Move over crystal ball, predicting the future just entered the 21st century. The European Union is funding a computer system that is intended to predict future economic crises.

The project, called the Living Earth Simulator, it aims to simulate everything on Earth including weather patterns, traffic congestion and economic trends. Dr. Dirk Helbing, chairman of the FuturICT Project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is leading a team of scientists on the project.

The project works by accumulating vast amounts of data ranging from tweets to online news articles which the team will feed to the computer system. The simulator will be powered by supercomputers that can analyze vast reams of data quickly. Helbing and his team will then teach the simulator to spot trends that will mimic events in real time.

"The idea is to gather live information from a huge range of sources and then analyse it using the world's most powerful computers," Helbing told the Sunday Times of London.

"Many problems we have today - including social and economic instabilities, wars, disease spreading - are related to human behavior, but there is apparently a serious lack of understanding regarding how society and the economy work."

The LES would be able to predict a number of social trends like the spread of infectious diseases and even predict where the next financial crisis would be. Oxford University, University College London and Edinburgh University as well as 30 leading computer science centers around the world have pledged their support for the supercomputer. The European Commission has also placed the LES at the top of its shortlist for £900 million in funding.

The European Union isn't the only government looking at funding supercomputers that can predict world events. The University of Tennessee has a supercomputer called Nautilus that predicted the Arab Spring. The Nautilus has 1024 Intel Nehalem cores that can process data at 8.2 teraflops or trillion floating point operations per second. The Nautilus sifted through 100 million news reports and analyzed them for overall mood based on their regional sources. The supercomputer was able to predict the Arab Spring and estimate Osama Bin Laden's final location as 200 kilometers near Abbottabad, Pakistan.