I think the most logical explanation is that long before developing FTL (if that’s even possible), intelligent civilizations would develop the ability to upload consciousness (if that’s even possible), or otherwise develop fully realized artificial/vr/matrix-esque worlds that would be so immersive and exotic as to become complacent within them. As Lennon (John) once said, “thought is the best way to travel.”
Iow, if the prospect is leaving your loved ones on a journey that could take several generations to complete compared to uploading your consciousness into a little black eternity box, where you could live eternally in your own private “lucid” dream state, I’d pick black box and would fully expect our robot probes to find planets littered with them.
I've heard this one discussed many times, but if any humans are aware that there's a reality "out there" that they can access and explore, some most certainly will regardless of the risks.
Consider global warming. I may be wrong, but I believe we're already dead; a fait accompli that cannot be reversed. It's like an explosion and we're hummingbirds, so our perception of how long the explosion takes to finally rip us apart is skewed.
We may
want to explore strange new worlds and boldly go where (apparently) millions of other intelligent species have already gone before judging from Star Trek, but unless we can come up with FTL (or its equivalent) within the
next century (or figure out how to explode a Genesis device here on Earth), we're fucked. Uploading into robot bodies and/or indestructible nuclear powered black vr boxes may be the only option available (if, indeed, either actually can be options).
Would this be true of all intelligent civilizations? Would they all evolve in to competitive douchebags out to kill each other off and sell everything short with no regard for their own future? Well, we only have one test species available for a case study and based on that, we'd have to conclude, yep! Any species that evolves to our off-world capabilities would evidently kill the golden goose in order to achieve that goal in a horrible twist of irony.
Iow, nature evidently "wants" intelligent species to take care of nature, not try to escape from it. Our drive to develop the technology that allows us to leave the planet is ironically the very thing that has poisoned the planet (for us) making our leaving it all the more imperative. Which I personally find hilarious, but that's beside the point. Every step forward in that direction results in two steps back so that we will have killed ourselves just before we finally put all the pieces together.
Unless we're talking suicide arks, of course, but that's just going to result in a dozen or so drifting deep space mausoleums, basically.
Or we can try to colonize Mars, but then, the technology that would allow us to survive there would be better used to try to survive here and both would eventually end up failing, most likely. We'd extend our species extinction by a few generations but what's the point if the planets we live on will always remain specie-killers for us?
The only way a VR world could contain all of humanity is if there is no one left who is aware that the VR is not the real world.
That would take about two or three generations. Look how ubiquitous our current tech is. I'm 52 and even I can't remember how we all got around without smartphones, or being able to deposit a check with a photograph and a minute later transfer funds to pay all my bills, etc. The small conveniences exponentially multiply to the point where even today we are on the brink of having no need for long term (or short term) memory, since that can all be handled by a device and "knowledge" need not be retained since it's a google search away. The more shortcuts we rely on technology to perform for us, the less we retain independently and the more dependent we become on the tech. Fold. Spin. Repeat.
And yes, there will always be luddites, but again, unless they are the last remaining Mensa brigade, if they're stuck on Earth it's either going to be black boxes or radically depleted life spans due to living underground (if our species can even survive in that environment, since it will first be an artificial transplant recreation of above ground environments that will in turn eventually break down and either be the death knell or create some version of the Morlocks).
Plus, the boxes need not contain the whole world. I'm not suggesting they would be linked or anything. Consider our dreamstate ability. Somehow our brains are capable of creating entire narratives--often nonsensical, but typically only out of context of the dream--where chronological time (in the objective sense) doesn't exist. In a dream, you can "live" a thousand years in what is actually a couple of minutes or less, objectively.
The point being that we are already in a matrix; we are already brains in vats, we just call them skulls. Analogues (selves) animated by our brains are placed into virtual worlds all the time (i.e., maps of the external or dreamscapes), with varying degrees of time dilation and exotic experiences that, while in the dream at least, seem completely real and no different than our waking state.
So we know the "technology" exists, it's just an electro-chemical technology that we have barely begun to investigate. So, in keeping with the hummingbird experiencing an explosion analogy, we could live millions of years in a tear drop and while it wouldn't objectively be interactive, it would be subjectively interactive exactly the way dreams are (and the waking state, to be ontologically/philosophically exact). We exist
right now in a virtual reality created by our brains, so the theory behind it already has a practical application.
Iow, you would never know the difference, because you would never wake up from the dream. And that dream--that eternal existence inside the black box--could all take place in an instant from the perspective of the black box. Just imaging if, after reading what I just wrote, you sat back in your chair, look around at your surroundings and then decided it was time to fly up into the air to eat at your favorite restaurant in Prague. NOTHING else changes other than your ability to just superman your way anywhere in the world.
That's the kind of dream state tech that exists
right now in our brains, so if we can replicate it in a black box that can't be destroyed by climate change (or slower than light space travel), then problem solved, but then again, if we could do that, why ever leave the black box? Curiosity? How curious do you think you'd be on a space craft that for hundreds (if not thousands/millions) of years never encounters anything remotely interesting, because that's how unbelievably huge is our universe?
Hell, think of driving from Toronto to Miami. Sure, you could do it (and maybe when you were young you loved such long car rides), but if you can fly their in a third of the time, wouldn't you? And if they had super sonic flight that got you there in an hour? Half hour? Ten minutes?
We are (in general) creatures of comfort and leisure once we discovered fire and soap. So my guess would be this would be true of any evolved species as the steps would all be pretty much the same. Step one, kill or be killed every hour. Step two, kill or be killed every day. Step three, kill or be killed every week...
