Virtuality Universe/Technical details

Social Distance and Communication

First, If two people "live" on the same computer, that is just as good as being in the same room in Reality. If two people "live" on different computers connected by a high-speed network, that is *almost* as good as being in the same room; the difference will change as the ratio of CPU speed to communication speed changes, but ultimately will be affected by the speed of light. (Comm speed seems to improve more slowly than CPU speed; we had 100 mbps Ethernet in 1998, and in 2006 we're still mostly using that same speed, although gigabit has been available to consumers for several years now. CPU speed, however, has gone up by a factor of about 10-20 at a quick guess.)

Cost of Living

A couple of assumptions:

• people won't start "going virtual" in significant numbers until a single computer can accomodate all of a virtual person's basic needs (body simulation and surroundings, plus the necessary interfaces to interact with others)
• the size and power consumption of the average "single computer" will not go up; more likely it will go down, due to various economic and technical factors.

At the beginning of the "virtual age", then, one virtual human's basic needs will be essentially the following:

• about 200 watts of power, continuous
• one computer's worth of hardware, but with much more redundancy than today's home systems
• maintenance hardware (waldos for replacing parts)
• parts and supplies for repair of all hardware
• media for backups (most regular backups will probably be done via encrypted peer-to-peer file-sharing, but most sensible folks will want to have hard backups in case of disaster)

Hostile Environments

The computers which house virtual life can also "survive" in environments which would be impossible or very expensive for bio-people to live in, such as space, underwater (computers need to be kept dry and powered, but they don't need heat, oxygen, or light), in mineshafts or caves (all tunneling work will be done by virtual humans and will become much cheaper because of the lack of physical risk), or onboard transportation with limited physical room (freight trains and ships will no longer need to allow for the biological needs of a crew).

Virtual people also can't be killed accidentally; the worst that can happen, assuming proper backups have been made, is that a virtual person's experiences after the last backup might be lost. Failure to make proper backups would be seen as a sign of severe personal neglect.

The virtual person doing the work, however, will generally not experience personal discomfort while doing the work; their experience of the work will be some kind of metaphor which best allows them to interact with the sensors and actuators of the mobile unit, but they will "be" physically in a comfortable, pleasant location.

Virtual people will therefore be in some demand for jobs in unpleasant or dangerous environments.

Idea Fodder

• Health seriously declines, disparities increase as youths become adults: virtual people might want to stop their aging somewhere during (or even before) adolescence