If you're ever in the greater Boston area, it's worth going to Harvard's Museum of Natural history solely for the Glass Flowers. The rest of the collection is stunning too.
I dread a world where each citizen will have (access to?) a zoo of 3D models, artificially made physical representations of those (like plastic flowers, or a fake flamingo in your garden), rich virtual worlds filled with beauty...
...while the real life creatures represented, are only a tiny tiny fraction of that real+virtual whole [1].
Or have long gone extinct.
While masses of people spend more time exploring virtual worlds than the real one.
It used to be we could have both. Vast virtual worlds, and beautiful nature outside.
Nowadays... the latter being degraded or outright destroyed, more & more no matter where you look.
[1] In that flamingo example: I've read an estimate that for each life/wild specimen, there might be >100 fake ones out there (might as well be 1:1000 or 1:10000, who knows). Or eg. see:
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Flowers
https://huh.harvard.edu/glass-flowers
...while the real life creatures represented, are only a tiny tiny fraction of that real+virtual whole [1].
Or have long gone extinct.
While masses of people spend more time exploring virtual worlds than the real one.
It used to be we could have both. Vast virtual worlds, and beautiful nature outside.
Nowadays... the latter being degraded or outright destroyed, more & more no matter where you look.
[1] In that flamingo example: I've read an estimate that for each life/wild specimen, there might be >100 fake ones out there (might as well be 1:1000 or 1:10000, who knows). Or eg. see:
https://xkcd.com/1338