>>10897576No reason not to do both. Entertainment is entertainment, people will still want it no matter where they live. If it is just VR, you will still see the population expand as we get closer to post scarcity production, and those people have to go somewhere. Eventually the system will be full of habitats since they are fairly easy to make if you have the necessary infrastructure. Once you have a dyson swarm interstellar colonization is entirely trivial. Every O’Neil cylinder is a spaceship capable of travel on its own with only minor modifications, and you could send off a couple 100 of them with a couple dozen times earths current population to go start a new dyson in the next system over and have that be less than a percent of a percent of your dyson swarm’s total population on that expedition. The people on board wouldn’t really have any change in the way their life is, especially if they mostly just live in VR, and even if the journey lasts 100 years they aren’t really lacking in anything since O’Neil cylinders would be made to be self sufficient. Such a migrating cloud of habitats could still share their VR with each other and have more variety than modern day earth in the matters of who they play with/against or what types of games they play, and if a particularly awesome game/app/new piece of tech/etc showed up in the Sol swarm during their journey, they would still only be getting it maybe a few years late when it is beamed over to them from back home.
Even if everyone decided to go full digital, it would still be reasonable to build a dyson swarm. As a digital being, you can live literally forever as long as you have power and are maintained, and if you have the resources to sustain it there is no reason not to massively increase your population to increase your pool of customers/researchers/game designers/whatever else people can come up with to get profit or new ideas from. The galaxy is your resource pool and a dyson is the first step.
