“The One”.
Prediction
The First Wholly Solar Powered Virtual World will become what we know as “The Metaverse”.
It will be “The One”.
All other attempts to create it will either fail, or merge with the first to connect to solar.
I believe this with 100% certainty.
The reason I do, is firstly because the more we study the concept of Kardashev Money, the more we realise it is the truth.
Kardashev money, is money which reflects the dynamic Joules of energy being received exclusively from the sun, put to use by us humans.
We might recognise it actually as a key mechanism already in process of delivering us from being an infant species, dependent still on the fuel of its mother planet, to an adult species; self sufficient, from the energy of its environment, independently of any planet or fuel, becoming “Humanity+”.
Kardashev money is a certainty, because when the majority of people demand free money, they get it, as we saw when $4Tn was issued in the US.
On that occasion, we saw a brief flash of the future world; a world where no-one need experience poverty or deprivation, a world where everyone had a say in what happened next, not just the wealthy elites. Everyone got to experience pure fine-grained democracy. They voted against oil, and for known, still loved yet technically bankrupt companies. The shares of those soared, whilst the oil price went negative, the first and only commodity to do so, ever. The dollar price itself went up in markets, whilst gold and even Bitcoin prices languished. The environment itself underwent a glimpse of recovery. Fish stocks, coral growth, and air quality all showed brief recovery. And we all watched from lockdown, incredulous.
What the hell just happened?
We worked it out, eventually.
Now that most possibilities of conventional “Jobs” are evaporating, along with most profit-driven “Bullshit Industry” (David Graeber), and with a war over energy shortages already in process guaranteeing yet more energy shortages all round, inflation already ramping up in all countries to remove all chances of folk surviving on the old zero-sum profit driven economy, deprived of all energy and with heat-domes beginning to burn the valuable world around us, we are waiting to see who will demand the free money first.
Which country will it be in?
But really the question should be which virtual world will we see it in?
Then we won’t have to demand it, it will be there for anyone to try.
See the difficulty of the whole concept of Kardashev money is that it is difficult to believe, since it is radically different from anything we’ve known in our entire history of enforcing scarcity on one another, thousands of years of competing with one another, often to the death, in order to have one another’s energy (Wealth).
Yet Kardashev Money is the simple truth, the way nature actually works.
We can see a key part of the problem of credibility is the availability of excess stored energy (Capital) at various points in our system.
Excess stored energy at any point in any working system is never good news.
Posession of it, or the privilege of wielding it warps our minds such that we are removed from seeing reality. The more excess capital we have at our disposal, the more extreme is our shift in perception. We don’t realise that the very act of posessing it and wielding it obscures our ability to see how this negatively affects the lives of others, and our environment, which ultimately comes around to destroying our own quality of life.
So investors, with money to invest always invest towards what we believe amasses most for us personally, never towards what is best for the majority of people, even if that includes ourselves, because in that role we simply can’t see the benefits of benefiting anyone else.
Within all of us, it seems there are two forces; an animal emotional us, which displays all of the qualities we see in wild animals, and the logical (Human?) part of us, which evaluates all with cold logic.
With that logic, the human within us might see that nature is a universal system of giving. But still we operate on an animalistic system of taking, using our human logic to extend our ingenuity to do it most effectively, because in life to date so far, if we didn’t do that, we’d get trampled by everyone else doiing it.
We have become accustomed to using all of our profit driven financial instruments against nature, rather than working with it, to do all of our human business to date.
So we find ourselves with the current problems, since what we have been practicing is actually an unsustainable grand energy Ponzi.
Kardashev Money simply mimics the path followed from sunlight to creation, in the same way as nature does it via plants, to nutrients in Earth, powering all things.
So the concept of Kardashev Money has to be de-risked, by showing it actually works in a simulation of what we know in the real world, before we might start to see, and believe that it actually works.
A Metaverse is that simulation.
So the question is not really which country we will see Kardashev Money trialled in, but which Metaverse we will see it trialled in.
How do I know this with such certainty?
What is an expert, in Metaverse technology?
I don’t honestly know, there are many folk we might define as experts there*, each one has followed a different path, some much higher in the public perception than others.
Personally I’ve always had a mindset of immersing in the modeling and simulation of all things, including the most complex Systems we can imagine for the past thirty years or so, even doing so at PhD level on a deeply Metaverse related project in recent years.
As a Chartered Engineer I’ve worked in key roles in all manner of large Systems, variously working as “Model Based Systems Engineer”, “Systems Architect”, “Simulation Engineer”, and many other similarly oriented titles, after first starting out on MSc graduation as a Hardware Engineer.
All of them, without exception, are about modelling and simulating things in some way or another, and then building them.
Even designing something on paper is a model, the act of defining it is a process of modelling, whilst bringing that to virtual life is the process of simulation.
I’ve modelled and simulated Kardashev Money using all of the techniques and formal tools now at my disposal, to my own satisfaction, but as yet not to others.
That’s how I know it will happen in a Metaverse, before we see it or acknowledge it in the real world.
Backup Power
A common claim we often hear from standard investors reluctant to buy into the concept of Kardashev Money, is that “Renewable” energy sources have no reliable backup.
This is fallacy, as we see nature itself operates just fine with the sun only shining for part of every day on any particular plant, and the Money-fuel tree shows how we can operate similarly with solar power:
To see how to configure that with a virtual world, we just need to have a look at the system diagram in the Money-Fuel Tree story:
In the Diagram, we replace the gold block named “Cryptocurrency Generation Datacenter”, with “Virtual World Servers”.
