Technology Blog

An ambitious European project wants to build super-real simulations to help predict the future. Ever wish you could turn back the clock and try a day, week, or year over again? Plans afoot in Switzerland to build a more detailed simulation of the globe’s environment, societies, and economies than ever before could make that possible. Professor Dirk Helbing of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich wants to build a “living earth simulator” to probe the kind of dangerous cascading effects that he believes threaten financial markets, power grids and other complex systems that modern life relies upon. He has a good chance at getting €1bn ($1.2bn) of EU research funding to build it, as co-leader of one of six projects competing for two huge research grants.