Hello everyone,

Welcome to globalknowledgecouncil.org. This site provides a forum for discussion around how we, as scientists, assimilate and share our knowledge with the leaders of the world, to insure that decisions our leaders are making are based on the best scientific knowledge available. The most important components in understanding what this site will try to do is: 1) be open to all perspectives and 2) be respectful to those perspectives.

Think of the ideas expressed here as a thought experiment. There are no right or wrong answers. But hopefully, constructive comments that can help build a community of people willing to express concern of how our knowledge system is currently able to contribute to society.

This site is the beginning of a conversation that must begin to take place within the our scientific communities. I hope this site gathers a wide range of ideas and perspectives about new approaches to inject knowledge, information and technology into our decision making processes more efficiently. With that said, to begin the conversation, I suggest that you start by reading “About” on the navigation bar, followed by “The Purpose.” All feedback is welcome, positive or negative, but just please ensure that your comments are constructive and respectful. These post will lay out my perspective and I am hoping to hear yours. We are all living in such wonderful times, where human knowledge is expanding so fast, yet we have not figured out how to harness it. Most people are pessimistic regarding the future of the human race. This site is not. This site is built around the optimistic message that, as individual humans we lack the ability to retain all knowledge, yet with the proper organization and participation of individuals who have this knowledge, we have tremendous potential to leverage that knowledge into solutions.

Imagine you are hiking in the dark, alone in the wilderness. The moon gives off a faint glimmer of light, just enough to reveal the path ahead of you. You hear a noise, and  your adrenaline spikes. When what at first sounds like a small animal rustling in a bush grows louder, you can no longer assume it is caused by a small animal.  Instead, you imagine that you have awoken a mountain lion in the darkness. Stoping dead in your tracks, you remember your pistol… and your single bullet in the chamber. The mountain lion, startled by your sudden presence in her previously uninterrupted and docile slumber, roars and charges in your direction.

In the blink of an eye, you quickly assess all the information you have available to you: type of animal, speed of animal, distance from the animal, accuracy of the pistol, amount of light, your proficiency in shooting your pistol with its single bullet – and finally, your odds of survival if attacked. With the lack of light, you know it will be a tough shot, but regardless you take aim. With your pistol drawn and the lion charging, you think “15 meters, do I take the shot?”  In the dim light, your eyes can’t fixate on the fast moving lion, and you can only discern the general direction of the lion’s harrowing lunge. “10 meters, do I take the shot?”  “5 meters, do I take the shot?” ”Wait for it to pounce, then take the shot?” What will you do?

Our dynamic knowledge revolution over the last 30 years is the roaring lion and we, as today’s scientists, are the ones taking shots in the dark. Our knowledge, information and technology are so disconnected and so disjointed that our ability to make knowledge-based decisions are, at best, limited. Even with the vast amounts of data and potential associates on the internet there are few trusted and well organized sources of information. Without a complete overhaul of how we assimilate, organize and distribute our knowledge, using available information and technology, we will continue to make our decisions based on the partial knowledge and the partial information available to us. If this is the best we can do, it is also the best that our leaders can do. A status quo such as this is wholly unacceptable.

The idea for forming a Global Knowledge Council originated with a paper written during my graduate studies. The topic was to assess human knowledge and identify problems with how we make decisions, use history for examples and examine how we come up with solutions to the problems presented to us. This site is built as an approach, a forum that will facilitate collaboration across disciplines and countries.  The ultimate goal is to form an interdisciplinary scientific knowledge Council to identify, bring together, harness, and provide the knowledge, information and technology necessary to our leaders to begin to solve many of the problems the world presents to us.

Many aspects of these ideas have already been created, implemented and put into operation, but the integration of knowledge across disparate disciplines remains a formidable struggle. Our objective to overcome many of the obstacles in accessing knowledge is based on the premise that many of the current knowledge-sharing organizations were founded and developed before the internet revolution. With the facilities offered by the internet, there is significant room for improvement for sharing ideas, data and knowledge across all disciplines. Such collaboration could enhance the assimilation of shared knowledge into society’s mores, and into its ethos. This site will promote those facilities and engender this collaborative culture.

