[quote][quote][img]http://www.treehugger.com/20090123-earth-from-space.jpg[/img]
[b]The Living Earth Simulator will collect data from billions of sources.[/b][/quote]
[b]It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived.[/b]
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.
[b]Knowledge collider[/b]
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.
But how would such colossal system work?
For a start it would need to be populated by data - lots of it - covering the entire gamut of
activity on the planet, says Dr Helbing.
It would also be powered by an assembly of yet-to-be-built supercomputers capable of carrying
out number-crunching on a mammoth scale.
Although the hardware has not yet been built, much of the data is already being generated, he
says.
For example, the Planetary Skin project, led by US space agency Nasa, will see the creation of a
vast sensor network collecting climate data from air, land, sea and space.
In addition, Dr Helbing and his team have already identified more than 70 online data sources they
believe can be used including Wikipedia, Google Maps and the UK government's data repository
Data.gov.uk.
[b]Drowning in data[/b]
Integrating such real-time data feeds with millions of other sources of data - from financial markets
and medical records to social media - would ultimately power the simulator, says Dr Helbing.
The next step is create a framework to turn that morass of data in to models that accurately
replicate what is taken place on Earth today.
That will only be possible by bringing together social scientists and computer scientists and
engineers to establish the rules that will define how the LES operates.
Such work cannot be left to traditional social science researchers, where typically years of work
produces limited volumes of data, argues Dr Helbing.
Nor is it something that could have been achieved before - the technology needed to run the LES
will only become available in the coming decade, he adds.
[b]Human behaviour[/b]
For example, while the LES will need to be able to assimilate vast oceans of data it will
simultaneously have to understand what that data means.
That becomes possible as so-called semantic web technologies mature, says Dr Helbing.
Today, a database chock-full of air pollution data would look much the same to a computer as a
database of global banking transactions - essentially just a lot of numbers.
But semantic web technology will encode a description of data alongside the data itself, enabling
computers to understand the data in context.
What's more, our approach to aggregating data stresses the need to strip out any of that
information that relates directly to an individual, says Dr Helbing.
That will enable the LES to incorporate vast amounts of data relating to human activity, without
compromising people's privacy, he argues.
Once an approach to carrying out large-scale social and economic data is agreed upon, it will be
necessary to build supercomputer centres needed to crunch that data and produce the simulation
of the Earth, says Dr Helbing.
Generating the computational power to deal with the amount of data needed to populate the LES
represents a significant challenge, but it's far from being a showstopper.
If you look at the data-processing capacity of Google, it's clear that the LES won't be held back by
processing capacity, says Pete Warden, founder of the OpenHeatMap project and a specialist on
data analysis.
While Google is somewhat secretive about the amount of data it can process, in May 2010 it was
believed to use in the region of 39,000 servers to process an exabyte of data per month - that's
enough data to fill 2 billion CDs every month.
[b]Reality mining[/b]
If you accept that only a fraction of the "several hundred exabytes of data being produced
worldwide every year… would be useful for a world simulation, the bottleneck won't be the
processing capacity," says Mr Warden.
"Getting access to the data will be much more of a challenge, as will figuring out something useful
to do with it," he adds.
Simply having lots of data isn't enough to build a credible simulation of the planet, argues Warden.
"Economics and sociology have consistently failed to produce theories with strong predictive
powers over the last century, despite lots of data gathering. I'm sceptical that larger data sets will
mark a big change," he says.
"It's not that we don't know enough about a lot of the problems the world faces, from climate
change to extreme poverty, it's that we don't take any action on the information we do have," he
argues.
Regardless of the challenges the project faces, the greater danger is not attempting to use the
computer tools we have now - and will have in future - to improve our understanding of global
socio-economic trends, says Dr Helbing.
"Over the past years, it has for example become obvious that we need better indicators than the
gross national product to judge societal development and well-being," he argues.
At it's heart, the LES is about working towards better methods to measure the state of society, he
says, which would account for health, education and environmental issues. "And last but not least,
happiness."
[quote][tab]Source: [/tab] [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12012082][b]BBC News[/b][/url][/quote]
[/quote]
:science:
[QUOTE] or congestion on Milton Keynes' roads.[/QUOTE]
What u dissin Milton Keynes roads for?
