Why is the Piston project involved in solving climate change?

[bvssvni]

We live in a special time where humans have very great influence on the future. Recently, the scientists that have devoted their lives to study the complex systems that integrate biological diversity with the chemical and physical reactions of sea, land and air, have came under a political pressure to cut back investments into understanding these systems. At the same time, we observe unprecedented changes all over the earth, disturbing the economic progress and prosperity we have built up thanks to advanced technology during the course of the few past centuries. This is a time for self reflection and action, not fighting, and those who want to help have an opportunity to get their hands on things to help solving problems that matters.

The Piston project consists of two branches of activities: Maintenance and research. The maintenance part is about keeping software up to date to meet the demands of new platforms and hardware. The research part is about exploring, formalizing and testing experimental ideas and techniques.

A motivation for starting the Piston project was to maximize the long term benefits to sharing and collaborating where the people involved had both read and write access, making it easier to cross pollinate ideas from one project to another. By sharing maintenance, we get more time to work on the projects that interests us most, which both reduces costs and speeds up development.

The people who are working on research need new challenges that go beyond what our current knowledge let us do. This is why big problems, like new perspectives on economic inequality and climate change are interesting, because those are very hard problems. In the case we help a bit to make progress on these problems, the potential benefits can be huge.