A ‘Planetary Simulator’

Technological advances over the next decade could pave the way for the realization of one of the most staggeringly complex computer projects ever conceived: a “planetary simulator” with the ability to simultaneously model everything from the spread of infectious diseases to the behavior of financial markets, a European scientific group developing the idea suggests. The project, dubbed the Living Earth Simulator, would act as a “knowledge accelerator” — the social science equivalent of particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, said Dirk Helbing, professor of sociology at the ETH Zurich Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and chairman of the FuturICT project, which is seeking funds to build the simulator.
In the case of the planetary simulator, thousands of streams of real-world data would be brought together to reveal previously unknown patterns and trends in human society. “It is time to explore social life on Earth, and everything it relates to, in the same ambitious way we have spent the last century exploring our physical world,” Dr. Helbing writes at the group’s Web site.The simulator would have practical real-world applications for addressing societal and environmental problems, Dr. Helbing told the BBC last week...more 

And here I was worrying about those little ol' drones spying on us.