OK, What About Sex?

Sex is the big enchilada of the arguments against Virtual Worlds. People can imagine going to work or attending classes in a Virtual Worlds even if they don’t like the idea. But, sex is the show stopper. You can’t have sex in Virtual Worlds; at least not real sex. And if you can’t have real sex how can you procreate?  Resistance to Virtual Worlds is firm on this point. And people who raise this argument see it as the grand mal seizure of technological musings, throwing the possibilities of future Virtual Worlds into a tail spin of chaos. They see it as the one irrefutable argument against living in Virtual Worlds. But, it isn’t. And I will take on this argument now.

First, I would like to provide an analogy to put things into perspective. In the Middle Ages in Western Europe, towns were beginning to emerge and people were beginning to populate them in significant numbers. Imagine an ambitious younger person discussing the future of towns with an elder. The elder might point out that towns have a dicey future because people will eventually want to marry and raise families. But, in a town this would be difficult as you don’t know the families of prospective spouses so you can’t make good choices. Further, you don’t have the benefit of more experienced older people to guide you. And the midwives in the town, if there are any, will not be familiar with your family’s history and so won’t be able to help you if difficulties arise in child birth. These are all legitimate concerns but towns became prominent anyway, many eventually becoming large cities.

There is no end to the list of similar examples where things change in ways that were incomprehensible to people who were used to a different world. Today we elect King’s. People choose their own professions. Overwhelmingly most people don’t grow food. And on, and on. The point is that what you are used is nothing more than what you are used to. It is not reality. It is merely the way things happen to be done at the moment.

So, how might things change to accommodate the problem of sex in Virtual Worlds? Let’s start with the easiest and move to the more difficult to imagine. First, we might just make social accommodations. That is, the partners we choose for procreation come from a different pool and serve different roles than the people we work with or attend classes with. This is not all that farfetched as we seem to be moving in that direction anyway with dating websites.  So, let’s take it a step further. 

Imagine a future where procreation can occur through artificial insemination. So the people involved never have to meet.The idea of mailing reproductive material to the one you love probably sounds repugnant to nearly everyone. But, don’t forget that just a couple hundred years ago the idea of storing blood in bags for people who need transfusions would have been shocking as well. Taking the organs out of dead people to put them into living people sounds even worse. So, the idea of separating reproductive materials from their donors is not that different.  Another problem with this idea, in the minds of most people, is that it separates sex and reproduction. But, even that does not hold up upon inspection.  Even in today’s world, the amount of sex allocated to reproduction is a tiny fraction of the amount of sex dedicated to fun.  

Let’s take this one step further. We are not that far off from having artificial blood and artificial organs. So, it is not unreasonable to imagine that, at some point in the future, we will have artificial reproductive materials as well. If this happens, then the need for proximity in reproductive sex goes away entirely.It may take some getting used to. But we have gotten used to a lot in the past and will get used to more in the future.

I realize that these ideas are probably repugnant to most readers and I am not suggesting any of them as a desirable future. That is a different debate entirely. I am merely saying that what we are used to what we are used to and people in the future may well be used to something different.

To drive this idea home consider a future, perhaps a couple hundred years from now where reproduction is handled neatly by combining reproductive materials in a clinically controlled incubation environment. Then imagine that the technology is lost somehow. And it is your job to convince people to go back to the old way of doing things. How difficult would that be?