Denkraum

“Blue Marble 2002”: a composite of natural-colour satellite images gathered over four months. Image: NASA’s Earth Observatory. Can you really meet someone in a place that exists only on a screen? Many people answer with a quick no: a "real" encounter needs real bodies in a real room. Others, who have spent years in online worlds, answer just as quickly with a yes. This post tries to take both views seriously. It asks what virtual spaces such as Second Life can offer for genuine encounters, what we can say about it with evidence, and where the limits lie. What a virtual world can offer Second Life was launched in 2003. According to Linden Lab, the company behind it, more than 73 million accounts had been created by 2023, the year of its twentieth anniversary, and around 750,000 people were using it each month. These are the company's own figures, and they need care: an account is not the same as a person, and the monthly figure is about one hundredth of the total num...

Raphael, The School of Athens (1509–1511), fresco in the Vatican. Photo: Wilfredor, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. It has never been easier to reach another person. A message crosses the planet in a second, and almost everyone carries a library, a newsroom and a town square in their pocket. And yet loneliness has become a serious, well-documented problem, and talking with people who see the world differently does not come easily to everyone. This post is about why we believe that meeting each other in real conversation, and doing so across borders, matters especially today. Loneliness is not a small problem In June 2025 the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Connection published its global report on the subject. It reports that about one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness, and it links loneliness to more than 871,000 deaths a year, roughly 100 every hour. Young people are not spared: between 17 and 21 percent of those aged 13 to 29 reported feeling l...

Welcome, and thank you for stopping by. This blog is the public face of The Denkraum Project : an invitation to talk about the big questions of our time, in small groups, in many places around the world. What we are after "Denkraum" is German for a space for thinking. That is exactly what we want to create: a place with no fixed agenda and no expected outcome, where people can bring a question, listen to others and leave with a slightly different view than they came with. No lectures, no verdicts, and room for many viewpoints. Where the idea comes from The project grew out of a discussion group in Hamburg, "Philosophische Gespräche" (philosophical conversations), which has been meeting for several years. Over that time we saw how much a regular, open conversation can give people, and the idea followed naturally: why should this exist in only one city? Why not many groups, in many places, each with its own voice? Why Second Life? Second Life is a virtual wo...