Living Earth Simulator Aims for Prediction of Future

Switzerland, all of a sudden, seems to be a hotspot for very large scale, ambitious and visionary scientific inquiry. The Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva, first with a series of progress halting foibles followed by news of physics-world changing experimentation proceeding at record levels of energy, has earned extensive attention and media coverage.

Now, Dirk Helbing, professor of sociology at Zurich's Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, proposes construction of a computer modeling complex whose sophistication is so vast, it can only be described as the SimEarth game on vast amounts of steroids.

Helbing's vision, as PopSci explains, is the creation of a computer model that has been initially named the Living Earth Simulator. Anticipated to require at least a decade to construct and gather data, with an estimated price tag of about $1.5 billion, the project's mission is no less broad than the full spectrum of humanity itself. By taking into consideration measurements of natural systems as well as human social and economic systems, the Living Earth Simulator will be designed with the aim to describe the most likely future scenarios for humanity and the planet that we inhabit.

As News.com.au technology editor Peter Farquhar puts it:

"Finances, pandemics, emissions, weather patterns, transport, wars — if humanity indulges in it, affects it or is afflicted by it, it goes into the simulator. And ideally, what comes out the other end is a sharper vision of where we're all headed."

In a recently published paper outlining the vision and justification for what he calls a "knowledge accelerator," Helbing connects recent historical breakthroughs in scientific and knowledge advancement to set the stage for his proposed super-sized super computer application:

"With our knowledge of the universe, we have sent men to the moon. We know microscopic details of objects around us and within us. And yet we know relatively little about how our society works and how it reacts to changes brought upon it. Humankind is now facing serious crises for which we must develop new ways to tackle the global challenges of humanity in the 21st century. With connectivity between people rapidly increasing, we are now able to exploit information and communication technologies to achieve major breakthroughs that go beyond the step-wise improvements in other areas."

Photo by NASA via Wikimedia Commons.