The Metaverse Handbook

CHAPTER 2What Is the Metaverse?

Given enough time, technology imagined in science fiction will eventually become science fact. We've witnessed it time and time again. These phenomena are a mix of incredible visionaries and storytellers literally imagining the future, but also of creators and technologists being inspired by the science-fiction entertainment of their youth.

Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon mentions a light-propelled spacecraft nearly four decades before flight was achieved and just shy of a century before the first spacecraft left our atmosphere. In 2010, Japan's IKAROS spacecraft was the first to successfully demonstrate a propulsion method called solar sails that use radiation pressure exerted by sunlight on large mirrors to propel the spacecraft.

Throughout the early 1900s, Edward Stratemeyer dazzled young readers with the tales of Tom Swift—a teenage inventor who routinely had to stave off evildoers from stealing his inventions. One such story published in 1911 was Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, which featured a stun-gun-like invention Swift wielded throughout the story. When former NASA engineer Jack Cover invented the first stun gun in 1970, he aptly named it TSER after the “Tom Swift Electric Rifle.” The A was later added to help the invention roll off the tongue. After all, “taser” does sound better than “tser.”

Following the 1964 World's Fair, Isaac Asimov wrote an article for The New York Times predicting what inventions would ...