What is in store for the future of humanity? The usual way to answer
this question is to attempt to take things to their logical
conclusion. The “Bookworm” phenomenon has given way to couch
potatoes, video game addiction, and more recently, internet addiction.
This was partly addressed in Fahrenheit 451, where the citizens were
glued to their TV sets most of the time. Virtual reality (VR), of
various forms, seems to be a good diversion from real reality.

Another trend has been a moving away from physical labor to more
mental kinds of work, particularly as machines are better and better
able to do the dull, the dirty, and the dangerous. This was partly
addressed in War of the Worlds, where the Martians were almost all
brain but depended on machines for locomotion and anything else
physical.

Combine the two and what do you get? Remember the Red Dwarf novel,
Better than Life? Addicts of an immersive VR game would
waste away with their hunger and other drives being masked by the
entertainment. In the Ringworld novels, electric stimulation of a
pleasure center in the brain would cause people to die of thirst
instead of getting up off the chair, removing the plug, and getting a
glass of water.

I think our own future will be somewhat less bleak than that. A
VR system, though used for entertainment at first for
short periods of time, will becomes more and more immersive to the
point one would forget the normal drives that sustain life. At this
point, robots can take care of keeping you fed, watered, and
generally, alive.

Since people who design these robots are probably not replaced
completely by thinking machines yet, and since this design work could
be done within a VR environment (letting the robots do the
manufacturing), immersing in the VR environment is no longer just
leisure, but part of the work day, just like with the Internet today.
At some point we will have the first person to become immersed for 24
hours a day, 7 days a week–giving up their real life for a (more
flexible) virtual one. There will be plenty of reasons to do
this–with the robotic help, one no longer needs to be in the real
world; the virtual world can be manipulated to a user’s wishes more
easily than the real world–you can commune with a crowd or be
completely alone at will, visit (virtually) a friend on the other side
of the world instantly, or make your environment pretty much anything
you like–with high-end antique virtual furniture, for example,
costing little more than virtual milk crates (but see below).

At first, perhaps only those who can work in the VR environment will
do this, along with the occasional rich kid. But, as physical-labor
type jobs are replaced with robot automation, it will become more and
more possible for society to support those who do not work at all (and
can no longer get the high-end technical jobs that are all that are
left). A tempting solution is for these people to plug in to the VR
system and live their fantasies. Some may even find work in the VR
world.

There still will be currency; it will not be green pieces of paper,
but things like processing power and memory (or credits to represent
these). After all, those with the greatest access to processing power
and memory will be the most able to live in a virtual world of their
choosing. There will be rich and poor, with the rich living in
virtual mansions and the poor having the basic entertainment choices.
And the poor can get rich, if they can make a better design to improve
the VR system, or if they are artists who can design beautiful virtual
furniture in high demand, or can provide any virtual service to others that can’t be
done so well by the computer system.

The world will become two worlds–a virtual world and the real
world–and no doubt there will be communication between the two. But,
more and more of the world will go virtual for all the reasons touched
on above.

Some VR inhabitants will unplug and revisit the real world–those who
can do so anyway. Stay on too long and your body atrophies and you no
longer have the strength to walk out of your house. This can be
prevented by having robots that, along with sustaining you, maintain
your muscles, perhaps with some new exerciser technology.

Some VR inhabitants will unplug and then go steal other people’s
computing equipment, or kill them so there is more power available (or
because they do not like them). A VR police force, with robots
working the “outside”, will emerge to deal with this, as well as with
internal cyber crime (hackers? hacking wars?). At first the penalty might be permanent
disconnection from the VR, but past some critical point, that may
become “cruel and unusual punishment” and virtual jails will emerge.

Yet another reason to unplug would be for reproduction, though
eventually infants will be plugged in at birth and never know the real
world. Ultimately, even (normal) reproduction will go away. Will the human race die
out as a result? Maybe not.

Technology will continue to improve. As VR inhabitants need less and
less of their bodies, with robot help they will become more and more
integrated into the machinery. Ultimately, all that is left of a
person would be the mind in the computer equipment. At the same time,
artificial intelligence (AI) will develop, with help of the VR workers
who design those algorithms and hardware. The line between AI and
minds of people will blur.

Reproduction would now be a cloning of a mind (or AI), or some kind of
merging of (copies of) two (or more) minds (or AIs or AIs and minds).
Note, minds are essentially immortal by now, barring disaster of some
sort. Note that copying the minds before merging them is
optional–one could literally merge with another person and two
individuals will literally become one. This will change the nature of
humanity even more than the giving up of human bodies. It is even
possible (not that it would happen) that Nirvana would be realized,
with all minds melding together into one supermind. Or, the minds
could create a virtual God by making copies of all minds and melding
the copies–though they might be hesitant; this might not be a
benevolent god.

While this goes on, more and more physical and energy resources are
used to keep up the VR system. It is unlikely it would shrink–that
would involve minds dying or perhaps involuntarily merging or
shrinking. Over time, all of Earth will support the VR system. Then
what? It is still expanding….

Well, there is the moon, the 9 or 8 or 10 planets, the asteroids and
comets, and the sun itself. The VR system surely could make
spacecraft and build pieces of itself off of the earth. A “Dyson
Swarm” may emerge from this to fully utilize the Sun’s energy.

Note, the various VR systems in the swarm compete with each other, for
matter in the Solar System and for the Sun’s energy. Eventually, one
or more will advance enough to actually be able to dive into the sun
itself and begin consuming it. It will reproduce and other outer
solar system VR systems will dive in and join the party too. The sun
will be consumed, both for matter and energy.

Of course, VR systems might not reproduce, but some will, and all it
takes is some–they will have a survival advantage over those which
don’t, just like Earth’s life under Darwin’s theory. By this time, it
is hard to consider the VR systems to be artificial anymore–they are
almost a natural emergence of intelligent life. They ARE intelligent
life, competing for Solar System resources (and, quite literally, eating each other too).
They will evolve.

When the Solar System and its Oort cloud are used up, what then?
Interstellar travel of course! There is a whole galaxy out there
waiting to be consumed.

Alien intelligences in the galaxy will likely produce their own VR
systems that become “new formerly-artificial space-borne life”, which
I shall call “Starseeds” henceforth. There will be many different
(both incompatible and compatible) Starseeds in the galaxy. The
strongest will survive. A percentage (perhaps small) may very well
become a Nirvana or create their virtual God, and those may likely
have an evolutionary advantage over those that only contain lots of
small intelligences. The galaxy is thus populated with big,
intelligent Starseeds, some of which are filled with smaller
intelligences.

This may have happened in the universe already in other galaxies–if
we were to find them, we would look for “dark galaxies” with most of
their stars consumed.

Eventually, of course, the galaxy is consumed, and some survivers will
head out to the next galaxy.

The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Assuming it takes 5 billion
years to develop life that becomes “Starseed”, and assuming they
travel, say, 1/10 the speed of light, Starseed populations out there
may have expanded to spheres of radius 1 billion lightyears. There
are certainly 2-billion-lightyear in diameter “empty areas” in the
universe without much in the way of galaxies and stars, and this could
possibly explain part of the “dark matter”.

Now, the ultimate question might not be “Will the universe stop expanding and contract?” so much as, “Will the Starseed populations expand faster than the universe?”