http://www.bungie.net/stats/reach/online.aspx

“Halo, an FPS video game which I play avidly, was introduced sometime in 2001. It is now 2012.

The possibility of human beings cooperatively inhabiting data constructs in a visualized virtual reality resulted in 235,182 years of human combat in the Halo constructs alone. This number represents only those hours connected and tracked. Over 85 million life-days days since then (4015 world-days ago).

But that is only in a single video game. The actual figure, particularly if we expanded it to include all life-days since the inception of this possibility sometime around the 1950’s, would be so gigantic as to make this one appear relatively meager.

If anyone of even average intelligence was observing this, and asking questions about our species and our intelligence, I think that, along with their questions and research, they would act to insure we would confine ourselves to the world we are destroying long enough to either grow out of battle-addiction or exterminate ourselves. I certainly would.”

— an anonymous informant