The Multiverse, Megaverse and now the Metaverse

Today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the name of the company he founded would change to Meta. That means that Meta and the metaverse the company intends to dominate will be on most people’s minds around the world. Possibly for a long time to come.

Metaverse? Apparently the concept has been around a bit. The word “meta” as Zuckerberg pointed out, is Greek for “beyond.” Meta-consciousness is tossed about a bit these days which is basically being conscious or aware of being conscious or aware. Metaphysics is not what scientifically ignorant people do, (as I was accused of by a commenter), but is discussion about things “beyond” physics.

So what is the metaverse? The next big thing, apparently. Beyond the mobile web we now have. Zuckerberg:

“We’ve gone from desktop to web to phones, from text to photos to video, but this isn’t the end of the line,” Mr. Zuckerberg said at the social-media giant’s annual developer forum called Facebook Connect. “We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet.”

It is mostly about avatars, not the movie but digital representations of individual people. This is important because we haven’t figured out how to get our physical bodies made up of water and a few other bits of blown up stars into the actual internet. Maybe that will come. In the meantime, we have to settle for avatars.

If there is a digital version of me in the digital world of the internet it means I can go…