The limits of imagination consistently identify the frontiers of human achievement and innovation. In The Virtues of War, Steven Pressfield’s brilliant fictionalization of Alexander the Great, the legendary conqueror highlights his superior skill: “Not warcraft or conquest. Certainly not politics. Imagination.”¹ Influential leaders use their imagination to distinguish themselves. Those who take us one step (or giant leaps!) forward must imagine their ideas first and see possibility in the impossible. In a similar spirit, allow me to introduce the concept of an open metaverse to your imagination.

Before diving in, I’d like to provide some background on an open metaverse, which will be pretty similar to the internet today. As a digital public good, how do you access the internet? Many ways! You can use computers, phones, tablets and, heck, even refrigerators. Think of a natural public good like air. Something doesn’t feel right about there only being a single way to access the air. Similarly, users will have many modes of accessing an open metaverse, such as phones, virtual reality headsets and augmented reality glasses. As a digital public good, who owns the internet? No one! It’s not called Google’s internet or America’s internet. It’s simply the internet, a powerful tool humans have developed to help us solve increasingly complex problems. Think of air again. Something definitely doesn’t feel right about a single person or group owning the air. Similarly, no one will own the open metaverse, as it will be a tool we all develop together. In truth, it’s an extension of the internet, and I’ll show you how an open metaverse improves science, education and communities to benefit the world tremendously.

Improving Science

The metaverse will accelerate scientific progress at remarkable rates. Since humans posed the first question, we have embarked on an unending scientific quest. Our pursuit of knowledge requires verifying truth to satisfy our curious instinct. Properly confirming knowledge entails the collaboration of many individuals, traversing the rigorous scientific method. After all, NASA didn’t use its first draft of the Lunar Module Eagle design to carry Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. Engineers tested sturdy hypotheses, designed sterile experiments and tracked innumerable results to advance their understanding, ensuring the safety of the Apollo 11 spaceflight. The time and energy needed to reach a single conclusion demonstrate the costly nature of such an endeavor. What if we could exponentially streamline the testing process, making it more cost-effective while increasing the rate at which we reach conclusions?

Enter digital twins — functional, digital replicas of physical items. Digital twins dynamically simulate tangible things. Initially anticipated in David Gelernter’s 1991 Mirror Worlds, the concept finally entered the public consciousness in 2002. It consists of three distinct parts: the physical item, the digital item and the connection between the two. Let’s consider the digital twin of an automotive engine. If engineers alter the actual engine’s composition, the engine’s simulation evolves accordingly. To tweak the design, engineers can adjust the digital twin first without breaking the connection between physical and digital copies. In the metaverse, digital twins already help fashion designers visualize how articles of clothing accentuate the human form at a fraction of the economic and environmental cost.

As computing power and design precision improve, we can create replicas of unbelievably complex tools. Consider the James Webb Space Telescope², which cost $9.7bn, and the Large Hadron Collider³, which cost $4.5bn. Both machines required three decades of human labor to design and build correctly. Conducting near-infinite simulations simultaneously helps us discover truths quickly and cheaply.

Furthermore, we can store these advancements on the blockchain, creating a permissionless environment that encourages the human pursuit of truth. Imagine a world in which the global scientific community collaborates with identical datasets and assumptions to solve our most pressing problems. We’ll develop solutions at unprecedented rates while unlocking a more efficient means of allocating our most precious resources — our time and our money. An open metaverse enables the best ideas to distinguish themselves based on their material and form rather than the strength of their believers’ egos.

Improving Education

Naturally, to make full use of accelerated scientific progress, the discipline of education must experience a paradigm shift. As a society, we need curious individuals who can use our best technologies comfortably while stewarding their positive evolution. Fortunately, the metaverse will usher in a new era of how we teach, learn and grow together.

Education will move from mindlessly consuming static information to actively engaging vivid experiences. Imagine a world where you sit with a raucous, virtual crowd and listen to a virtual Homer⁴ recite The Iliad to study his works. Such profound experiences would help students create genuine, emotional connections with the greatest testaments of human ingenuity, surpassing what’s available through only reading words on a page.

Additionally, pairing these learning opportunities with blockchain-powered non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) lays the foundation for shared experiences. As an immutable and decentralized source of truth, the blockchain immediately provides verifiable proof and attestation to any claim. NFTs function as tangible representations of a claim. Physical NFTs exist and play an essential role in society. Title deeds to homes and vehicles verify asset ownership before buyers and sellers settle a transaction. On the blockchain, NFTs help you verify an infinite array of identity claims, such as I am who I am, I possess this asset and I participated in this event. In the context of education, NFTs will verify the identities of learners, teachers and the content discussed, enabling fully-immersive experiences. An open metaverse empowers students of all arts, skills and trades to engage with their material and encourages educators to create meaningful experiences, captivating minds and hearts.

Improving Communities

As sharing experiences and information becomes seamless, we’ll vastly improve our ability to create dynamic communities, perhaps the most significant benefit of an open metaverse. For most of human history, the geographical coordinates of your birth constricted the width of your social network. The most potent community-building tool today, the internet enables gatherings of like-minded individuals like never before. As a dimensional expansion of the internet, the metaverse opens up truly endless avenues of connection. We can play games with friends worldwide and transact real value with them.

Inherently, the formation of complex economies requires codified and proactive incentive structures to foster prosocial behavior. Before the blockchain, governance measures entirely existed off-chain. Initially, we trusted rulers with centralized authority to make judgments on all financial, moral, and ethical matters. History has proved these individuals to be far from impartial, so we designed governing infrastructure to serve as judges. We created a complex financial system, which supposedly gives us unrestricted access to our personal economic value. We created democratic political institutions, which supposedly give us full agency over how we shape our societies. However, such infrastructure still requires us to trust the human beings who operate in centralized power domains.

With blockchain, more governance can shift on-chain. After all, science and all rational inquiry serve to move the boundaries of persuasion, justification and explanation further away from us. That is, more ideas fall under the impartial umbrella of verifiable truths. As governance transitions on-chain, users can increasingly trust the power-proof environment in which new political systems form. It will be much harder for power-hungry humans to cause such systems to crumble. Assuming these individuals don’t succumb to the darker desires of human nature would be unfair and unwise.

Imagine a world in which you can safely form robust communities with those who share your interests and who appreciate the value you create. An open metaverse enhances connections among users and promotes shared value creation among organizations without any incentive to collaborate previously.

Moving Forward

Despite our universal desire to create and connect, our most advanced technology always has limited the speed at which we communicate. Fortunately, technological advancements produced fiber optic cables, enabling us to share information at the speed of light. While our ability to communicate has become essentially unlimited, the two-dimensional nature of our screens stands as the main bottleneck to a fully immersed experience. The metaverse expands our digital interactions by one whole dimension.

Archimedes, the illustrious polymath, once said, “give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” A blockchain-based, open metaverse stands to be the most potent lever humans ever created if we build it effectively. Developing such a tool requires harmonious collaboration between governments, corporations, educational institutions and committed individuals. While optimistic and idealistic, it’s our best chance at enabling more profound pursuits of truth, engaging educational experiences and forming robust communities. I sincerely hope that the concept of the open metaverse becomes synonymous with that of the plain-vanilla metaverse so that we can drop the open qualification altogether!

In all contexts, leverage amplifies outcomes — making sensational results more splendid and detrimental consequences more devastating.

If we build the metaverse openly, we increase the odds of moving the world in the right direction.

1. Pressfield, Steven. The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great, Bantam Books, New York, 2005, pp. 121–122.
2. Image from NASA, linked here.
3. Image from CERN, linked here.
4. Image from Wikimedia Commons, linked here.

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