Recently, a friend asked me what the "Metaverse" is. He said that he saw some videos talking about "Metaverse" on a certain sound, and he thought it was very interesting.

It has to be said that the concept of "Metaverse" is too easy to spread. A video of "Liu Yexi" is enough to make the major Internet celebrities in the real world automatically give way.

But so far, people's views on the "metaverse" are completely different.

For now, the voices in the market are mainly divided into three types, mainly represented by Liu Cixin, the author of "The Three-Body Problem", Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook (now Meta), and Chris Dixon, a partner of A16Z.

Let's review what the giants have to say:

"No matter how prosperous the earth has achieved, the future without space travel is bleak." ——Liu Cixin

According to media reports, Liu Cixin believes that the metaverse will be an involution of the entire human civilization, and the entropy value of the involuted closed system will always tend to be the largest, so the metaverse will eventually lead mankind to a dead end.

"In the metaverse, you will be able to do almost anything you can think of - hang out with friends and family, work, study, play, shop, create, and gain new experiences that are unimaginable with the current understanding of computers and mobile phones .In this future, you will be teleported as a hologram, no need to commute to the office, or go to a concert with friends, or return to your parents' house. You will spend more time on meaningful things .” — Zuckerberg

"3D worlds and metaverse experiences powered by Crypto that allow people to socialize, earn money, and build mini-worlds, all while guaranteeing interoperability and true ownership." - Chris Dixon

In the eyes of A16Z partners, the soul of the metaverse is Web 3, which is ownership. He said that compared with Web 2, the next-generation network will use blockchain and NFT as the core primitives.

Taken separately, these three points of view are actually reasonable, and it is no wonder that they can resonate with many people. So which kind of judgment should we believe?

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Three Development Directions of the Metaverse

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1. The future world imagined by Liu Cixin

Assuming that Liu Cixin’s prediction is correct, then the development of VR, AR, AI, blockchain and other core components of metaverse technologies will be meaningless, and human beings will focus on exploring the technologies of the real universe. At first glance, this seems to be quite Positive, but in reality, the process of human beings exploring the real universe will be greatly slowed down.

Why? The ideal is full, but the reality is very skinny. Expensive is not enough to describe the cost of exploring the real universe. As of now, exploring Mars is still the next distant goal for human beings.

Louis Friedman, founder of the Planetary Society of America, wrote in Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars:

"Although there is a gene for exploration in human culture, and although space exploration will go on "forever" in some form, as technology matures, it will become less and less necessary to send humans into space. Mars is not only a place where humans descend A goal, and possibly the final one. The exploration of the universe beyond Mars will be transferred to the world of virtual reality. Our physical bodies can simply sit in our homes on Earth or Mars, and through information processing, we can travel the entire universe. .”

This is the positive role of the metaverse in exploring the real universe. Humans will replace their fragile bodies with indestructible robot avatars to visit this realistic and dangerous universe, and use the virtual world to synchronize everything witnessed by robots. This is exactly the case. Only then can our dream of space navigation develop faster.

And if Mars is the end point for human beings to explore the universe, then the metaverse has no future. On the contrary, if the future of human beings is the sea of ​​stars, then the metaverse is the future.

2. The future world imagined by Zuckerberg

Assuming Zuckerberg is right, then the development of VR, AR, AI and other technologies will usher in an unprecedented explosion, and human beings will enter a real virtual world through hardware devices, where people can socialize, play games, travel, and hold meetings Everything that can be done in the real world, as well as unimaginable application scenarios in the real world, and the avatars in the virtual world can be ever-changing, which means that everyone has Monkey King's "seventy-two transformations" magical skills, There is no doubt that such a world is extremely fascinating.

But it should be noted that the metaverse imagined by Zuckerberg has the concept of gods, and the Meta company and himself are the gods of the virtual world it created.

If your own social accounts and video accounts have been ruthlessly deleted by these giants, then you may not have any interest in the metaverse imagined by Zuckerberg.

However, in terms of the development of VR, AR, AI and other technologies, traditional network giants such as Facebook (now Meta) and Microsoft undoubtedly have great advantages. They may realize a virtual world full of experience for human beings faster.

3. The future world imagined by Chris Dixon

Assuming that Chris Dixon is right, then on the premise that traditional Internet giants vigorously develop VR, AR, AI and other technologies, another group of people will explore the virtual world with Crypto as the soul. In this world, people can still do Meta world Everything that can be done in the game, and at the same time can truly own the avatar, money and virtual items in the metaverse.

Does it sound more attractive? But such a world is destined to experience a period of cruel competition, because not every newly created public chain and Dapp can survive, and eventually there will be giants in the Web 3.0 era, and the weak will be the same as Netscape in history , gradually disappearing from people's sight.

This will undoubtedly be a world of adventure, but also a world full of innovation and imagination.

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Conclusion: different outcomes of choosing the three metaverse paths

So what will the path you choose bring you in the end?

When you agree with the first point of view, that is, you don’t think the metaverse will be the future, then everything in the metaverse will have nothing to do with you. No matter whether the development of the metaverse is good or bad, you are just a spectator.

When you agree with the second view that the Metaverse will be dominated by the Web 2.0 giants, then the next thing you might do is to buy the stocks of these giants instead of using and consuming their products, because The latter will only make you their product, while the former will allow you to enjoy the dividends of the Web 2.0 metaverse.

This article comes from Tao of Yuan Universe, reproduced with authorization.

This article comes from Tao of Yuan Universe, reproduced with authorization.