A lecture on a virtual world...or was it on settlements?

Although the topic may seem completely vague to most people not associated with architecture, this post should still be worth reading (hopefully!).
Well, this semester we have a course called "Principles of Human Settlement and Planning" which is being taught to us by one of my absolute favourite teachers who is one person who knows everything about everything. He can talk for hours about any topic under the sun. He was even a part of R.K.Pachori's team which won the Nobel Prize. Well, so anyway, coming back to the topic, the lecture started off on how settlements grew and how with time philosophers tried to define factors that influenced the growth of settlements. After pretty good discussions about how we all have personality spheres which are impacted by personality spheres of people around us, we moved on to discuss what was common between old settlements and present day settlements which would probably not change with time. The answer was...spaces to house people, congregational spaces and connections between spaces. That was when it all began...I argued with Sir that maybe in the future, congregational spaces would not be required since everything could be done through video conferencing. To that he answered, that is also the creation of a virtual space, which ofcourse I just had to counteract by saying that a virtual space was not a real physically present space on the earth surface...which led him to say what actually bemused me to such an extent that at that very moment I told myself that I had to write about this. He said, "How are you sure that everything around you is real?". And I shut up.
Normally an ardent debater, this time I was actually left speechless. What could I say? After some thought I said, then Sir there is absolutely nothing in this world that is absolute! To which he gave his wide trademark grin and said "Yes!"
That led us to a discussion on how the future would be. Video conferencing, 3-d image transfers of humans into virtual environments in which they could actually interact without being present physically, digital transfer of just about everything, just like the Jetsons. How cool would that be! Which led me to think about how crime would also become digitized. Hackers would be thieves, where they would hack into the transportation protocol and divert products or people to their desired locations and steal or kidnap. We oculd grow our choice of plants in our gardens, as fast as we want them to grow, maybe even invent new species altogether. Each one having their one chance at playing God. Really, there is no limit to human imagination. Just as I was shaken out of these thoughts by Sir as he moved on to more technical discussions on human settlements, one of my classmates called out "Sir, phir toh yeh sab moh maaya hai!". There was nothing else left for anyone else to day.