Liu Cixin: the "arsenic" or "honey" of human civilization?
2021-11-15
Human beings expand outward, or to the virtual? Supporting different scientific and technological development directions, the two sides are called "spaceship school" and "meta universe school" respectively. As a staunch supporter of the "spaceship school", Liu Cixin once expressed his opposition to the entry of mankind into the meta cosmic era, which has triggered a heated debate recently. He believes that the meta universe will be an inner roll of the whole human civilization, and the entropy of the closed system of the inner roll always tends to be the largest. Therefore, the meta universe finally leads mankind to death. Questioned by the "science fiction leader", is the "meta universe" really like drugs? Does moving towards the "meta universe" necessarily represent the end of human extinction? In response to the voices of opposition, there are also words from the "meta cosmic school". one "Spaceship faction": in the meta universe, Human beings fear that they will eventually become complacent As a writer, Liu Cixin has repeatedly discussed the future of human entering the "meta universe" through his works. In his short story "time migration" in 2001, he once wrote that "life in the invisible world is like drugs. Once you have experienced that life, no one can return to the tangible world"; In his short story festival that cannot coexist in 2016, Liu Cixin imagined the opposition between the "spaceship school" and the "Yuan cosmos school", and also expressed his concern that human beings will confine themselves in a virtual greenhouse. Science fiction writer Liu Cixin The meta universe will make people addictive and difficult to extricate themselves, and then make the whole society lose the fighting spirit of exploration and scientific research on the outside world - this is the reason why the meta universe is criticized by many people. Especially today, when games are still regarded as "monsters" and "spiritual opium", won't such a completely immersive and multimodal entertainment experience of the meta universe become a "spiritual smokehouse"? Majes, the former head of Xiaomi VR and founder of Weiyou community, also closely participated in the debate to deal with the possible hidden dangers of "addiction". Majes said: "in fact, there are many factors that people intend to enjoy in reality, and today many people have stopped making progress and moved towards" endogenous " Today, it is those people who have no worries about food and clothing, such as musk and Bezos. Some people have such internal drive. They want to accomplish some great things. Even if there are more external temptations, they will not stagnate. " At the same time, we should also see that the role of the meta universe is not just entertainment. In Zuckerberg's vision, what the meta universe will change is the way people connect with each other, making it possible to upgrade their social and lifestyle; In the mind of Huang Renxun, founder of NVIDIA, "Omniverse" provides the possibility of progress in productivity. It uses digital twin technology to upgrade 3D content production tools, train artificial intelligence, and even simulate the environment and human body. NVIDIA virtual image toy me There is no contradiction between yuancosmos and hard core scientific innovation. Efficient community collaboration and greatly improved digital productivity are the contributions that the metauniverse can make to transforming the real world. With such empowerment, hard core scientific and technological innovation can also obtain better development opportunities. two Resource shortage? The meta universe may be the gateway to The only path of carbon neutralization Why do humans explore outer space? One of the reasons is that the Limited earth resources can not bear the growing human needs. Carbon emissions are more related to the common destiny of mankind. According to statistics, the total global carbon emissions in 2020 will be about 31 billion tons. Although it has decreased compared with previous years, it is still far from the goal of curbing global warming at 1.5-2 degrees Celsius. According to the assessment of the joint report of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the British meteorological office and other agencies, from the first industrial revolution, the earth's temperature has increased by about 1.25 degrees Celsius on average and the ground temperature has increased by 1.96 degrees Celsius in 2020. 2020 may be the hottest year in 140 years Georgieva, President of the International Monetary Fund, said at the recent United Nations Climate Conference: "we urgently need to reduce carbon emissions by 55% from the baseline level by 2030; if we want to achieve the temperature control target of 2 degrees Celsius, we need to reduce carbon emissions by 30%." For the impending climate and resource crisis, "spaceship faction" believes that mankind should strive to expand into the universe, increase the possibility of colonization while looking for clean energy, and finally alleviate the environmental pressure of the earth. They believe that this is the only feasible way for mankind. However, Majes, the former head of VR of Xiaomi and the founder of Weiyou community, has a different view: the meta universe is the only path to carbon neutralization. In today's society, human physical consumption demand constitutes an important part of resource consumption, and the production of products and services also brings environmental and ecological damage. The reason why the meta universe can solve this dilemma is that after entering the "meta universe", human demand for physical consumption will decrease sharply. As the meta universe breaks the boundary between virtual and reality, the way humans understand and transform the world will also change significantly, and our dependence on the physical world will gradually decrease. Although the resources of the physical world are limited, in the virtual world, the resources that the meta universe can bring to people are infinite. In the future mature meta universe world, people no longer need to consume any natural resources, they can transform and create the environment in the virtual world at will, enjoy the convenience of transportation, clothing and other services, and even get the experience of food, wine and residence. Weiyou community vyou With the gradual "migration" of human survival significance to the virtual world, the carbon emissions generated by human life will be greatly reduced. If we reduce our dependence on the physical world and turn to the virtual world, will our carbon emissions be reduced? The environmental data under the global epidemic may bring us some enlightenment. According to foreign data, after Italy and Malaysia implemented the blockade due to the epidemic, the air pollution in both countries decreased, and the number of meteorological stations with "good" air quality readings tripled; At the end of 2020, some research institutions said that due to the epidemic blockade and travel restrictions, the global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels decreased by 7% month on month in 2020, far exceeding the emission reduction during the global financial crisis in 2008. If outer space exploration is the "open source" of resources, the virtual world created by the meta universe is the "throttling" of demand. Majes believes that on the stage of carbon neutralization, "metauniverse" must be the protagonist. "Although the degree of digitization is deepening, this process is still dominated by graphic, audio and video content, which is still based on real space. For example, the content of eating, broadcasting, bringing goods and acting on some video platforms is full of waste." The ultimate goal of carbon neutralization may be achieved by the metauniverse. three Metauniverse with ultra-high energy consumption: forced computer system Structural remodeling, triggering the next wave of AI wave Seeing this, some people may have doubts: if we want to produce a virtual world that can be parallel and replace each other with the real world, the performance requirements of the hardware are also quite high. In particular, the energy consumption and emissions generated by the data centers, chips, digital currencies (mining) that support the normal operation of the meta universe, as well as the whole supply chain system, may still remain at a very high level. In Lei Feng's previous report "should we restrict the power consumption of technology giants?" we pointed out that taking TSMC, a chip manufacturing enterprise, as an example, its annual power consumption is 14.33 billion kwh, equivalent to the annual power consumption of 13.44 million permanent residents in Shenzhen. At the same time, a shocking figure is that the annual power consumption of bitcoin mining in the world is about 134.89 billion kwh, which exceeds the total power consumption of the whole country of Sweden. After conversion, it can rank 27th in the global national power consumption. At present, the global data center consumes about 2% of the world's power, which may rise to 8% by 2030. In China, as early as 2017, the total power consumption of the data center has reached 120-130 billion kwh, exceeding the combined power generation of the Three Gorges Dam and Gezhouba power plant (about 100 billion KWH). In fact, both data center and mining are essentially computing. If we look at this problem in the opposite direction, in order to meet the ultra-high performance but low-power computing needs generated by the meta universe, we must also promote the remodeling of the chip and even the whole computer architecture, as well as the development of quantum computing. Nowadays, most of the power consumption of computing devices is used for cooling. The difference between quantum computer and traditional electronic computer is that quantum computer is no longer composed of electronic components, but composed of multiple particles in quantum state. Therefore, quantum computer itself is a quantum system, which naturally has the characteristics of low energy consumption and low loss. The re upgrading of meta universe forced computing will benefit all walks of life, such as ultra-high-performance biological computing, and will carry out a new round of transformation in the fields of medicine and life sciences. It can even trigger the next wave of artificial intelligence. The reason for each blowout of artificial intelligence is summarized by experts as the joint promotion of computing power, algorithm and data, but its biggest booster is computing power. However, some voices are quite pessimistic. They believe that over the years, the new needs of users are always greater than new solutions. In the meta universe discussion group of Lei Feng, an operator said: "Now the battery capacity of mobile phones is getting larger and larger, and the built-in chips are constantly reducing their unit power consumption, but over the years, everyone's power consumption of mobile phones has only increased. With more and more high-energy applications, iterative low-power solutions have never hedged the growth of application energy consumption. Metauniverse is also difficult to avoid this embarrassing situation, and the consumption reduction can never keep up Increase consumption. " four The earth will be destroyed, but the meta universe can live forever In the above, we infer many benefits of the meta universe to the real world and the driving role of new generation technology. But looking at the long history, the earth will eventually die out. According to scientific research and analysis, the earth will no longer exist in 5 billion years. The film "wandering the earth" detonated the box office reputation in early 2019 and triggered many discussions at the same time. When the life of the earth is approaching, or devastating natural disasters occur, is the only means of human survival the same as the film, carrying out "Star Trek" with the earth. The movie wandering the earth For such external disasters, the direction of human escape can be the interstellar suitable for survival in the distant galaxy, but it can also escape to the meta universe parallel to reality. Such a future has long been predicted by a scholar named John smart. In his "transcendence hypothesis" put forward in 2011, he believes that when the development of civilization exceeds a certain boundary, it will not necessarily go to outer space, but will settle in the virtual "inner space", which can be understood as that human beings digitize their consciousness, memory and knowledge and upload them to the virtual world, even without body and life. John smart believes that this may explain the important reason why we have not met aliens so far. They have taken the lead in digitizing themselves. The first step of human digitization may be brain computer interface. As the "future" of the meta universe, brain computer interface is bound to achieve great development. Using this technology, the signals of the human brain will be able to achieve two-way transmission with the machine, and the storage and upload of memory and consciousness will also be technically possible. This and
Edit：Li Ling Responsible editor：Chen Jie
Source：Leiphone
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