Europe's Plan to Simulate the Entire Planet
Earth Simulator’ will mine economic, environmental and health data
to create a model of the entire planet in real time.
energy collective , May 8, 2010
- When it comes to global crises, we’re not short of
complex systems that look close to the edge: the climate, the food
supply, energy security, the banking system and so on. Add to this
the threat of war in many parts of the world and the possibility of
global pandemics and it’s a wonder that anybody gets out of bed in
the morning.
Science has certainly played an important role in understanding
aspects of these systems but could it do more?
Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Zurich outlines an ambitious project to go further, much
further.
Helbing’s idea is to create a kind of Manahattan project to
study, understand and tackle these
techno-socio-economic-environmental issues. His plan is to gather
data about the planet in unheard of detail, use it to simulate the
behaviour of entire economies and then to predict and prevent
crises from emerging.
Think of it as a kind of Google Earth for society. We’ve all
played with Google’s 3D map of the Earth that uses real data to
reveal not only the town where you live and work but your home and
back garden too.
Imagine a similar model that uses in real time things like
financial transactions, health records, travel details, carbon
dioxide emissions and so on to build a model of not just the planet
but the entire society that populates it. Helbing calls it ‘reality
mining’.
This model will be capable not only modelling the planet in real
time but of simulating the future, rather in the manner of weather
forecasters.
Helbing’s simulator will look for economic bubbles and
collapses, warn of global pandemics and suggest how to tackle them,
it will model and predict the outcome of regional conflicts and
determine the effect of our behaviour on the climate. He even wants
to create ‘situation rooms’ in which global leaders can view and
manage crises as they occur.
This Google-Earth-on-steroids is to be called the Living Earth
Simulator and Helbing’s plan is to have it working by 2022 at a
cost of a cool EUR 1 billion, funded by the European Commission.
He’s even assembled an impressive team to help, including partners
from most of the top universities in Europe.
So what to make of this plan and it’s ambition. At first glance,
it seems a somewhat worrying, even frightening, vision of the
future. A Living Earth Simulator will change how we see ourselves
and our planet in ways that are hard to imagine right now.
global nature of the society we live in and the effects that it has
on the planet. We also need to know how to leverage the benefits of
these global systems while limiting the downsides they can
generate. This capability is coming whether we like it or not.
Clearly, the computing infrastructure of the near future will be
increasingly capable of such a task.
The great worry, of course, is that it will not be the great
public universities and government-funded research institutes that
complete this task. The huge benefits of a Living Earth Simulator
will make it a valuable tool for insurance companies, financial
traders, global businesses and even search engines.
It’s not hard to imagine a company like Google wanting and even
building such a model. And if that seems hard to swallow, there are
plenty of organisations that may be even less palatable operators
of such a system. Imagine a Goldman Sachs Earth Simulator or one
run by the People’s Liberation Army. EUR 1 billion is just a small
fraction of the money these organisations play with.
When viewed through that prism, it seems clear and even
necessary that such a project is publicly funded and managed.
Should the European Commission agree, Helbing, who is a world
leader in the new science of techno-socio-economic studies, may
well be the man who leads it.
A Living Earth Simulator is coming, one way or another, perhaps
even to your living room or mobile communicator. The only question
is who builds it.
Source: www.technologyreview.com
Source 2: www.futurict.ethz.ch