(A suitable virtual world must contain an inworld currency)
The solar farm and H2 fuel backup & generation plant then must be built to supply the known needs of the virtual world servers.
In the case of second life for example, the server centre has been quoted as comprising 1000 x 225W servers, giving us a total server electricity load of 225KW.
In any high power server centre, we need to roughly double that capacity to account for the server centre air-conditioning required to keep all that hardware cool.
So on the information available we might estimate that a H2 Reversible PEM Hydrogen backup capability of around 500KW would be required to supply the Second Life Virtual World servers hardware, as it existed around 2010, when the server information above was applicable.
(It is likely that the server capability of Second Life has since 2010 been commuted to be hosted on Amazon virtual servers, since those became competitive with maintaining own server hardware, but the capacity of SL, if any change in numbers of users since 2010, has not changed by much, thus could again be hosted with similar capacity servers as existed then)
A rough rule of thumb is around 3 times the H2 Backup capacity is needed in installed DC PV solar farm capacity, to provide the power needed to maintain the continuous H2 Backup facility. So the solar farm would be sized around 1.5MW DC installed power, occupying around 7.5 Acres, to provide all of the power needed for the Second Life servers.
The price of the required hardware is around $50/KW for the H2 facility, and $1/W for the solar farm, so $25K H2+ $1.5M solar farm+ cost of H2 storage tanks + 7.5 Acre land, so maybe $2M.
What would the famous Second Life / Linden Labs of Philip Rosedale* heritage get, for doing this?
Immediately all of the costs currently charged to users could be dropped, since the main overhead, the electrical power for the servers would be removed.
Second life premium users currently enjoy a “free money” allowance, which is normally heavily outweighed by the subscription costs.
With that free money allowance continued, effectively at no cost, premium membership could be extended also to all users, at no cost.
Thus all users would see free money, just for being members of SL.
By that, the user base of SL would see significant numbers of new users, joining just to receive free money. The utility of SL would have changed drastically, attracting unprecedented numbers of new users.
The SL servers, and the corresponding solar powered facility supplying power to it all would need to be rapidly scaled up accordingly, and so the virtual world of SL would expand to a size never seen previously.
With all of the new users creating their now NFT protected virtual assets, the inworld currency would appreciate rapidly, exponentially, in proportion to the square of the number of users (By Metcalfe’s law) inworld. The additional utility added to any networked application by the offer of free money to users is literally incalculable, far greater than “One”, therefore the adoption curve by Metcalfe’s law is also incalculable.
An avalanche would be how I would expect anyone to try to characterise it.
With the added capital which would appear very quickly inworld, convertible to the real world, Linden Labs would have the options of freely expanding the solar capacity to create valuable cryptocurrency in addition to their existing inworld “Linden Dollars”, and/or valuable Hydrogen Fuel, from their Money-Fuel tree.
This extra capital would also inevitably enable many technical capabilities previously thought to be not possible for SL, due to pretty much all implementation expenditure being covered, enabling things like VR, haptic feedback, real time scanning of RL and XR user environments, and all the other good things we associate with advanced virtual and mixed reality systems.
The Matrix
Some folk describe the world we know itself as a simulation of some kind that we ourselves are living in a Simulation not unlike “The Matrix”.
I am not so sure about that either, but sometimes it certainly feels like the truth, hence the popularity of the cool movie of that name.
The lead character featured there, was “Neo”, “The One”, a long-awaited Messianic / Maitreyarchic individual of enlightenment who uniquely could see how the Matrix worked and would lead the suffering masses to freedom. Of course each of us Geeks identifies with that character, the hero of the plot.
In my estimation, the first Metaverse to become wholly solar powered will be “The One”.
No others will be able to follow it or compete with it, for the same reasons as no other cryptocurrency can compete with Bitcoin; history of positive work, done largely by solar.
Bitcoin began first, and has a blockchain which becomes more and more valuable with time, as long as it is progressively solar powered, thus is the Kardashev Hinge.
That can never by undone by any other blockchain solution, unless the power source for Bitcoin reverts to non-solar power, and others remain which have not.
(That dark scenario is one that could possibly come about, if the move towards volcanic power, such as that currently pursued by El Salvador for Bitcoin mining continues. If anything is a threat to the value of Bitcoin, it is the loss of that valuable solar energy product, intrinsic to Bitcoin, it seems to me, having done the studies leading to the Kardashev Hinge revelation).
Otherwise, Bitcoin will always retain its place as number one cryptocurrency.
For exactly the same reason, the first virtual world to become solar powered, will always retain its position as the number one virtual world; “The One”.
The Final Outcome
Of course this will stand as historical simulation of worldwide solar power adoption, and the effects of it on all things in real life, by whichever virtual world does it.
The world will become very quickly solar powered on the results.
“The One” will always be recognised as “The One”.
If not SL, who will be “The One”?
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As always, the above analysis was done with a few hours of my time, and is submitted “As is”, for reader digest/review. I’ve taken reasonable care to ensure minimum errors, but I know am far from perfect. If this was to become a serious proposal, I would expect to spend many more hours on it, which could uncover errors in outlay estimates. But if readers understand the implications of it, no cost is too much to achieve this, as the returns are infinite. All the same, I would welcome any appraisals / comments, from anyone spotting any obvious bloopers or other issues.
*To give credit where it is truly due, Philip Rosedale is the man, he is the one who comes first to my mind when the question is asked “Who is an expert of the Metaverse”, for sure few people know more than Philip. I’ve previously mentioned in my opinion, he is “King of VR”. Sorry I forget to add that in, on first writing Phil, I hope you are well.
