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Can the entire Earth and everything that goes on in the world be simulated? An international group of scientists believe so, and are now working on a huge project to simulate everything that takes place on Earth. And they mean everything!
This massive project includes the collection of everything from environmental data to economic movements, the spread of diseases and even traffic jams.
The project is called Living Earth Simulator (LES), and it is intended to act as a gigantic “forecast” for everything that can be predicted on the basis of the large amounts of data that will be collected, analyzed and put into the system.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------“Many problems we have today – including social and economic instabilities, wars, disease spreading – are related to human behaviour, but there is apparently a serious lack of understanding regarding how society and the economy work,” says Dr Helbing, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who chairs the FuturICT project which aims to create the simulator.
“Thanks to projects such as the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator built by Cern, scientists know more about the early universe than they do about our own planet,” claims Dr Helbing.
“What is needed is a knowledge accelerator, to collide different branches of knowledge,” he says.
“Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century.”
“The result would be the LES. It would be able to predict the spread of infectious diseases, such as Swine Flu, identify methods for tackling climate change or even spot the inklings of an impending financial crisis,” he says.
Real-Life Matrix Planned
In a recent effort to further monitor and analyze the actions of individuals on planet earth, scientists have unveiled plans to create a "Living Earth Simulator" (or LES) that will seek to accomplish the goal of predicting the actions and outcomes of whole societies.
Though the proposition is bold, the scientists claim they know more now about our universe than our own planet, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. They say that creating a Living Earth Simulator is the next step in human achievement.
The scientists plan to integrate data collected from any and every source on the planet, tracking the motions of everything. This sky-net like system will be a tremendous collaboration of human achievement and self-reliance...
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Earth project aims to 'simulate everything'
It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived.
An international group of scientists are aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth - from global weather patterns and the spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on Milton Keynes' roads.
Nicknamed the Living Earth Simulator (LES), the project aims to advance the scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define the physical world.
"Many problems we have today - including social and economic instabilities, wars, disease spreading - are related to human behaviour, but there is apparently a serious lack of understanding regarding how society and the economy work," says Dr Helbing, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who chairs the FuturICT project which aims to create the simulator...
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New Living Earth Simulator will Model Everything on Our Planet
Monstrous amounts of data will be fed into supercomputers that utilize technology never used before
A researcher from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has joined forces with a group of scientists to create a grandiose computer project capable of simulating everything we know.
Dr. Dirk Helbing, chairman of the FuturICT project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, along with a team of scientists, have begun to collaborate on an Earth project that could change how we see the world -- literally.
The computer project has been nicknamed the Living Earth Simulator (LES), and the idea behind it is to simulate everything on Earth, such as the spread of diseases, congestion on roads, international financial transactions and weather patterns. The project is aimed to epitomize both human and environmental actions that shape our world...
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Largest Supercomputers to Simulate Life on Earth, Including Economies and Whole Societies
ScienceDaily (May 28, 2010) — Scientists are planning to use the largest supercomputers to simulate life on Earth, including the financial system, economies and whole societies. The project is called "Living Earth Simulator" and part of a huge EU research initiative namedFuturIcT.
Supercomputers are already being used to explore complex social and economic problems that science can understand in no other way. For example, ETH Zurich's professor for transport engineering Kay Axhausen is simulating the travel activities of all 7.5 Million inhabitants of Switzerland to forecast and mitigate traffic congestion. Other researchers at the ETH -- all working within its Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems (CCSS) -- are mining huge amounts of financial data to detect dangerous bubbles in stock and housing markets, potential bankruptcy cascades in networks of companies, or similar vulnerabilities in other complex networks such as communication networks or the Internet...
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This is the research initiative behind the "Living Earth Simulator" project:
