People don't seem to understand that VR was always an element of dystopian fiction. It's one of the things we do when we are confined to Earth. The others are gambling (with apes?), drugs, mindless hedonism (there's an app for that), following cults and crazy ideologies (Qanon? flat Earth?), pointless political intrigue, and war both physical and cultural. There will be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.<p>Starship is the most important project at this point in human history. Without a frontier there is nothing but meaningless conflict, repetition, and stagnation. We will sit here on Earth and basically masturbate until some black swan event destroys our civilization or even our entire biosphere. That event could be something stupid we do, an asteroid, a gamma ray burst, who knows... but it doesn't matter. If we stay here intelligent life dies.<p>I think Starship is even more important than fighting climate change, since winning that battle still leaves us trapped in a cyberpunk dystopia that just happens to be a little more sustainable. That means instead of global warming trashing our civilization we might get a few more centuries of pointless masturbation before something else kills us.<p>Edit:<p>Keep in mind too how frontiers work. Novelty is imported from the frontier back to the old culture. The frontier revives everything. It's like going for a hike in the woods or a trip to a new city, but at civilization scale. Even if only 0.001% of humanity ever goes to space, I predict a civilization-wide effect.<p>As an added bonus as far as we know there are no natives in our immediate region of space. The "new world" of Europe's great age of frontier exploration was not a pure frontier, and it came with the moral baggage of war and displacement. The new frontier is pure. It's all exploration, no conquest. It's going to be more like the settling of the Polynesian archipelago (by the original Polynesians) than the European age of colonialism.<p>Anyway what a crazy rant from an article about VR... but I think it's relevant. Every time I hear about the metaverse or NFTs or some other bit of wank this is the thought that runs through my head.