Louise Sallé, edited by Laura Laplaud 07:32, September 20, 2022

This is the question posed, among others, by the first edition of the "Forum des metaverses", organized this Tuesday in Paris by the company specializing in communication strategy RM Conseil.

But the ecological impact relating to the rise of this virtual world is quite negative given the energy power required and the significant metal extraction that results.

The "metaverse", or metaverse in French, is a virtual world in which companies dream of establishing themselves.

It is thus the subject of a "Metaverse Forum", organized this Tuesday in Paris at the Maison de la Chimie, in the 7th arrondissement, by the company RM Conseil.

The BNP Paribas and Accenture groups, in particular, are participating.

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The metaverse today is more a projection of economic activities in the future than a reality.

Nevertheless, there are some "pieces" or "bricks" of this virtual universe.

Transactions in crypto-currency for example, certain connected video games or videoconferences organized to exchange remotely.

But the idea, advocated by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (now Meta), is to link all these exchanges in the same 3D universe, in order to develop new ways of interacting and doing business.

Already significant digital pollution

However, there is a problem: its environmental impact.

Because if the major part of the metaverse remains to be built, the pollution already generated by digital technology is significant.

The Internet currently accounts for around 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

This is a small percentage that will increase significantly in the years to come.

"We realize that between 2010 and 2025, our digital impacts will be multiplied by three. Imagine that on the scale of each and every one of us, we have tripled our impacts in the space of 15 years environmental factors associated with our food, our movements, in fact we would already have collapsed as a civilization. This is without taking into consideration this novelty of the metaverse", explains the expert in digital sobriety Frédéric Bordage, founder of the GreenIT.fr collective.

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More pollution from energy and metal mining

The metaverse will thus add data centers (or data centers), virtual reality headsets and screens to the already massive production of digital terminals.

It will therefore require more energy to use them and more metals to manufacture them, mainly extracted in China.

"We will need 1,000 times more computing power, so mechanically 1,000 times of date centers, it is impossible to multiply the number of data centers, to manufacture enough virtual reality headsets, to multiply the size of the networks to pass these very high definition images in real time since a priori, we would not have enough resources, metals to manufacture the material reality of this virtual world", he observes.

For Frédéric Bordage, the metaverse, therefore, cannot be sustainable.

Yet this is the theme of one of the round tables organized today during the forum.