Mega-Crises Demand Mega-Solutions

We have all witnessed the accelerating string of high profile disasters, both natural and man-made, and the concominant loss of life throughout the planet over the last 10 years. Our ability to predict the start or the finish of such events has effectively been zero. Could it be that we have something wrong in our designs for society, our risk analysis, and our fundamental sciences? Or could it simply be that we have become over-specialized and too reductionist in our thinking to see the wood from the trees; unable to connect the dots and read the precursor signals? After all, Nature is holistic, borderless, seamless and fully integrated, whereas our sciences and analytic skills are not. Nature clearly comprises of networks of complex interlocking sub-sytems, and risk in any one of these sub-sytems spills over to risk in another. Through feedback, reverberation and amplification, we continuously witness multiple synchronous collapse in the catastrophic events that I speak of.

Indeed the time has come to build an organization that captures an entire global view of the planet Earth, while holistically integrating all the sciences - natural through socioeconomic - with the world's best compute capabilities and the most advanced modeling, simulation, visualization and optimization tools at its disposal. Such an organization should act as an independent service and support resource to all local national efforts, and should help train the next generation of holistic global thinkers. Such an organization would best be established as a private-public partnership, and quickly.