There's no way they'll make a simulator accurate enough, but it'll be very interesting to see how far they can get. Perhaps they'll make some advances in computer technology along the way that might actually pave the way for an accurate simulation in the far future.
what if we are already a simulation of earth simulating us simulating themselves? :psyduck:
[QUOTE=Heidenreich;27028195]what if we are already a simulation of earth simulating us simulating themselves? :psyduck:[/QUOTE]
Cue xbizit "yo dawg" joke
Will I be able to woohoo with my hot neighbor?
don't go swimming in your pools
[QUOTE=Van-man;27028248]Cue xbizit "yo dawg" joke[/QUOTE]
I was thinking more of an "[b]I N C E P T I O N[/b]" line.
While we're at it we should get it to calculate the answer to life, the universe and everything.
[QUOTE=Sgt Doom;27028148]There's no way they'll make a simulator accurate enough, but it'll be very interesting to see how far they can get. Perhaps they'll make some advances in computer technology along the way that might actually pave the way for an accurate simulation in the far future.[/QUOTE]
Accurate enough for what? I think it could be for climatology.
It's funny, because in 50 years, we'll all be playing MMO's many times more powerful and advanced than this.
[QUOTE=Heidenreich;27028195]what if we are already a simulation of earth simulating us simulating themselves? :psyduck:[/QUOTE]
Haha, what, that's absolutely sil- WHERE DID MY DOOR GO OH GOD I'M TRAPPED
[QUOTE=noctune9;27028601]Accurate enough for what? I think it could be for climatology.[/QUOTE]The simulating of, taking the example from the article, traffic flow, or the movement and behaviour of people, disease transmission patterns etc. They do say they want to simulate everything happening on Earth, after all.
Climate can already be simulated, to varying degrees of accuracy; it does not seem to be the sole focus of this project, although they probably seek to simulate that on grander scales and with more accuracy.
Finally we can discover who killed JFK.
So, does that mean that the people inside it will "think"?
[QUOTE=Coffee;27028145]Will it be like Moonbase Alpha?[/QUOTE]
Spam John madden.
Virtual John Madden comes out of nowhere in boxers and beats your head in with a microphone.
I think we already have something similar to this.
[url]http://outerra.com/[/url]
[QUOTE=Dlaor-guy;27029269]I think we already have something similar to this.
[url]http://outerra.com/[/url][/QUOTE]
Sure the outer geography of a planet is everything.
Does this mean virtual reality is starting? I can finally have lots of kinky sex, all day. :blush:
To clarify, I am pretty sure that they are not simulating a 3 dimensional copy of the earth atom for atom. They are going to create prediction models for almost everything we find on the earth instead using statistics. There will be no virtual earth with simulated people and stuff.
Although compared to what many people would probably think, programming a simulation of earth would not be very hard. We understand pretty much everything happening on earth on a quantum mechanical level. So all you would need to do is program a quantum mechanics simulator and just scale it up, processing power is the only bottleneck. The mathematical foundation already exists.
[QUOTE=Foeggy;27027997][img_thumb]http://blog.mindbites.com/wp-content/uploads/foundation_lg.jpg[/img_thumb]
?[/QUOTE]
Absurd! The Empire has survived for thousands of years, there's no reason to believe it will fall now.
One step on the way to a system that can determine the future. I like it.
I can't wait until all the motions and human actions of the universe can be absolutely determined man it will be fuckin great maybe people will finally stop whining about free will
[QUOTE=Nautsabes;27028276]don't go swimming in your pools[/QUOTE]
i bet those assholes will remove the ladder and leave us to drown :argh:
[QUOTE=MasterG;27028587]Could be instrumental in developing artificial intelligence. Even if it's just 1% as complex as the real world, putting an artificial cell in that system and watching it evolve and gain intelligence could create the kinds of robot dogs and cyborg people that science fiction has been promising for a century.[/QUOTE]
there is no spooky rating, or i would rate you it.
true blue AI scared the crap out of me.
[QUOTE=Aff3;27029680]i bet those assholes will remove the ladder and leave us to drown :argh:[/QUOTE]
Oh yeah, I remember doing that.
And also removing doors while people are in rooms.
Good times.
[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;27029457]One step on the way to a system that can determine the future. I like it.
I can't wait until all the motions and human actions of the universe can be absolutely determined man it will be fuckin great maybe people will finally stop whining about free will[/QUOTE]
but if we all know about the future then we can change our action and choose another one different from the one the prediction made meaning that the prediction was wrong, am I right?
[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;27029457]One step on the way to a system that can determine the future. I like it.
I can't wait until all the motions and human actions of the universe can be absolutely determined man it will be fuckin great maybe people will finally stop whining about free will[/QUOTE]
... and just kill themselves instead.
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