When Reality Is Being Depleted: Metaverses as Salvation?

Imagine an area larger than Antarctica. No, it’s not a new country or a giant city. It’s 15 million square kilometers of depleted soils spread across the entire Earth. These vital resources are degrading at a rate of about 1 million square kilometers per year — that is, we are literally losing the fertility of the planet at an alarming rate. Soils and forests could once absorb a third of excess CO₂, but now their capacity has decreased by 20%. We ourselves are reducing nature’s ability to balance the climate by cutting down forests and using land irrationally.

All this sounds catastrophic, and to some extent it is. But the paradox is that we live in an era of frantic technological progress. While real ecosystems are being depleted, we have more and more tools at our fingertips to study them, restore them — or, if we take a more radical approach, create alternative spaces for life. Yes, I’m talking about metaverses.

Metaverses are not just “virtual worlds” for fun. They can become a kind of laboratory for finding sustainable solutions and developing new approaches to human interaction with resources. While we are trying to slow down the degradation of real soils, we are simultaneously creating ecosystem models in a virtual environment, where we hone resource redistribution mechanisms, “grow” digital forests and test sustainable economies. In this way, we can not only store knowledge and best practices, but also use them to manage the real world.

Of course, the metaverse is not a panacea. But when the real world cries out for help, technology gives us a chance to think about non-standard solutions. This is a reminder: innovation is not only about gadgets or artificial intelligence, but also about finding new ways to preserve and multiply what gives us life.

#Ecology #Soils #Metaverse #FutureTechnologies #Climate #Innovations