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SensibleInterlocutor t1_ixhxrjk wrote

Day in and day out my reddit new feed is flooded with "we're missing emissions targets, the world is burning and civilization will collapse within the next few decades" articles. Supposing that were true, there is one way I can think of that would definitely avoid that eventuality, and that's reducing the human carbon footprint by several orders of magnitude by stopping producing everything we make out of physical matter if it can fulfill its purpose equally well as a hologram. It costs next to nothing to copy a hologram and creates next to no emissions. But to make a copy of something made out of matter costs a lot, and creates substantially higher emissions. Manufacturing is just one aspect of this extended reality transformations benefits to humanity and earth in this "era of crisis". Transportation emissions will also be drastically reduced once the entire surface of the planet is being photogrammetrized in realtime by satellite, allowing for realtime holographic telepresence, which will be a vastly cheaper than and virtually indistinguishable experience from conventional travel. Fully realized metaverse technology is still decades down the line, and tech companies aren't saying the quiet part out loud at this juncture, but they are developing superintelligence for the purpose of making Earth a much more energy efficient system. This will be downvoted because people don't like to think outside of their comfort zone. But if you're a person who thinks both about the current human condition, with reference to our crises and progress developing superintelligence, you know this is the road map.

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