What visionary project would you fund?

Richard_Kennaway

I have just received a survey questionnaire regarding future directions in EU (European Union) research funding, and thought it would be interesting to see how LessWrong would answer the main question:

Imagine that EU funding is available for one ambitious, visionary project extending beyond 2020.

What kind of research challenges should such a project address in your area?
What would be the most urgent research tasks?

Imagine that EU funding is available for one ambitious, visionary project extending beyond 2020.

What kind of research challenges should such a project address in your area?
What would be the most urgent research tasks?

Can you expand on that? I hadn't heard of it before, and the wiki article isn't much more than a stub. What are the fundamental questions, and what difference would it make if we knew the answers?

There are a lot of kinds of plants and animals. They interact. Their current and future distribution makes a difference, and it takes both general principles and detailed local knowledge to have any idea of what's going on.

Discordant Harmonies is about the idea of balance and stability of Nature, and that it's just something people made up. There isn't a reliable pattern of succession when a forest is destroyed, and that cute pattern of opposing sine curves between predators and prey has never been observed in the real world, not even for microbes in a te... (read more)

1billswift15y

I've actually been thinking about this, rather casually, for a couple of decades. For one thing, this kind of understanding would be necessary for a long-term closed environment, like for a large space colony. Also, it would be useful, like a seed bank, in restoring the earth if there was a sufficiently bad catastrophe.

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What visionary project would you fund?

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What visionary project would you fund?

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