has become a part of our lives.

Liu Yexi, a virtual idol who came out of the metaverse, may be able to provide us with an intuitive feeling at this stage. As a beauty blogger in the metaverse, the beauty pen in Liu Yexi's hand is not our appearance, but the dream in the world. In the video, people in real life are amazed at the existence of Liu Yexi, and the makeup pen in Liu Yexi's hand leads the curious little boy to see a world he has never seen before and only exists in imagination . This is the world of the Metaverse—a world that keeps you awake and dreaming.

Finally, the ultimate stage of metaverse development is to change the essential logic of the real world and rebuild a new universal law. At present, whether it is the sci-fi movies we watch or the virtual mobile games we play, we can roughly feel the basic outline of the metaverse. However, these scenes are only in line with the metaverse in terms of expression, and their essential laws of existence and operation are still based on the logic of the real world.

And in the final stage of the metaverse, anything we want to do can be constructed autonomously in the virtual world. This gets rid of the single-world logic in reality and forms a decentralized and distributed universe structure. Human beings under this structure have no class, no state, and no society. What they have is a world constructed by themselves, their own desires, and centered on "I".

In their own virtual world, human beings can stipulate order, create systems, and write new rules of survival. All the worlds we can feel are the worlds that we want to see or hope to see. This is the final stage of the metaverse - domination of our own world. Standing in the metaverse centered on the self-world, one can't help but find that the human being in reality is just a brain.

3. The destruction of all things, the essence of the universe

The Buddha said: The world is empty, there are thousands of worlds, all living beings; the Metaverse says: Space becomes the universe, time becomes the universe, and everything will start anew. The final form of the metaverse is the destruction of all things in the world and the birth of a new round of the universe.

Development is the inherent law of human beings. Then, what is the ultimate goal of human development? The progress of productivity, the strength of national strength, and the happiness of life that we often talk about are just one process after another in front of this ultimate goal. The ultimate goal of human development is to pursue the infinite expansion of space and time.

From tribal territories in primitive society, to castles and princes in feudal society, to human exploration of space in today's era of great technological development, the expansion of space has broken through the limitations of this planet; from walking on foot in the past to later The popularity of cars and trains, and today's network transmission, the output per unit time is growing at a geometric rate.

When human beings completely break through the constraints of time and space, the material world in reality will be unable to meet human needs. Everything in the world today will be gradually abandoned in a corner of the long river of history and allowed to be destroyed. And the metaverse has come completely at this moment. In the state of the metaverse, time and space are nothing but a virtual world that serves the human brain. In other words, the arrival of the metaverse will completely elevate human beings from the world they live on to a more dreamy universe—this may be the end of human development.

The war drawings under the cold weapon have long been unable to describe the outline of war in the nuclear age; and today's human thinking is also difficult to describe the operation logic in the future metaverse era. If someone still adheres to the laws and laws of today's world, then the dimensionality reduction from the high-dimensional space to the low-dimensional space in "The Three-Body Problem" has already happened at this moment.