For many tech enthusiasts, the Metaverse has the potential to revolutionize nearly every aspect of daily life, from professional work to learning experiences to leisure activities. Well, recent research from Cornell University shows that the environment can also benefit from the Metaverse.

The study revealed that the Metaverse has the potential to cool the Earth’s surface temperature by up to 0.02 degrees. Celsius by the end of the century.

The team’s paper was recently published in a journal Energy and Environmental Science.

They used AI-based modeling to analyze data in key areas such as technology, energy, environment, and business to identify the growing usage of the metaverse and its most promising applications (remote work, virtual travel, remote learning, gaming, etc.). Non-Fungible Token (NFT).

The researchers predicted the expansion of the metaverse by 2050 along three different trajectories: slow, nominal, and fast, and used television, the internet, the iPhone, etc. to gain insight into how quickly that spread would occur. We focused on the previous technology of . We also took into account the amount of energy consumed by increased usage. This modeling suggests that this technology will be adopted by over 90% of his population within 30 years.

“What surprises us is that this metaverse is growing much faster than we expected,” said Fengqi You, professor of energy systems engineering and lead author of the paper. “Look at earlier technology, like television. It took decades for everyone to finally adopt it. Think smartphones, they grew up so fast.”

The two largest companies driving metaverse development in the industry today are Meta and Microsoft, both contributing to this study. Meta focuses on personal experiences such as gaming, while Microsoft specializes in business his solutions such as remote conferencing and distance learning.

According to you, limiting business travel will produce the greatest environmental benefits.

“Let’s think about decarbonizing our transport sector,” he said. “Electric cars work, but you can’t drive them all the way to London or Tokyo. Do you really have to go to Singapore for the conference tomorrow? It will be an interesting decision point for some stakeholders to consider as they move forward with these technologies.”

The paper points out that the metaverse industry could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 gigatonnes by 2050. Reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration by 4.0 ppm. Reduces effective radiation power by 0.035 watts per square meter. Reduce total domestic energy consumption by 92 EJ. This is a reduction over the annual national energy consumption of all end-use sectors in the previous year.

These findings could help policy makers understand how growth in the metaverse industry can accelerate progress towards meeting net-zero emissions targets and facilitate more flexible decarbonization strategies. have a nature. Metaverse-based remote work, distance learning and virtual tourism could be encouraged to improve air quality. In addition to reducing air pollutant emissions, reduced transport and commercial energy use could increase energy supply to the residential sector and help transform the way energy is distributed.

“This mechanism will help, but ultimately it will help reduce the surface temperature of the Earth by up to 0.02 degrees,” You said. “There are so many sectors in this economy.

See: “A Growing Metaverse Sector Could Save 10 Gt CO2e of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the United States by 2050,” by Ning Zhao and Fengqi You, 13 April 2023, Available here. Energy and Environmental Science.
DOI: 10.1039/D3EE00081H

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation.