Motherboard

As if re-creating the origins of the universe or reverse engineering the human brain weren’t hard enough, European scientists are also launching a brand new video game. The latest project in massive simulation is called the Living Earth Simulator, or the “Knowledge Collider,” which will attempt to model the processes that drive the planet and the societies that call it home.

The Living Earth Simulator will act as a virtual human-oriented Large Hadron Collider of sorts, in this case simulating how small-scale interactions shape the processes that drive our world. The hope is to make sense of some of the underlying challenges—issues such as global hunger, climate change, economic inequality, and terrorism—that threaten human societies. It may seem to be turning humanity into one gigantic Sims game, but the technology actually has enormous potential for good.

Project leaders FuturICT share some background on the LES.

Modeling the systems that run our human network isn’t necessarily a new idea, but having a platform with the ability to synthesize these networks in one space is. Data will be collected in real time via something called a “Planetary Nervous System” (er, PNS?), a cooperation of data collection networks and agencies from around the world, and also through something called a “Global Participation Network.”

The problem with our global human infrastructure, according to members involved in the LES project, is that we now have so much data being collected on a global and individual level (ATM transactions, phones, laptops), that the speed at which this information propagates far surpasses any person or institution’s ability to understand how this data interacts with out social economic systems. The project wants to attempt to build a sort of federated entity compromised of experts from around the world across multiple disciplines to create a larger tool for social technical analysis, and synthesize larger problems as a whole.

Or as Dirk Helbing, a complexity scientist from UTH Zurich states, “We want to create something like a flight simulator for policy and economics.”

The project is outlined to be a combination simulation, data visualization and data explanation infrastructure that combines data collected from a micro to macro scale from across the globe. This includes mobility traces, twitter feeds, data from public infrastructure, and from sensors across the internet. The project will align data in a platform which is where the “Living Earth Simulator” comes in.

Individual entities ranging from individuals, to companies, to government will be able to connect to the project via the Global Participatory Platform, a proposed Second Life-type environment that would allow people to interact with the earth simulator.

FuturICT’s game plan for whole-Earth modeling.

And the outcome may be promising. After all, systems that run economic exchange and that map conflict issues are difficult to analyze on a large scale. Analyzing patterns between them is nigh impossible. The link between individual behavioral patterns and global socioeconomics is still largely something we don’t understand, and something the LES will attempt to explore. With the world increasingly structured upon global interdependence, being able to visualize the interactions between large trends and small trends on a global basis would be invaluable, perhaps, to understanding how to adapt policies or practices based on how societies behave.

At a time where every corporation seems to be clambering to model data, and new platforms threaten to become visual “data dumps,” the idea of using our complex modeling capabilities as a tool to generate strategy is an irresistible undertaking. It’s also an enormously expensive one: The European Union just pledged $1 billion in funding for the project over the next decade. That hefty sum speaks to the enormity of the project, which can’t be stated enough. Here’s to playing the first full-Earth simulator.

Connections:

• Earth Simulator Probably Not A Prelude to the Matrix
• How NASA Supercomputes the Climate