Grab a six pack! Let's talk about living in virtual reality.

I firmly believe that I'll live to see the day when people elect to live exclusively in virtual reality. Maybe not some Matrix scenario, but likely I could see a person who is completely paralyzed electing to live completely interfacing with a computer. All senses being pumped into the brain and all signals sent out into a computer.

Like a brain in a jar. Seriously.

After a while I can see people with no ailments stripping away their bodies and living in it. It may even become more economical to live like this with the brain requiring so little space and so little nutrients.

And then with 3d printing of organs and tissue I could see this being reversible, where one day you decide that you want to live in the real world again and have a body printed out for you.

What do you all think?

 

Not bad IMO, probably would be first to get the procedure done, if by the time we can achieve true AI as well. After all, who wouldn't want to get to play the God in their own world? Minecraft is popular for a reason.

 

Reminds me of Otherland

Spoiler

The Happiest Dead Boy in the World

 

I hope to be able to copy my consciousness to a computer before I die, so I could live in countless worlds, learn, create and interact with other people long dead for as long as I want. But that's a technology far in the future I suppose.

 

See "Surrogates" movie.

For a brain in a jar I think cyborgization would be a better option.

Living in virtual reality is a rotten deal, because at one point you'll have to wake up and realize that the world moved on and your body is in very bad condition. To fix that you'd need to either find a way to stop RL time while you're inside, or decouple mind from the body completely (which is most likely impossible). Until you can do either of that, it is a bad idea.

 

https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/147365861

Watch it till the end or don't bother at all.

 

Well, that's one way to use VR.

Spoiler

Hook up people to military drone and then add visual filter that will make it look like a game.

I also think it will be eventually created for real.

 

Dunno but for me the mere imagination of spending my entire time in VR is a nightmare... :S

 

Found that the other day, can't believe I didn't see it earlier. $1250-1500USD

 

You know....

It REEEALLY reminds me of "jumping pants" for toddlers. I think it is called jumparoo or something?


Vehicle phase looks really uncomfortable. And the disk looks too small for running.

 

Notice who is having much more fun?

 

This is why I want to create the games, not be the person stuck inside them.

 

For me the problem with living in virtual reality is that nothing can appear that hasn't been programmed into the VR world already. You can't make any new discoveries, or see something that no one else has ever seen. I would much rather explore the universe and expand my knowledge and horizons.

 

Best VR fiction series I have ever read for sure

 

The funny thing is most of the people here discussing living in VR, are you sitting in front of a computer or using a device that lets you visit the web a virtual space.

The question is between smartphones, TV, computers, tablets, notebooks how long do we already spend in Virtual Reality.

VR in a way is just bringing that virtual experience closer to you.

On a side note I think the brain is a massive nutrient hog, so best look after your body for a while.

But who would you trust to look after your brain in a jar, and where in the world is the safest place to store your jar?

Also what if your VR broadband provider caps your limit or gets hit with a Denial of Service attack, or goes out of business.

I can see a few problems with the brain in a jar idea. Although it is a fun cartoon idea.

 

I'd do it if I could, sure. I'd probably wait to be a certain age though before I abandon my body. The brain is still young when we die so becoming an actual brain in a jar could lead to a much longer life. This could be win win for the government if they tap into our brain-jars for computational power from time to time

 

I would probably live in a virtual world because then whatever I want I can just make it. I could have a mansion, fly and do magic. I would probably consider my life complete

 

Ah, here's a good one. So if you copied your conscious and die, don't you still die? I mean there's still a version of you, but as far as you go, you're dead.

But then again, every cell in your body is replaced over the course of seven years so isn't that what we already do now? At 35, wouldn't I have already "died" 5 times by now?

Ah, well then here is another consideration. And believe me I've been up and down this one.

I don't know how to get around the universal constant (aka "c" (aka "speed of light")).

Star Trek is not going to happen. Plain and simple. It's not. We will most definitely NEVER be able to get to another solar system within the current life span, and we will most likely NEVER leave the galaxy under any circumstances.

That said, I could see exploring our galaxy under the right circumstances:

1) Generational space travel - Exploring the galaxy over generations of people living on a starship. I don't see this happening because people don't do things that don't benefit them in their life time. And it would only take one person to destroy the ship and everyone on it. No way we could survive multiple generations of people on a ship without having this happen.

2) Stasis or Cryogenics - Okay, stasis is most likely as likely as FTL so that's out. Not going to happen. Then cryogenics are completely viable, but this would require a completely self contained ship that can navigate, refuel, plan trips, and investigate and weigh the importance of points of interest for when it's time to wake the passenger. More in the realm of possible, but it would mean that you would leave the Earth forever and everyone on it would most definitely be extinct by the time you could return.

