![]() Today, the interweaving roads he aims to chart are those of society, technology, economy and environment - where the stakes range from financial crisis and political upheaval to nuclear war. Helbing's early work in the 1990s focused on urban traffic, specifically how to prevent the cascading small traffic events that ultimately lead to large-scale congestion. The project is the brainchild of Dirk Helbing, a sociologist, mathematician and physicist who specializes in modeling and simulation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Yet even the Planetary Skin is just a fraction of what the FutureICT teams hope to achieve. Ĭan we really build a simulation of the world from this growing wealth of data? The men and women behind the FutureICT Project believe we can - and all for a mere 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion). That's a million gigabytes, sufficient space to stash a 32-year-long MP3 file. It encompasses data of all varieties, is generated in real time and amasses in volumes that stagger the imagination - to the tune of petabytes. To better understand the value of big data, think of it in terms of three v's: variety, velocity and volume. The data pools swell and spread, overlapping and merging until there are no more pools - just the vast sea of information we call big data. In fact, according to IBM, 90 percent of the data in the world today was created in the last two years alone. The information about the world pours in at an exponential rate. (To give you an idea of how crazy that number is, some people have conservatively estimated that all the words ever spoken by humans equal 5 quintillion bytes of data.)Īll that new data comes from climate sensors, social media hubs, digital media Web sites, online transaction records, cell phone GPS signals and countless other sources. The science of weather prediction is far from perfect, but better equations, more powerful computers and a widening array of atmospheric data sets continue to improve the accuracy of our simulations.īut can we really simulate the world itself? To find out, we have to travel the waters of big data.īut the rain continues to fall and the puddles of data continue to swell, to the tune of 2.5 quintillion bytes per day. Computer advancements allowed meteorologists to move beyond mere observation-based predictions and implement numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, in which computers pull past and present atmospheric data to construct predictive models of future weather. Just consider meteorology, the scientific study of atmosphere and weather. Built in 1949 by engineer and economist Bill Phillips, the MONIAC used the flow of colored water through pipes, drains and pumps to simulate the British economy.ĭigital computing, however, changed everything. The Monetary National Income Analogue Computer (MONIAC) stands as another classic example of analogue computing. The astrolabe was essentially an analogue computer, a pre-digital device that incroporated electrical, hydraulic or mechanical systems to simulate another system. The user plotted colossal, interstellar movements while holding the device in the palm of his or her hand and manipulated the data to gauge time, location and distances. The ancient astrolabe, for instance, served as an indispensable astronomical tool for more than 2,000 years and is a working model of the night sky and the position of the stars. Humans also developed the means to copy more than mere physical forms. They call it the Living Earth Simulator and, as we'll discuss in this article, FutureICT aims to simulate every aspect of the world around you, from Wall Street and the Paris catwalks, to thriving jungle ecosystems and the darkest ocean depths. In fact, the international team of scientists with the Future Information and Communication Technologies ( FutureICT) Project intends to build it. No longer the domain of imagined fantasy, such simulations are now within our grasp, thanks to modern data mining and computer technology. Designers could flawlessly forecast next season's fashion trends. Businesses could gauge public interest in a new product. A leader could fiddle with a new law or economic policy in the safe isolation of a simulated reality before actually introducing it to citizens. If only there were a way to test a decision on a separate, identical world - a complex model of reality in which even the most catastrophic choices played out in mere simulation. ![]() At best, they merely understood the ebb and flow of politics or public opinion. "Reveal to me the effects of my decisions so that I might safely navigate the days, months and years ahead."īut of course for all their sorceries and prayers, the king's advisers possessed no true insight into future events. "Peer into tomorrow and advise me on today," a king might command.
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