The anti-crisis project: Thinking our way to a better future

Just a few days ago, at the Love Parade dance and music festival in Duisburg, Germany, 21 people were trampled to death in a human stampede. Apparently, the responsible decision-makers did not see the problem looming before the event. But couldn't we foresee at least some of the disasters before they strike?

In fact, scientists say, with the right kind of effort, we could do much better, not only with crowd disasters, but also in managing traffic problems, impending energy shortages, persisting financial and economic instabilities, climate change, and many other challenges. An ambitious new scientific effort now aims to transform our ability to understand and manage mutually entangled social, economic, and technological systems through an Apollo-like project uniting scientists across Europe. The FuturICT initiative will exploit the revolution in modern computation and information technologies to build an immeasurably more powerful science of human systems and their interaction with the global environment.

The project is being coordinated by a team of scientists led by physicist, traffic scientist, and sociologist Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich. "It's time to explore social life on Earth, and everything it relates to, in the same ambitious way that we have spent the last century or more exploring our physical world," he says. Their proposal, submitted for the European Commission's Flagship Programme, aims to assemble expertise across the whole spectrum of science-from physics, computer science, environmental science and economics through psychology, ecology and sociology-and, by developing supercomputing facilities and large-scale laboratories, to build a much more powerful human science on which to base future policies.

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With funding of approximately EUR 100 million per year for ten years, the FuturIcT project aims to build on these advances to establish three systems on an unprecedented scale:

A Living Earth Visualator. A super-computing platform capable of simulating and visualizing the world at the global scale, focusing on the interaction between technical, social and economic systems as well as their physical and biological environment. This will provide a setting for the exploration of whole-Earth dynamics and policies designed to manage them.

Crisis Observatories. Laboratories running massive data mining and computing systems to detect possible crises, such as bubbles or crashes in financial or housing markets, to gain advance warning of critical shortages in, say, oil, water, or food, or to develop ways to identify risks of wars and social unrest, disease spreading, or environmental instabilities.

Knowledge Accelerator: A concept bringing together key representatives from a wide range of scientific disciplines, from businesses and other organizations, and from governments to identify important social or technological innovations early on and to devise ambitious, practical programmes to further their wide social benefit.

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