3) Immortality - Medicine simply advances to the point where we can re-grow any organ, make new cells from scratch, and fix any ailment that would otherwise kill you. Almost all of this stuff is all ready there. We're already printing new organs and seeding new ones from donor organs. We still need to figure out how to deal with degrading genetic material, but I'm sure that we're getting close. AND in the mean time we could start taking cell samples to preserve your current cellular age to seed organs as you need them, rather than using old cell that you have when your organs are already failing.

Personally I can see a combination of #2 and #3. Have us awake on a star ship during points of interest while crossing the galaxy, interfacing through a virtual world as brains in a jar. Then printing out new bodies as we need them to walk on the surface and starting new colonies.

But do I think I'll ever hope in my Millennium Falcon and hit warp speed with my wookie pal? Absolutely not.

Virtual reality is the most practical solution to minimizing onboard space and weight needed to house people, prevent sabotage, and make life bearable.

 

Well if you migrated your conciousness over a period of years it could be that "you" mostly still exist elsewhere. But there's some evidence at least some cells aren't replaced in the brain.

In any case, I'd give it a go if the alternative is nothing. Troll the internet for a thousand-thousand years. Moderate until the sun grows incandescent and bloated, filling the sky.

 

I find the prospect of organic life more interesting with immortality and infinite youth. Although, everyone around you will evolve in the span of a few million years and then you'll be the ugly one. We could all be dead by then anyway. Life is weird.

 

That's rather narrow-minded.

To say with 100% certainty that intergalatic travel is impossible, you need to uncover every single law of the universe, and try any single way to abuse those laws for the purposes of FTL travel.

We are not there yet. And we aren't even close.

 

Well, okay. I could foresee living long enough that Andromeda starts to crash into the Milky Way and start to travel there. But most of the Galaxies are expanding away from us at a accelerated rate. We're talking millions of years without FTL any way we cut it.

Then there's fuel. We're not going to get around the fact that to travel we will need fuel. Any unless we can tap into dark matter and/or dark energy, which we don't even know what it is (my theory is matter in another dimension of space OR matter coiled into quantum strings), there's no fuel between the galaxies. The only possible solution is anti-matter which currently costs something like $16 Trillion a milligram to produce, not that we could ever contain it or stop it from reacting instantly. And I personally don't want to be anywhere near something that could wipe out half the solar system if one of it's containment field has a hic-up.

Then on top of that, with millions of years to travel you have to consider that the whole ship has radioactive decay and no place to stop and build replacement parts.

So FTL is almost certainly the only way to do this, but there's simply no evidence anywhere that this is ever possible. Even forces that act outside our observable space are limited by C. The only thing that isn't is quantum entanglement and we're talking about sub-atomic particles rotating. Not billions of tons of ship jumping from one point to another.

This is why I've shifted my focus to the prospect of virtual reality.

It's more possible to create our own worlds than it is to go to new worlds.

We've already hit the limits of resolution that the eye can see on commercial TV's. And we've hit the limits of what is possible to detect in sound. There's no reason to think that we could not digitize every sense to a resolution higher than we could detect.

Interface it directly with the brain and it would be indistinguishable.

As far as the details of the world, I don't see why we couldn't use algorithms to procedurally generate details. Or why the world would need to be our world. Or why the world couldn't abstract to a completely new set of rules.

And maybe traveling the universe will become the outside world while these artificial realities will become the inside world. Art and science.

 

Oh, and on that matter, how far off you all think we are from interfacing the brain directly to a computer?

Here's a fun video. It's video clips that people were shown, next to clips from them remembering the clip.

 

VR could go far, but I'm not sure if accurately simulating things like sand or water will ever be feasible. VR will be uncanny valley land for quite some time. And I could very well imagine crazy zealots to lobby against further advancements at some point. Humanity as a whole sometimes does a good job of standing in the way of progress.

Just recently I thought we might have actually witnessed the zenith already. 200 years back in the past we had S***ty medical tech and 200 years in the future... let's say I'm quite concerned how messed up everything will be, given the state of current global developments. Maybe it doesn't get much better than this and it will be Fallout 5 before we can even reach Deus Ex?

I don't want to be the immortal brain in a jar anyway. I'm very interested in VR or lucid dreaming, but only to escape reality from time to time, not prolong it.

If you read the details of the experiment it isn't that amazing at all. They don't generate visuals from brain patterns, they generate visuals from videos. They just match them according to what brain patterns looked similar at the time of watching. It makes for a neat demonstration to impress people, but it would never be able to show something for which no pattern was prerecorded. And it's also questionable how much the system needs to be trained for an individual person because not every brain is working exactly the same. I can't remember if the study had any details on that though.

