''This is Major Tom to ground control, I'm stepping through the door.''
When I was little, I really wanted to adventure into space. I bet a lot of people wanted to do the same thing, and that a good number of people still do. The movie industry does a great business selling us dreams about space. I can still remember lying inside a wardrobe box in my basement, ready to lift off, surrounded by knobs and buttons I had drawn around me on the carboard. So what is it that is so appealing about space? Why do we all want to be astronauts? In 1999 after I had left RealNetworks to begin the work that would become Second Life, I was interviewed for an article about what successful tech entrepreneurs were doing with their lives, and I told the guy that I wanted to get back to building rocket ships. It was a general answer – I didn’t mean that I actually was going to try to win the X-Prize or something, but just that I was now free (per the article, at least financially) to go after the greatest dreams that I could imagine.
Now, 5 years later, I am convinced that in a strong sense I have really achieved what I had dreamed of as a kid and what I said in that article. The way we did this was by building the space, rather than the spaceship. Instead of trying to get out of orbit, we at Linden Lab instead built the place that such a ship would travel into. I think that the most compelling aspects of space exploration – the things that drew us all to it as kids – are in Second Life, or even in some sense are Second Life.
Let me suggest two reasons why we think space is so cool. First, space is interesting because of the possibilities – you could find anything out there. Since space is so big, and other planets haven’t ever been in contact with ours, they definitely won’t have people like us on them – or pretty much anything else from earth for that matter. Although we worry whether we will find anything at all out there, we can know that anything we do find will be really interesting. Earth just doesn’t have this property, because it has been around for a very long time, and everything on it has influenced almost everything else during that time. If you’ve seen one bird or tree or even city, you have at least in a grainy sense seen them all. Second, space is interesting because of the freedom from conventional human experience inherent in the process of getting there. If you are going into space, you are by necessity leaving the world behind. You become free. Indeed, special relativity dictates an absolute departure from the rest of humanity – if you are going to go anywhere really far out there, you will never in our earthly lifetimes be able to return. So not only does space offer the possibility of seeing and discovering things you have never seen before, it also guarantees that the conditions under which you will encounter these things will free you from all the external constraints of human existence.
These two ideas – infinite possibility and freedom, are pretty much what Second Life is all about. That’s what we are all there – why we put up with the bugs and the hard learning curve. It’s because we have just stepped into space. At least that’s how it feels to me.
Unlike earth, things change so quickly in SL - ideas breed new experiences so rapidly -that in a very real sense it is like space. What you see in flying from corner to corner of the grid even today (at 700 host servers) I think is more like
undiscovered space than any physical geography you might fly over in an airplane. The rate of creation of new content within Second Life exceeds the possibility that any one person could even if online 24 hours a day see it all. This is really important, and one of the things that I think makes SL like space – it is expanding and changing so fast that there isn’t time for new things to ‘erode’ into their neighbors. Inotherwards, although you can certainly communicate about things in SL quickly (using the same tools we use in the real world like chat, IM, and eMail), SL is changing much faster than that. And since the rate of change in SL will increase with the number of servers while our ability to communicate will not, this situation will only become more pronounced. Second Life will probably become even more strange and fascinating as more people come in and it gets bigger - certainly a compelling thought.
If we think about where SL will go as processing power explodes (as it certainly will continue to do), things get really interesting. A digital simulation like SL can accurately model the basic ‘atoms’ with such acuity that eventually the emergent behaviors that arise from the complex interactions of these atoms will come to be identical to those that gave us life here on earth. Today, the smallest prims in Second Life are on the scale of a centimeter and can have a relatively small amount of code inside to drive their behavior. But it won’t be very long before those prims will be more at the scale of a cell, and their interactions complex enough to give rise to competition and cooperation and colonies and everything else that preceded us.
Maybe one of the fun things to do in some future version of Second Life will be to ‘buy an island’ and then put a bunch of really complex little things into it, then intentionally allow no human contact with it for a period of time before lifting the curtains to go inside and see what built itself there. In the first year that we were working on the high level structure of SL, I used to dream about this idea of a huge forest – a few hundred sims with an interacting ecosystem so complex that one could stroll through it an discover plants and scenes that noone had ever seen before. This could be done in a mind-blowing way even today if we just used the entire grid for the 'forest'. If we isolate pieces of a really vast digital simulation from our prying interactions for a time, we will find when we explore them the same things we expect from other planets.
As a physics major and just for fun, can I also add that exploring good-old-fashioned physical space is going to be very hard, maybe even impossible? First, as I mentioned earlier, special relativity says that if we accelerate to close to the speed of light (which we certainly will need to do if we are planning on finding anything interesting) we change the rate at which time runs relative to people back on earth. This has the handy property of allowing us to potentially travel enormous distances, but with the nasty side effect that by the time you get back with the stories of your adventures, everyone you wanted to tell them to is long dead. Second, there is a really big statistical problem with picking which direction to go in. The distances between stars are so large, and the chances of finding life around a given one so low, that it is impossibly unlikely (even if there are billions of other interesting forms of life out there) that you could choose the right stars to travel to. You would spend the 10 or so trips you could make in a human lifetime with odds of winning many times worse than the California Lottery. It would be so much easier if you could just run a giant computer simulation that had enough complexity to give rise to everything, but didn’t have all the stars separated by several light years… well you get the picture. It may be that the space we are looking for isn't out there after all - but instead something we are actually going to create.