Stills of contestant number one.

Text/Liu Xiaochun

The desirable other shore world

London residents can drink morning tea in bed and order all kinds of goods from all over the world by telephone. As long as they think it is appropriate, the goods will be delivered to their doors as soon as possible.

At the same time, he can invest his wealth in natural resources and new enterprises around the world in the same way, and reap the expected results and benefits effortlessly and without burden. Or, he can decide to entrust his property to the municipal authorities of any continent because of a whim or based on any recommended information, and combine his property safety with the reputation of local citizens.

As long as he wants, he can immediately take cheap and comfortable means of transportation to any country or region without going through passport or other formalities. He can easily send his servants to a nearby bank to extract precious metals, and then he can take the wealth he created abroad, even if he doesn't know the local religion, language and customs.

Is this scene familiar? Is it similar to the Internet future described when the Internet rose 20 years ago? Similar to our life today, even as an imagination of the future?

But this is a passage from Keynes in his Economic Consequences of the Peace Treaty, which describes the scene at that time, that is, the year of 19 14:

However, Keynes was actually analyzing the coming crisis. On July 28th of that year, World War I broke out.

"Science has eliminated the distance," Miles Yades said. "It won't be long before people can see what is happening anywhere in the world without leaving home." This is a plot in Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Miles Addis, a mobile businessman, is selling binoculars to the descendants of isolated South American colonists. This is similar to the exciting advocacy of the Internet and blockchain big coffees in previous years!

Fortress Night Video Game Interface. Figure/fortress night

As an animal of thought, human beings are also an animal of fantasy, dreaming of the future, and even more dreaming of another beautiful world-the other side, heaven and paradise. People in the past hoped that they could enter the illusory world wholeheartedly, so they practiced and hoped that one day they could go against the wind and become immortal. Nowadays, people are more powerful in science and technology and richer in imagination, but they are also inferior. They used technology to create a parallel universe, and the body stayed in the real world, allowing vision and consciousness to enter the virtual world through a pair of VR glasses.

This is the hyperuniverse!

Human imagination of the future and the other side of the world is a mirror image of the real world, so imagination is similar. The mythical world in Greece is as noisy as the human world, with as much jealousy, stealing and killing. So is the Temple of Heaven in the Monkey King. At present, all kinds of big coffees imagine the metauniverse as "everything in the real world is in the metauniverse".

However, compared with the ancients, the hyperuniverse has made two progress. First, people can truly perceive the virtual world, not just imagine it; Second, economic benefits can be created and realized in the virtual world, and even such virtual economic benefits can be transformed with real money in the real world. To put it bluntly, the metauniverse is a virtual world created by technology and a mirror image of the real world, which can be truly perceived by people without exceeding their imagination. Can we reach such a state? At present, it still belongs to the level of imagination or primary stage.

The inescapable real world

Science and technology are also the characteristics that distinguish human beings from other animals. Because of thought and science, human beings have discovered many laws and truths hidden behind nature and created many things and ideas that nature does not exist. Science and technology benefit mankind, so that the earth can survive so many people, and the life span of mankind can be continuously extended.

Sadly, science and technology have never created a better human society. Human society is still full of serious inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor, and science and technology cannot solve the social survival dilemma of specific individuals. Technology may create a metauniverse, or even multiple metauniverses, but they are all virtual worlds that escape from the real world, and everything in the real world will be mirrored in the three thousand worlds.

The seven elements that make up the hyperuniverse. Figure/Meta Universe Jon Radov

The ancients cultivated themselves, including body and soul, in order to go to the Elysium. Worst of all, only by cultivating the soul to be pure and flawless can we get rid of the body and ascend to heaven. I don't know how many people practiced successfully in ancient times. Now with the blessing and empowerment of science and technology, neither the body nor the soul need to practice, nor does the soul need to leave the body. Everyone can enter the virtual world of the meta-universe as long as they wear VR glasses. Hyperuniverse is really a "convenient door". However, if hundreds of millions of unclean souls enter this turbid universe, will it be a beautiful society?

When your vision and consciousness roam in the vast universe, how much nutrition and energy does the body outside the "convenient door" need to provide for your vision and consciousness? If you take off your VR glasses and perform the function of eating, drinking and sleeping in the real world, do you still exist in the meta-universe? If it doesn't exist, will your creation in the hyperuniverse be lost? If it continues to exist, what are you doing in the hyperspace? When you put on VR glasses again, are you still the same person in the hyperuniverse? Can we enter now and exist seamlessly? Put on VR glasses and enter the hyperuniverse. Do you know what you did when you were in the super-universe, eating, drinking and sleeping in the real world? It is also possible that when you eat, drink and sleep in the real world, you are a virtual body in the meta-universe. How will the soulless body in the hyperuniverse be disposed of by other people in the hyperuniverse?

Will the hyperuniverse be your heaven or hell? Is it determined by technology, or by all kinds of people entering the meta-universe? Can the hyperuniverse change the individual you and the real world? The key is probably how many people in this world will continue to participate in the metauniverse for a long time. If there are really a large number of people immersed in the whole metauniverse, it is conceivable that in the real world, a few elites must create and control the operation and maintenance of the metauniverse, and a large number of bottom groups are immersed in the metauniverse. This is a familiar picture in human history!

20 18, annual developer conference, Zuckerberg explained interactive technology at the sharing session. Figure/vision china

The future of mankind is not beyond the universe. What will be the future of the hyperuniverse? Maybe there are some possibilities:

First, as a technology, it provides services for some fields in the real world. Such as virtual classrooms, virtual conference rooms, urban planning and management, architectural design, war deduction and so on. In short, it is to provide services and create value for the real world.

Second, as a way of human games or entertainment, players and artists pay real money in the real world, while investors earn real money in the real world. The so-called exchange or interaction between the value of virtual assets in the meta-universe and the value of the real world means that some people want to earn legal tender in the real world in this way. Therefore, after all, the hyperuniverse is a virtual world in the real world.

Whether mankind can build a beautiful human society depends on human wisdom and conscience to build a good system and culture that can promote people to live in harmony. Like poetry and philosophy, it is the product of human wisdom and mind. As a human creation, technology provides inspiration and tools at most in this respect.

(The author is the vice president of Shanghai Institute of New Finance)