Scientists are planning to use the largest supercomputers to simulate life on Earth, including the financial system, economies and whole societies. The project is called “Living Earth Simulator” and part of a huge EU research initiative named FuturIcT. You can read the article online at ScienceDaily (May 28, 2010). In a practical sense, the scientists behind the project foresee the development of crises observatories and decision-support systems for politicians and business leaders. “Such observatories would detect advance warning signs of many different kinds of emerging problems,” says Dirk Helbing, “including large-scale congestion, financial instabilities, the spreading of diseases, environmental change, resource shortages and social conflicts.”