There is no silver bullet for this monstrosity of a problem; but even if it is somewhat in the dark, this is a first shot. Knowing if it is in the right direction relies upon all of us.

This site’s purpose is to facilitate a conversation around our global scientific community that can identify global issues that collectively we can solve. Although a formal council is far from being established, this site will promote an exchange of ideas on how we can ensure that all knowledge, information and technology is organized, available and used to make knowledge-based decisions.

Knowledge-based decisions in a co-evolving world are essential to the success of human organization. From history, we know that catastrophic events have occurred, such as meteor and asteroid strikes, super volcanic eruptions, climate shifts/changes and mass extinctions, wiping out an unknown number of living species. These catastrophic events could not be stopped or their impact minimized because of the lack of knowledge and the lack of organization by the inhabiting species.

Humans have evolved into a knowledge-driven society. We must begin to harness the growing knowledge and technologies in order to better organize and cooperate with each other to preserve the human race from future catastrophic events, both natural and human-induced. Catastrophic events WILL occur in the future and the degree of impact of these events will rely on human organization, cooperation and decisions made by the leaders of the world. As scientists, our goal is to provide our leaders and policy makers with the most accurate and up-to-date knowledge, information and technology available, so that the decisions made will have the highest probability for success.

The Global Knowledge Council will be established to provide a forum to share knowledge on vital topics and  to attract scientists, academics, professionals and scholars from across the globe whose sole purpose will be to collaborate and  assimilate all available knowledge, information and technology to use in solving problems in and threats to the world. The Council will work to design an information network to update research topics and results from individual sciences into an organized platform. This will take one of the largest global knowledge assimilation efforts seen by the  human race. With the projections of massive amounts of new knowledge, information and technology over the next few decades, we must begin to think about ways we can assimilate, understand and harness ALL available knowledge information and technology for use by our leaders and decision makers.

To be clear, the Global Knowledge Council should not be thought of as a world government, a one world ideology or even a “world brain.” It is an idea and philosophy that knowledge, information and technology, when harnessed properly, that can benefit society in a positive way. Currently, all knowledge, information and technology are in need of a means to be collectively assessed and harnessed. The expansive growth in distributed knowledge today can be described, at best, as chaotic. If you believe that over the last three decades we have seen a knowledge, information and technology revolution, including the internet boom, the adoption of mass communications and the inter-connectedness of business, financial markets and governmental relations, you recognize the dire need to assimilate, understand, organize and distribute our knowledge in a more effective manner. Companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and many others are quickly realizing that how information is organized and delivered is one of the most important aspects of human growth and development. Researchers across the globe are trying to figure out how to embrace this philosophy, and as of today it has not yet been done effectively. How can this be, you may ask? Just look at how scattered our knowledge continues to be across all the sciences. Only in recent years has an interdisciplinary and integrated approach been implemented to solve many of the pressing problems in today’s world, and the internet acted as the catalyst.

Global problems need global solutions. Only a global organization will have the perspective, expertise and the will to solve serious threats and problems that face us. What if you woke up tomorrow and found out the world was about to be obliterated by an asteroid the size of Alaska? Or that all of Europe or the Americas or Asia would be destroyed by a super volcanic eruption? How could we organize to try and stop it? Could we do anything? Could we pull together all the knowledge, information and technology needed to avoid or at least minimize the catastrophe? If it happened tomorrow, would there be anything we could do?

Historically speaking, catastrophic events will occur in the future. It is time that we create a forum to share and organize all of the wonderful knowledge, information and technology of the world in a way that can be assessed and used properly so that our conclusions, and therefore the decisions of our leaders, will incorporate all the best thinking across the world.