Ever since our ancient ancestors walked out of Africa between 125,000 and 60,000 years ago humans have pushed themselves to explore and to emigrate to territories that would have been almost impossible to reach by the technology at the time.  Imagine how hard and dangerous it would be to adapt to living in the frozen tundra of the arctic north or to settle Pacific islands like Easter Island, thousands of miles from the nearest land.

Recorded history shows that even when the planet was reasonably settled it did not stop peoples from continuing to emigrate from one territory to another, generally uninvited and unwelcome by the people who were already there.  Emigration became aggressive, whether you were a Mongol riding across the steppes into Europe or skirting the deserts into China, or a European sailing across the Atlantic to the Americas or a Bantu herding your cattle across the rivers, jungles and deserts into Southern Africa.

In the modern world, migration, from mainly non-Western countries into Western countries, has accelerated to unprecedented levels with children of immigrants frequently outnumbering children of locals in major cities, presaging a major demographic and cultural shift over the next 20 years.  How far will emigration go?

Colonies of Space

Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal, founder of SpaceX, which delivers cargo to the International Space Station and is the founder of Tesla, the electric car company, wants to create an 80,000 person colony on Mars.  The trip there would cost about $500,000 per person: essentially the life savings of wealthy citizens in developed countries.  Colonists should not expect to ever return to Earth.  The thought of never being able to return home, and spending all your money to make the trip is nothing extraordinary for humans – that is what we have been doing for over 60,000 years.

Mars has almost exactly the same surface area as Earth (which is bigger but is mainly covered by oceans), so there is plenty of space.  Humans have successfully lived in hostile climates, like the arctic and in deserts, and although Mars is even more hostile than anything on Earth, modern technology should make it easier to adapt there and to maintain larger numbers.  Once Mars has been colonised, why not the Moon or even the stars?

This sounds exciting and vaguely plausible.  Early exploration and colonisation on Earth was, due to the limited technology and knowledge, expensive and very dangerous. Colonising the Solar System and the stars would also be expensive and dangerous, but prices would come down and the dangers would be managed.

But also perhaps pointless.

Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not

One of the great puzzles of science is the question: “Are we alone in the universe?” Arthur C Clarke, the famous science fiction writer who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, famously said:

 “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” 

If other sentient species existed in the Universe they would also have a drive to emigrate, due to the same pressures that have driven humans.  This would suggest that they would be driven to colonise other planets and solar systems and that the Universe would be teeming with intelligent life.  But since we have not found any intelligent life, other than on Earth, the assumption is that there is no other intelligent life and we are alone. Hence Arthur C Clarke’s comment that 'we are alone in the Universe' is the terrifying likelihood.

But there is a third possibility, and that is that at a certain point in time intelligent life becomes so advanced that it become pointless to colonise other planets and solar systems.

And humans are rapidly approaching that point, thanks to advances in technological breakthroughs that have given us computing power and worlds of virtual reality.

Lets go back to the purpose of emigration.  Curiosity is a key driver for some people, but they are a minority and it would have been hard to justify the risks of taking your family away from their community just because of curiosity.  Instead, most humans are pretty content where they are and have no real desire to move even if where they are is not that great.  Why would humans choose to settle in a desert or in the arctic?

Humans move because something compels them.  There is not enough space, or food, or not enough security.  If someone has discovered something better – more space, more food, more security etc – then they can be both pulled and pushed to emigrate.

If you were to emigrate to Elon Musk’s colony in Mars you would be guaranteed the following: food would be bad (vegetarian only); accommodation would be cramped, you could only go outside at great expense; discomfort and risk, the climate would be a mixture of a desert and the arctic; your legal rights and colony governance would be quite different to what you are used to as the new colony may blend a mixture of Earth based laws and new Martian based laws.  And, above all, you could never go back and see your family again.

Colonies of the Mind

What if you were presented a nicer, alternative, place to emigrate to?  You could have a luxury house as big as you liked, any kind of view that you wanted, fine clothes, furniture and the best art; cooks and cleaners to tend your needs, people who were like you and had your interests.  You could have your ideal legal system and governance structure.  Anything that you could imagine you could have. You could even live “forever”.  A type of paradise.

The catch is that while the Martian colony would be “real” the alternative colony would be virtual reality.

The ultimate form of virtual reality is something similar to that portrayed in The Matrix: a virtual world so real that it is impossible to distinguish between the real world and the virtual world.   We are not that far off:  modern sci-fi and action films routinely show digitally created worlds and characters that are impossible to distinguish from the real world.

The technology to create a visually perfect virtual reality world already exists, albeit unevenly distributed and expensive.  But Moore’s Law, which predicted a doubling of computing power every 18 months, still seems to work, after 60 years.  The new Sony Playstation 4 and Microsoft X-Box One games consoles, released in 2013, already demonstrate real time computer animation that is almost photo realistic.  In the 20 years before any rudimentary and expensive Mars colony is available computing power will have doubled 13 times and a cheap games console will have the power of today’s fastest and most expensive super-computers.   That is more than enough processing power to access any virtual world that you could imagine.

So in 20 years time perhaps millions of people will be living the bulk of their lives in multiple virtual reality worlds of their choosing with their own unique economies and social systems.  A parallel real economy will cater for their real needs with simple food and simple shelter.  The cost to house, feed and maintain the real world population would be significantly cheaper than the cost of maintaining a Western family today, potentially enabling the population to reach 10 billion people without too much difficulty or conflict.

Given the expense and discomfort of “real” colonisation to other planets virtual colonisation may be a far more appealing alternative, and not just for humans but for other alien species in our galaxy as well, which may well explain the apparent absence of intelligent life despite there being possibly millions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy.

As more people 'emigrate' to these 'Colonies of the Mind' it may even reduce pressures on Earth so that more of the planet can be returned to its natural habitat, resulting in a resurgence of biodiversity and life.

But perhaps the only way we will see that is in a virtual world catering for idealists and environmentalists!