Well, getting into the subject of people preferring artificial reality exploring (before you started to digress), it should be remembered that you can have no real surprises in an artificial reality. It can only contain what the programmers put into it. While programmers can imagine quite a bit--I still love the Myst series--only the real universe can throw a complete spanner into your perceptions and show you something completely new. Pretend it's 1950. How many people visualized a Mars full of craters? A Venus with a sulfuric acid atmosphere? What Io looked like? Or closer to Earth, the life forms around a vent in the ocean bottom?

People are always going to want to seek the real surprises. While some people might be happy with whatever comes out of some other person's mind,

Now, if you are talking remotely-operated virtual presence, that's a whole different story. This is already a big item in ocean exploring, and I expect when interplanetary communications are up to it, it will be a big item in space too, especially on the Moon, which has no serious signal delays.