 

Well that's not a very scientific point of view, although surpassing light speed does looks like a huge problem. Perhaps it will not be possible. But there is a much easier way travel large distances. Bring your destination to you. Curve space-time and step through to other solar systems and galaxies. Wormholes.

Irrelevant if you have the ability to create wormholes to where you want to go. I agree though that inter-generational space travel (with live people) is frought with problems. It is mainly a relic of utopian socialist science fiction.

Not an easy idea to implement, but not impossible IMO. The ship would simply have to go from A to B and then wake the passengers, which isn't a complicated thing to do. The chances of hitting anything en route are astronomically low, so it is pretty much just straight-line travel. And refuelling is probably irrelevant as long as you have enough fuel to accelerate to your cruising speed and decelerate at the end.

It would probably be easier though to freeze eggs and grow test-tube humans at the end, if colonization was the purpose and not tourist travel.

Growing humans from scratch is probably much easier than making them immortal, and renovating the brain without destroying the consciousness of the person is probably going to be hugely difficult.

I'm not sure how virtual reality would apply to long-distance space travel, it is probably easier to just go to sleep, or send the raw material for humans. And with the ability to generate wormholes none of these problems would continue to be relevant.

EDIT: on virtual reality, for me the problem is that hooking up to virtual reality en masse is like taking off down a dead-end street in evolution. Something may continue to grow for a while, but the need for new adaptations it will be essentially removed since there is nothing new to adapt to. Not to mention that virtual reality is likely to be heavily constructed with a view to the pleasure of the participants, and become simply some kind of complicated Skinner box.

I wouldn't mind stepping in for a bit of fun, but it would quickly feel empty, the same way I feel when I play too much video games or spend too long at a party

 

You're talking from within modern day mindset using modern day knowledge. It is possible that there's yet uncovered law that will allow currently unknown mode of travel.

Take a look at this for example:
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-year-2000-1899-1910/

That's what 19th century people thought modern day would look like.

Depends on what you define as "interfacing". Simple brain implants that could control mouse cursor were done before. IIRC right now there's artificial eye technology in development that could restore sight (basically, someone reverse engineered protocol used by optic nerve, so if you stick chip in what's left of retina, you could send right signals).

I'd expect that tech (neural chips and the like) to be available from within 25 to 50 years from now.
First flight happened at 1903 and in 1963 people made it to the moon.

 

You are someone very disappointed with your daily life if you have hope on some alternative virtual reality



What occurs if a bug happen in the matrix ? or someone is hacking you and all your data ?

 

I was just having this conversation(figuring everything using present day technology/knowledge) in relation to climate change with a friend the other day. Both of us are for cleaning up the environment and doing what we can to minimize human impact as humans definitely have "some impact" on it, but think it is ridiculous people are worried about the impact 100-200 years from now as if it is a pressing issue. Technology and invention advances so quickly(and by all counts is increasing faster than ever before every year) that a lot of this worry about climate change is largely a mental exercise for fun.

Can you imagine someone from 1916 comprehending what a smartphone is and that we would essentially carry most of human kinds knowledge easily accessible in the pocket of our pants? By the time we face the heavier consequences of climate change I can only imagine where we will be, we could well be having the local weather station setting temperature and chance of rain on a handheld computer.

 

That's some interesting stuff, what they thought it would look like. You can see that those ideas basically involve taking current technology and simply having it behave futuristically.

One of my pet hates in sci fi games is what I like to call "spaceships with wings", the way that futuristic sci fi games have such a need to connect with people's naive concepts of the future/sci fi that they're afraid to challenge people with really different and unintuitive ideas. I think this is wrong, and that as long as people can connect with the characters, as a developer you can have pretty much free reign over the game world. OTOH maybe the developers were just not interested in portraying any innovative concepts.

 

Either you look at immersive VR as a sci-fi wet dream or a pathetic way to waste one's life in sweaty socks and gym shorts. I don't see the middle ground.

 

Seems easy to abuse. You could, for example, use VR to brainwash people who are not anticipating a malicious abuse of the technology.

 

Brainwash them to do what? Jump out of the airlock so you can be alone in a big bathtub zooming through a vast ocean of nothingness? Brainwashing is only useful (or necessary) in a rich, affluent society.

 

Brainwash them into deifying you, for starters. For example, I have been trying on you guys but it simply isn't working. But VR might just do it.

 

I'll admit one fear I have of computers hooked straight up to the brain is the advent of a bliss button that would become the most addictive drug ever.

 

My plan for world peace, domination and destruction is kind of like that. Make personalized universes that outshine the real world to an extent that people would abandon this world for their own. Giving everyone their own heaven to reside in would end all current and future wars (or at least when the tech is available everywhere).

