This is the location where the great prostitute is and so where John must go to observe her. God created the earth to be a place of abundance (Genesis 2:9). Due to the fall into sin, the earth became a wilderness (Genesis 3:17–18). This “great prostitute” lives in a fallen world, one characterized by God’s curse (weeds, sweat, limitations, death). Whereas thus far John saw things happening in heaven, this vision of how Babylon the great falls occurs on post-fall earth.
3 And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns.