CriticalMusings

What if there’s a more interesting or easier to explore place to go than “out”? I propose two such places:

Used to be that as kids we’d play outside, tinker inside, explore our environment, physically interact with other kids, etc. Today, many kids are happy to stay immobile while they explore cyberspace, virtually interact with each other, or digitally create. Could ETCs all graduate to the point where they are happy to stay put and just explore virtual realities? Or create simulated universes (which we may be in one of) and enter them? This does assume that population pressure allows them the luxury of staying put. (There’s also cataclysmic pressure which forces you to move or expand, lest the cataclysm makes you extinct; even if you can manage your population and resources, a civilization would have to be careless not to expand out.  Sometime I want to write about bees and their instinctual drive to replicate their hive.)

My second proposal: just as we’ve come to know the moon or Mars better than we know our ocean depths, and how the exploration of space is capturing more of our imagination than the exploration of our planet, maybe there are yet other places for us to go than out to space.

Could ETCs, in the process of trying to devise schemes to exceed the speed of light, have all stumbled onto inter-dimensional travel and discovered a much more fascinating and less energy-consuming frontier? Why bother with slow, dangerous and expensive travel to space, when stepping into another dimension is considerably easier and equally rewarding?  Just as a child has no reason to return to the womb, ETCs who step out of this realm may have no desire to return.