''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.
SOOO INSPIRING. :) And that David Bowie song is one of my faves. Funny story, on one of my early weeks in SL, I had just dropped a flight script with the help of some friends into my synthesizer-prim in the Cordova sandbox. As I started takeoff and began to clear the ground, I could faintly hear "Space Oddity" start on the audio stream. One of many magical events I have experienced here.
It is now that I read what you wrote, Philip, and am taken back to that fond moment while still very much looking towards the future. That sense of wonder and joy and elatement... "OMG! IT'S FLYING!! IT'S REALLY FLYING!!!"
The first time I read the last line of your entry, I misread it as:
"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 IN HERE."
It's like a collective hallucination come to life -- Second Life, this. (Oh I mean that in the best of ways of course.) People with crazy ideas in their head who are looking for the most direct, exciting way to share their personal experiences and even create in SL what they've seen in their dreams . . . this is what I witness on a daily basis (and partake in too) and what I hope to see for a long time to come. Opens up all sorts of new realms of communication, along with the accompanying triumph of:
"I have finally set free what has been locked in my head for so many years."
Well, SL has this tendency to turn tangents into something tangible. ;)
Sounds like the rippleshock wave of you having a lot of fun at GDC... more to come I'm sure. :)
YAYZERAMA!!! :D
Posted by: Torley | March 12, 2005 at 10:43 PM
Something I made a while back (not the Bowie version, though) take your pick of quality vs. size:
58MB: http://www.furnation.com/fluffandsuch/vids/FS-Major%20Tom%20(T1).mov
18MB: http://www.furnation.com/fluffandsuch/vids/FS-Major%20Tom%20(Cable).mov
6MB: http://www.furnation.com/fluffandsuch/vids/FS-Major%20Tom%20(Modem).mov
Its a sample of my old hobby that has seemingly died since finding Second Life. Well... Maybe with video in SL too, it can be revived and recombined.
Oddly enough, my entry in this year's game contest is a space exploration game, so what can't be done for real (within reason) can be simulated in Second Life...
Posted by: Tiger Crossing | March 15, 2005 at 02:13 PM
I always wondered why all those aliens out there haven't tried to contact us yet. Now I know this sounds mad: But maybe they all migrated to their own simulated spaces, interfaced or uploaded their minds to their grid and completely lost interest in reality? Maybe the physical world is nothing more than one necessary base platform to run their sims?
Posted by: Anshe Chung | March 16, 2005 at 03:56 AM
Did every geeky kid build a spaceship in their closet?!?
(Mine had blinking Christmas lights and an Atari 2600 for the ship controls!)
One of my favorite dreams as a kid was flying out over Puget Sound and circling the lighthouse, no plane, just me with my arms outstretched. Total Freedom. When I first arrived here and saw my dreams playing out before my eyes I realized I had arrived. Talk about lucid dreaming.
I would also like to see such a forest. A deep dark expanse that grows and changes according to it's own ever-evolving recipe. Full of life... virtually indistinquishable from the real thing.
Wow.
Posted by: Salazar Jack | March 16, 2005 at 05:32 PM
Lucid dreaming... now maybe I'll do another entry on that. A favorite subject.
Posted by: Philip Linden | March 16, 2005 at 09:29 PM
yes, the quest to explore, conquor, build and generally be adventurous is one that has lead us to this new frontier. I'm having a good time in this virtual world and hope it grows and grows!!
Posted by: daz Groshomme | March 19, 2005 at 09:49 AM
Without dreams, we don't know where our reality will take us, SecondLife was a dream for me at one point, Philip, I honor you and the people you work with for making that dream a reality.
Now I do something I find interesting in that world, explore it's insides and outsides. Just today (yesterday at this posting) the artistic team released some of the work they've been doing on the northern continent. I sat at the waterfall on the southern side of the continent and pondered how it'd be like with a dock (must remember to ask Ben if he can add that) to sit on and dive from, maybe with something to make splashes against the water for added fun. My thoughts, for several hours wheren't on the arm sensor I wear to gather map data, I stopped, and did something simple, spent some time with good friends, relaxing, even fired up Team Speak so we where talking together instead of typing, gave it that much more of a real feel, that this virtual world was more real. The dreams of returning to youth, to running along a traintrack and thinking of childhood dreams you thought while running along such paths as a child, just... warmed my heart, more so than the things I've built from my dreams, I feel. Because I was the kid, running along, dreaming of what could be or what could have been. Indeed, I feel that even people in SL need times to just relax, and dream of what could be, rather than making it happen... while we can build anything we dream, we still need to dream to build and create amazing things.
Posted by: Ice Brodie | March 23, 2005 at 03:35 AM
Philip writes:
"Maybe one of the fun things to do in some future version of Second Life will be to ‘buy an island’"
Nope, that would be fun only for those who are "selling an island".
What would be fun would be for anyone to go out there into space and nab a chunk of it for themselves, without any middlemen ... after all, it's infinite, and doesn't belong to anyone per se. If anything, we belong to it.
Translating this into SL terms, I have computing resource, so why can't I set up my own corner of space using my own resources and link it to the corporate "megopolis" that is the LL grid?
I wouldn't be using LL servers for anything except at the point where people leave LL turf and travel or warp into my patch, so only minimal fees would be appropriate for connecting with LL's sector of space.
The fact that SL isn't a distributed metaverse but requires managed/resourced islands to be purchased and hosted from LL is what is holding back the myriad of people who would like to create their own MMOGs or other types of world in this environment. It's simply too costly for the normal enthusiast, by at least a hundredfold.
Until you let go of the reigns and let this explode into community space, the dreams will just be dreams.
Posted by: Morgaine Dinova | April 05, 2005 at 07:30 AM
I need to ammend the picture I painted in the preceding post just slightly, because it is not architecturally correct.
The LL megopolis (ie. SL2) should not be the hub to which all other separately resourced worlds connect, because that would place it in a special position and the resulting star topology would not be properly distributed.
Instead, the interconnection framework (which is just a setup proxy and doesn't handle traffic once the connection is established) should be in the commons, rather like the DNS root nameservers. LL's world grid would then connect to that just like any other world, advertising its presence and inviting connections but not managing the root framework.
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