"Do Humans Have 23 years to Go?" Play Superstruct and Find Out -Invent the Future!

The Institute for the Future is inviting the world to play Superstruct,the worlds first massively multi-player forecasting game. It’s not just about envisioning the future—it’s about inventing the future, creating superstructures to solve and counter super threats facing the  planet.

Developed by the Palo Alto-based non-profit think tank, it will launch on September 22 for six weeks. Superstruct allows participants to use their “collective intelligence” to create solutions that can apply to real-world problems. Everyone is welcome to join the game.

Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the "survival horizon" for Homo sapiens - the human race - from "indefinite" to 23 years.

“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which it a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”

According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks.

“Each super-threat on its own poses a serious challenge to the world's adaptive capacity,” said GEAS research director Hernandez Garcia. “Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm our species’ ability to survive.”Garcia said, “Previous GEAS simulations with significantly less data and cross-validation correctly forecasted the most surprising species collapses of the past decade: Sciurus carolinenis and Sciurus vulgaris, for example, and Anatidae chen. So we have very good reason to believe that these simulation results, while shocking, do accurately represent the rapidly growing threats to the viability of the human species.”

GEAS notified the United Nations prior to making a public announcement. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: "We are grateful for GEAS' work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity."

GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.

The Institute sees super-threats are "massively disrupting global society as we know it. There’s an entire generation of homeless people worldwide, as the number of climate refugees tops 250 million. Entrepreneurial chaos and “the axis of biofuel” wreak havoc in the alternative fuel industry. Carbon quotas plummet as food shortages mount. The existing structures of human civilization—from families and language to corporate society and technological infrastructures—just aren’t enough. We need a new set of superstructures to rise above, to take humans to the next stage."

The Institute says: "You can help. Tell us your story. Strategize out loud. Superstruct now."

Twitter that, Galaxians. Kind of makes Malthus look like a childern's book.

Posted by Casey Kazan. Image credit: FutureLab London Bridge, 2019,

http://www.iftf.org/node/2098

Comments

[Adam Pieniazek]

Wow, that game sounds really cool, though also terrifying. I'm a big believer that playful activities can result in productive results so hopefully this simulation will attract some great ideas that we can implement.

[surf]

You've a nicely done site with lots of effort and good updates. I would like to welcome you to submit your stories to www.surfurls.com and get that extra one way traffic to your site.

[Vivid Unicorn]

What if by thinking about problems we actually create them in some sort of quantum mechanical way? Maybe we will actually bring about the end of the world by collapsing the global warming state vector? I am concerned.

[cam]

2008 + 23 years = 2031, not 2042.