Myo, Oculus, Stem. Baby steps to world domination

 

You mean the "speed of light when in a vacuum". It doesn't always travel that fast.

 

In the meantime, why don't you just go and be a drug lord?

 

Ahahaha.

Don't present real science to people who worship science.

A) Where is there a perfect vaccuum? 0.0
B) Light attempting to escape a black hole could be completely stationary.
C) Everything is relative baby.

 

The stem is too close to release for me to risk ma freedoms!

*insert poop joke*

Yea, I hate when that happens.

 

Right, relative to C.

If you flash a light, the light move out at the speed of light.

If you're on a starship moving at 99% the speed of light and turn on the flashlight it still moves out at the speed of light relative to you since time is slower than outside the starship. And it still moves at the speed of light from the outside of the starship as well.

 

How often do they legitimately travel faster than the speed of light though? Traveling faster than light in Star Trek was always, assuming an episode doesn't exist where they actually do it, about bypassing the limitation in some manner.

Warp drive (aka Alcubierre drive) achieves faster than light travel by bending (or warping) a portion of spacetime in front of the ship and then lengthening it again once it travels beyond that portion.

Wormholes are a similar concept except you're tunneling "around" the area you would otherwise have to traverse. If you want a rough analogy think of a steep mountain. Traversing the mountain could be done by traveling up a windy road and back down again to reach the other side. Or you could take a tunnel through the mountain. You would have reached the same destination but your time involved would be much shorter.

Hyperspace is another popular concept in science fiction. It achieves faster than light travel by shunting the traveler into another dimension where space is more compact, or quite possibly where the limitation doesn't even exist, where they then travel for a while before emerging back into spacetime at their destination.

 

@Not_Sure
@Ryiah

Getting anywhere in this universe isn't about speed. It isn't about trying to go nearly as fast as light or faster than light. It's about bending space. Yes?

 

Fixed that for you. After all the method you use to get there doesn't really change the fact that you got there.

 

But what if getting there at the speed of light caused you to age slower over a long period of time and experience time differently? Like... a quick trip to andromeda and back... and earth is 100 years older!

 

Right, that's relativity.

As for warp drives, yes space bends all the time, but it never tears. You can take an kilometer and shrink it down to a meter, but the space around that meter will stretch making the distance still the same.

Worm holes, same thing. Space does not tear. It doesn't.

There's some theories that the 3 spatial dimensions we occupy are held together by multidimensional membranes called "strings" (as in "string theory") and they are constantly rethreading the dimensions, meaning it may be possible to slip between them (which is unlikely because quarks are the subatomic particles of subatomic particles). But just as moving side to side doesn't make you move forward, neither would going moving along a 4th plane. So I think hyperspace is nonsensical.

I absolutely believe that there are multiple dimensions and that's where dark matter and dark energy resides. And that's where a lot of things happen, like gravity, which is why it's so weak: because it spends most of its time in other dimensions.

But I don't think parallel universes, extra-dimensional travel, time travel, or FTL travel are likely.

And, most likely, those extra dimensions are just curled up bits in space that make space "space" and not "nothing" with stuff floating around in those other dimensions. Like 11 dimensional subatomic dust, not worlds, aliens, and Doctor Who.

 

You state that as if it were conclusive yet my searches are leaving me with the impression that it's anything but that. There appears to be a project under development to build a super laser in an effort to test various theories and practically every one of them mentioned this as one of the theories they wanted to check.

Linked one of the least outlandish articles covering the laser.

http://phys.org/news/2014-02-lawrence-livermore-super-laser-eli.html

 

Where does it mention space? Is it on another article? (I'm being Sincere)

EDIT: I've read a few more articles and all I can find about what they plan to actually do with the laser is research for "fundamental science and applications", which could be a lot of things.

 

Other articles. Literally doing a search for "laser tearing space" turns them up. I'll link a couple.

http://science.slashdot.org/story/1...s-working-on-laser-to-rip-a-hole-in-spacetime
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...-laser-to-tear-apart-the-vacuum-of-space.html

Official website linked below (it changed URLs from the one linked by Slashdot).

https://eli-laser.eu/

 

Sorry, I don't find those sites credible.

Slashdot.org site's Discovery channel for their source, and Discovery channel does shows about Megalodons still existing.

And the Telegraph is a tabloid.

 

I've updated the post with the official website. You're free to examine their project's whitebook. All five hundred and more pages of mathematics that go sailing way over my head. Credibility is exactly why I linked the initial article but the reality is I couldn't find anything credible that outright stated it was or was not possible. I don't think anyone actually knows yet.