Last week on 9/11 eve , The authorities identified two more victims of the acts that claimed over 3000 lives. The victims identified now stand at 1649. The identifications help bring closure to two more families.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb in his book describes a Black Swan as a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.
While the book was more about building robustness in business to cope with such events, there has been one major change since April 2007, the book’s release. Our ability to process data has moved from the realm of reactive to the predictive. There lies the secret of our future.
The mother of Black Swan’s was the extinction level event 66 million years ago above the Yucatán peninsula. The explosion and the resulting blast crater was so vast , it remained undiscovered until the 1980s ! The discovery was possible because of the convergence of data from two unrelated fields of research. In 1979 Walter and Luis Alvarez, discovered a thin layer of clay in Gubbio, Italy that had iridium levels 160 times above the background level. It was theorized the iridium got there due to the atmospheric dissipation of the vaporized impactor . A huge crater lay waiting to be discovered.
In 1978 geophysicists Glen Penfeild and Antonio Camargo working for Pemex of Mexico were conducting an airborne magnetic survey of the Gulf of Mexico north of the Yucatán Peninsula when they discovered an anomaly 180km in diameter.
Proving the theory right needed multiple cuts of data to match before the reason for the dinosaur extinction was proved.
The 1998 movie Deep Impact is about a comet colliding with Earth. Earth has a year and a lottery decides 200,000 Americans to shelter underground, the rest to fend for themselves.
Extrapolating the movie and the event from 66 million years ago, there is an element of predictability that has crept in over the last 25 years. All Data driven.
In 2016 OSIRIS-REx was launched by NASA to rendezvous with Asteroid Bennu in 2018, it explored and collected samples and now returns to Earth.Such missions only plug data gaps and assist in Earth’s ability to combat previously extinction level events.
On the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 we can safely say the World is a safer due to strides made in multiple fields working in synergy. Facial and biometric recognition are widely used ( even the iPhone ). Forensic profiling has made strides in synergising nominal and criminal data to create never before observed potential criminal profiles. X-Ray machines at airports are now able to detect possible weapons both inside and outside the body without making contact.
As our Universe gets increasingly data driven, Mankind will seek synergy with data and create a safer Earth for future generations…
Peace.