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ScienceDaily (Apr. 28, 2010) - Humanity faces enormous challenges ranging from financial and economic instability to environmental destruction and climate change, all linked directly to our inability to manage -- and often even to understand the nature of -- our collective activities and their consequences.
Now a diverse group of leading scientists has unveiled an extraordinary plan to meet these challenges through a project inspired by historic enterprises such as the Apollo Project. Their ambitious proposal aims to stimulate an urgent scientific effort of unprecedented scope focused on building a more powerful and accurate science of human systems and their interaction with the global environment. Their efforts will exploit the revolutionary scientific potential of modern computational, communication, and information technologies, backed up by theoretical analysis.
The initiative to establish a "FuturIcT knowledge accelerator" (where ICT stands for information and communication technologies) has been coordinated by a team of scientists led by physicist, traffic scientist, and sociologist Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich. The proposal was submitted for the European Commission's Flagship Programme, which seeks to support ambitious large-scale, visionary research initiatives with 1 billion EUR in funding over ten years. While 1 billion EUR sounds much, it is actually little compared to the losses from the financial crises and the money invested into elementary particle and astro-physics, nanoscience, gene technology, systems biology, or nuclear fusion research. The project aims to assemble expertise across the whole spectrum of science -- from physics, computer science, environmental science and economics through psychology, ecology and sociology -- to develop supercomputing facilities and large-scale laboratories for a new kind of data-rich social science on which intelligent future policies can be based.
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