I agree with the first half of your comment: humanity will be (mostly) Earth-bound and energy-bound, trying to deal with a fragile ecosystem in a humanitarian

I agree with the first half of your comment: humanity will be (mostly) Earth-bound and energy-bound, trying to deal with a fragile ecosystem in a humanitarian way. However, I disagree with the pessimism in the second half. To explore the ocean floors will take another 200 years, and probably another 100 for land before we even start. This will be driven by the need to decipher weather and climate, with currents of heat, salinity, nutrients, carbon exchange, and who knows what else through the atmosphere and oceans. Those seem like the priorities we'll need to solve climate stability, including associated tech for renewable energy and feeding whatever population we finally (hopefully) level out at (peacefully). And then I think we will still have many fascinating frontiers to explore, such as molecular biology, genetics, history, and the big one in my mind: psychology. We know so little about all the different ways our minds work and our studies are so primitive we think all people think alike. Just consider the huge difference between introverts and extroverts, and what it implies for people to be so fundamentally different--science isn't even considering these questions yet. In a thousand ears, things will just start to get interesting. To retreat into virtual worlds would be premature--though I have no doubt they will be explored in parallel.