It is good to read you are still active, both here and presumably inworld, and with such a story which is pretty much exactly as I’ve been, since around 2017, when I went from being a Model Based Systems Engineer working only on heavily profit driven projects, down a PhD rabbit-hole of virtual worlds, and all of the implications on such things as the commons, game theory, profit, capitalism itself, and now the global environmental problem.
The last part is why I have to take issue with the established view of cosmology.
That is because I have encountered now on multiple occasions, folk using it as a kind of weapon, to argue against solar power, that there are other power sources we might use sustainably, even within Earth itself.
It just doesn’t make sense.
How, with that explanation of how our planets formed, do we explain why all planets rotate in a roughly flat plane, in the same orbital direction, each themselves rotating in the same direction, always around a much hotter sun?
It obviously isn’t coincidence, but that is what is implied by the standard accepted cosmological theory.
To me it makes far more sense that the sun itself had an active, spinning volcanic period, during which we were simply ejected. A lot of ejaculate would have been produced, only a small amount would have neither flown off out of orbit, nor fallen back into the sun. We are lucky enough to be on one such body.
That would simply explain all the questions about why orbits, planes, and rotations of any planetary system are all common.
I don’t know what the driver of the much more complex mainstream cosmological view is, but its implications on our perceptions of the environmental problem, and the required fix, are profound.
Many otherwise very clever folk seem to be unable to see the problem clearly, far less how to fix it.
The problem is that we are not connected to the only source of energy, unlike nature.
Everything we think of as energy on Earth, is actually only stored energy, the use of which always comes at a cost.
Our economy can’t be truly connected to solar energy as things stand, because capital can only represent stored energy, not actual live energy.
Right there the technically minded should see a mathematical incompatibility between actual live energy (Joules per second), and any discrete lump of money (bank balance, KWhr, Joules)
See the issue?
I’ve written much more, most recently in stories around something I’ve called "Kardashev Engineering", "Kardashev Money", and a much earlier story on the "Bitcoin Kardashev Hinge".
In light of all of this, it would be uber cool if Philip Rosedale, following his return to SL, was to think about the possibilities of setting up appropriate physical infrastructure to fund or power all SL servers directly by solar power, and to modify the SL internal economy accordingly, to something like Kardashev Money.
The difference that would make to the utility of SL is literally out of this world, as it would offer a real means of everyone effectively plugging into a new hybrid RL/SL Kardashev economy, where all wealth comes from the sun. Who can resist being paid real money for "Gaming"? I would wager no-one. Not a single one.