Thing 5: Uploading Climate-Change Plans from "Map of the Future" to Climate CoLab

A friend of mine (hey, that's him in the video!) worked on the Map of the Future museum exhibit, below.

Map of the Future from Tactable on Vimeo.

It allows museum visitors to visualize current and future energy supplies and atmospheric carbon levels; you make policy decisions, and see their effect on carbon levels. It is pretty cool. But what if someone accidentally came up with something really, earth-shatteringly cool on it (a workable model for energy policy in the future), or even something only really quite cool (a good starting point for one)? It stays there on the table.

So I wish it could submit scenarios to the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence's Climate CoLab, which is pretty much what it sounds like. Imagine Map of the Future developed into a more complex simulation and deployed en masse to airports, libraries, and other places where people have time on their hands, asking for and collecting ideas on what to do about climate change and how to do it, and sending these ideas to the experts for triage. That would be so living-in-the-future that it should really happen NOW.