By Anne W. Semmes
So, the race is on to build the metaverse, that virtual-reality space where users spend their days online interacting with others in a computer-generated environment. Those Silicon Valley young geniuses are reportedly leaving Microsoft in droves to head for Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta world of more immersive alternate-reality technology.
That emerging digital world of metaverse is described in the Wall Street Journal this last week as “a largely unrealized virtual realm where proponents say people will work, play, learn and shop.” Hasn’t that world already arrived??
“Virtual reality completely immerses users in a virtual world- a videogame for example – with a headset closed off from the real world,” so confirms the Journal.
Somehow, I posit those young geniuses have read the tea leaves of our fast-disappearing inhabitable earth, along with those billionaires pushing to go to Mars like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. For those seven-month journeys to Mars what will apparently keep us sane is virtual reality! Will you ever forget that scene in “2001 – A Space Odyssey” of those seated travelers in their reality vacuum. Is that scene haunting those Silicon Valley nurds?
Don’t they know the earth is worth saving? That the earth is healing to man and womankind? The scientists have told us so. How hospital patients in both America and Europe have significantly speedier recoveries when exposed to natural landscapes. How a walk in the woods brings down our anxiety.
Might not these metaverse minded entrepreneurs put their minds instead to ways to save say half the earth so that animals and plants don’t go extinct, with habitats sufficient for survival? Jane Goodall lays it out in her new “Book of Hope – A Survival Guide for Trying Times:” “By destroying habitats we force animals into closer contact with people, thus creating situations for pathogens to form new human diseases.” Like in wildlife markets – “Perfect opportunity for a virus to hop onto a human,” Goodall writes, “and it is thought that this pandemic, like SARS was created in a Chinese wildlife market.”
Can’t those metaverse geniuses spend their virtual creative time finding new ways in the real world to tackle climate change? Hollywood film director Adam McKay in his hot new movie, “Don’t Look Up,” thought he’d give viewers a “kick in the pants” to prompt “urgent action on climate change,” a film reviewer wrote. But having seen the flick, I don’t think we need a catastrophic meteor heading our way to wake us up. I’ve got a better idea for a wake up flick.
Surely many of us have seen that classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” So, imagine small towner George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) has given up his dream to save half the earth as climate change worsens, leading him to think of suicide, when an angel appears. The angel (played by Henry Travers) tells him how he can engage everyone in his town to save half of it to protect plants and animals, then what necessary actions they must do to lessen climate change, to make earth more inhabitable. And George Bailey is successful! So successful neighboring towns follow suit. And soon the whole state is a green state, then the whole country!
Some of those grassroots efforts that George Bailey began with in his town this town has embraced! Those efforts and others on the way – to be shared in my next column.
