One of my frequent yarns as a futurist is that mankind’s future lies in virtual reality, underground, the oceans, the mountains, the deserts, and Antarctica, not space.

Most of the world’s surface is uncolonized. Siberia is largely empty. The oceans are entirely uncolonized. Much of the central United States is highly rural. Most of Canada is empty. Patagonia is cold and unpopulated, with population densities around 2.0 per km2. Australia has just 21 million people spread out over almost 3 million square miles. Antarctica, which would have been an amazing place to be in the Mesozoic, and could become amazing again, is occupied by only around 1,000 scientists. Greenland, which will become the world’s newest country in June 2009, has a land area of about 830,000 square miles, but a population of only 57,000.

“Cold” is relative. Want to make Antarctica habitable? Throw down a concrete foundation, put soil on top, cover it with a dome and numerous heaters. Poof, instant Antarctic city. Use vertical farming or direct synthesis for food. (This is a vision that would probably only be made possible with the technology of 2030 at the earliest, probably more like 2060, unless there’s a Singularity and everything goes out the window.) Find a way to artificially generate light that mimics sunlight. Give people implants like subdermal heaters that make “cold” not seem so cold anymore, and parents will begin to let their children run around and play outside. (Unless there’s a blizzard, though a network of underground tunnels combined with accurate forecasting could minimize that risk.)

Speaking of artificial sunlight, in due time it seems likely that we will carve out vast underground caverns and live in them by the billions. This could be done on several levels, constrained primarily by the temperature at greater depths and the structural stability of the lithosphere. We could reinforce these underground caverns with mass-produced fullerenes. There is roughly 36,000 gigatonnes of carbon available to do this with. More carbon could be imported from carbonaceous asteroids. The asteroid belt contains carbon equivalent to more than 1% the mass of the Moon, which is approximately 7 × 1011 gigatonnes.

The Pacific Ocean is covered with about 25,000 islands, which are basically huge mountains with their tops pointing out of the water. These could all be carved out and turned into wonderful subterranean gardens with brilliant artificial days and serene artificial nights. Display technologies like phase array optics could convey images of the true night sky in realtime. Images of real shooting stars could be projected on these perfectly realistic screens only microseconds after the event actually occurs. It would be impossible to tell the difference.

Humanity and all biodiversity is a two-dimensional film on the surface of the Earth. This is such a waste of a beautiful planet. We should build our civilization dozens of miles into the sky and at least a few miles underground. We can bring ample biodiversity with us, constructing megascale arcologies. With personal flight technologies and embedded intelligent systems to prevent us from slamming into each other, we could feel free to fly from miles underground to altitudes above Mt. Everest in something like half an hour.

Space is an inherent hazard because of the eventual risk that a nutcase will drop an asteroid or other heavy object on us. Therefore, it seems likely that space exploration and development will be placed under high scrutiny and surveillance. Getting into space may eventually be easy, but heavy development will likely be subjected to much red tape. Unless every space developer willingly subjects themselves to brain implants that allow a security program to scan their thoughts for maliciousness, we will willingly self-limit how many people have access to unrestricted space technologies.