Researchers in Switzerland want €1 billion (£780 million) to
build a Living Earth Simulator, which can analyse complex systems on a
planetary-scale, and perhaps even predict the future.
It's called FuturICT, and
it's one of six projects in the running to score a massive grant
from the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technology
The simulator would chew on data about things like the weather,
financial systems, animal migration patterns and power grids. Then,
by using models, the Earth simulator could find out how these
systems work and interact with each other.
That information could even point towards events in the future.
In the project's pitch, researchers say it could "provide a basis
for predicting natural disasters, or managing and responding to
man-made disasters that cross national borders or even continents."
It could also help society "discover a more sustainable way of living".
The project would take about ten years to build, and require a
huge amount of data from experts in many different fields. There
are also plans to crowdsource data from sensors, smartphones and
"Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies
probably constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge
of our century," a spokesperson for FuturICT said. If the team wins
the cash, it expects to open initial simulations and data repositories in 2015.
Other projects in the running for the EU's grant money include a simulation of
the human brain, soft-skinned robot companies for citizens and
intense research into Graphene.