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- WHETHEReport: A Global Surprise Anticipation Center
WHETHEReport: A Global Surprise Anticipation Center
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
Before every major global event, people around the world begin having explicit dreams and intuitions about it. WHETHEReport will be a web portal that will aggregate and analyze these dreams to generate maps/scenarios of these potential events.
Supporting organization:
The Arlington Institute
URL:
http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org
City:
Arlington
State/Region:
Virginia
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
Before every major global event, whether it is a tsunami or a terrorist event like 9/11, people around the world begin to have strong dreams about the impending catastrophe. These unusual dreams – and other intuitions, like visions and strong feelings – sometimes manifest themselves as explicit mental images, sometimes symbols, and sometimes a combination of the two.
This kind of dreaming is not limited to extraordinary individuals (although clearly some people appear to be more naturally sensitive than others), but the scientific literature and anecdotal reports suggest that many, if not most people at one time or another will have a particularly memorable intuition that turns out to be premonitional.
This dynamic has been noted by the law enforcement and intelligence communities, with a number of intelligence services and police agencies utilizing particular individuals who actively dream about threatening events. Christopher Robinson of the UK, for 15 years worked very successfully for Scotland Yard and other British intelligence and security services anticipating IRA bombings, drug movements, etc. Secondly, the participants in the now well-known but previously highly classified U.S. remote viewing program, had the ability (particularly after training) to visualize events and situations unlimited by space and time.
WHETHEReport will be a tailor-made web portal for this purpose: it will serve as an unprecedented community early-warning system, capable of providing timely alerts of impending major events, while at the same time exposing a new dimension of the human experience. This real-time monitoring of the “aggregate intuition” – or collective unconsciousness – of individuals around the globe could provide the first concrete indications of a common connection that exists between and among all humans.
Sustainability (financial) model:
First year expenses: $4.1 million. This covers creating the portal, buying the servers, and getting rights to the software needed.
Annual expenses thereafter: $1.5 million. The main costs associated with running the program are hiring analysts, legal advisors, marketers, and a project manager.
An intuitional gaming interface will be the second phase of this project and is not currently included in the original project plan. This interface will allow people to test their intuitional capabilities and participate/compete in multi-player games. This gaming platform will drive users to the site and maintain their awareness of the main portal. Cost for this segment has not been specified.
Revenue: User subscriptions, donations, sponsors, community support, data sales (raw data, streaming data, tailored analysis, general analysis, user access), advertising
Potential obstacles:
There are two significant obstacles to WHETHEReport. First, generating public awareness and maintaining interest. WHETHEReport may only predict one or two catastrophic events a year, and it will be a challenge to keep users involved with such long time periods between feedback.
Secondly, we must create and educate the public about the differences between predictions and scenarios. WHETHEReport - even if it becomes highly accurate - will not be predicting events; its function is to aggregate pools of intuitions and position them over physical maps as possible scenarios.
Resource Needs:
Servers
Identified Third Party Software Tools
Salaries for analysts, engineers and technicians
Travel
Bandwidth
Key Milestones:
1. 3 months into project: Build the portal (likely with Drupal)
2. 10 months in: Beta launch
3. 14 months in: Marketing Launch
4. 17 months in: Version One (V1) Launch
5. 21 months in: Completion of Analyst Tools Integration
Project Summary:
The Arlington Institute's project "WHETHEReport" is predicated on the idea that before catastrophic, world changing events people have premonitional dreams that anticipate those events. While there have been a number of famous people throughout history who have accurately predicted the future, it also appears that almost everyone has intuitions from time to time in the form of dreams, visions, or simple gut feelings.
WHETHEReport would provide an online portal for people to create intuition journals which they could update daily. While maintaining complete privacy and anonymity, their reports will be scanned and aggregated with the most sophisticated sense making and pattern recognition technology available today to create visual displays of intuition clusters designed to identify potential catastrophic events.
Our hope is that through WHETHEReport human beings will have a system that can anticipate surprise events of global significance.
The Arlington Institute, a 501 c-3 non-profit, has for the last 18 years provided expert analysis to non-profits, governments and businesses. TAI’s core business is creating scenarios. WHETHEReport’s unique method of scenario generation, coupled with access to a network of futurists, leaders in technology innovation, and intuitives will produce results unrivaled by any previous experiment of this kind. Our established reputation in the futures community, combined with our comprehensive network, provide the technical experience, momentum and sustainability to be able to accomplish a project of this size.
Comments
I support whether report.
The whether report appears among other things to connect chaos theory with quantum theory. It also is tri-modern (premodern, modern, and post modern.) This a path less traveled and could be a real contribution if there were necessary controls.
Prof. Joel Snell
Kirkwood College
Thanks
Thanks Joel, its nice to see someone share a pretty far out vision we have. That said, we already conducted a fairly extensive feasability study, and we know exactly what hardware we need and what programs will run the analysis, so all we are waiting for is the funding.
We are approaching a number of industries regarding sponsorship, such as computer game developers, reinsurance companies, risk assessment companies, and psychic research foundations. Your blog gave me the idea to pursue support from institutes interested in advanced mathematics and system theory.
Do you have any suggestions for who to get in touch with?
Sincerely, Paul
WHETHERReport
Dear Paul
You focus strongly on the postive effects your WHETHERReport may have ('If WHETHERReports predicts only one catastrophic event...it will be completely worth the investment'). But what about false predictions: you warn people for a catastrophy, people make all kind of efforts to get out of the way, but the catastrophy does not take place. Here you have two problems: a. the costs that people make to get away and b. the reduced trust people put in warning systems, which will result in more and more people to not follow up warnings any more. The latter will be a big problem when a catastrophy really hits.
Friendly greetings
Don
Hi Don, Thank you for your
Hi Don,
Thank you for your comments. You are absolutely correct that this portal has the potental to be the "boy that cried wolf." In our era of consistent "Orange" alerts, people are less and less trusting of warning systems. The paradox is that even though statistically we are safer than ever before, we are also more vunerable than we ever have been because of the complexity of our system. Should that warrant outright fear - in some places it does - or should people ignore it - someplaces they do. Neither is particularly correct unless you are in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time.
Three days before Katrina, every weather reporter in our country informed people in New Orleans to get out - people didn't listen because they had heard it so many times before. I don't know how often weather people are right, but probably not that often...is this why they weren't listened to? Was there a backlash afterwards for being wrong so often, yet right this time? Not really - probably because most people understand that weather modeling is still in its infancy and can not take into account every vector of influence possible - rather it is more an educated guess or scenario based on what we can observe.
Hence, what we should talk about is how this project could be positioned around scenarios rather than prediction. That may help eliminate the wolf syndrome that you could certainly be right about. There are a few goals it seems with this project beyond scenarios. 1) To see if there is any predictive capability in the global unconscious (intuition/dream space). 2) To provide a warning system to the public (if there are actual correlations in this unconscious and 3) The larger society wide paradigm shift that this project could represent if global unconscious was proven scientifically.
Thank you for your comments, please send more!
Cheers,
Ken