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Baroness Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, said she feared users of the popular simulation could abandon the messy intimacy of "real-life" human relations for two-dimensional liaisons in the virtual world.
Second Life was started in San Francisco in 1999 and now has seven million players who can create their own characters, known as avatars, buy goods, throw parties and build their own homes.
However, Baroness Greenfield says the implications have not been thought through. "People who dismiss it as a game will be in for a rude awakening," she said. "This will have a huge impact on society.
"Offering people the chance to have a permanent soap opera going on, in which they can participate, will be even more pervasive than reality TV such as Big Brother.
"This is the ultimate in that you can be involved, you can interact, but still you are hiding behind an avatar."
Baroness Greenfield wondered whether people who inhabited virtual worlds would come to regard real-life sexual relationships with some queasiness.
"Could it be that in the future they will say, 'A real relationship! Urgh, how horrible,' " she said. "The messiness and squalor of the real world, and the real-time element, might be offset by the more sanitised, two-dimensional reality of Second Life.
"It scares me in one way, and fascinates me in another, in wondering where it will take people. What impact does having a false identity have on your real identity?"
The Royal Institution and Nature Network London will host a public event at London's Apple Store tonight to discuss how virtual worlds are increasingly being used by scientists.
Prof Richard Dawkins, who is author of the best-selling The God Delusion, recently appeared as a human on video, addressing a Second Life audience of avatars.
His publisher bought an island in the virtual world in which its authors could "connect" with residents.
"I have been in there myself as an avatar, incognito," he said, adding that Second Life offered intriguing new opportunities for sociological research.
However, he considered one scenario where people inhabited Second Life so much "they hardly know they are in an outside world".
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Telegraph Media Group Limited 2007
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