Somewhat surprisingly, scientists have been attempting – so far with limited but tantalizing success – to predict such black swan events. One of the better known efforts is called the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), based in Princeton, NJ. According to its mission statement, the GCP is “an international collaboration created in 1998 to study the subtle reach of human consciousness in the physical world.”  Its forecasting model relies on random event generators – called ‘Eggs’ (which operate like flipping a coin) deployed in a network of nodes in some 65 locations, from Alaska to Fiji, on all continents, and in nearly every time zone. The generators in the network use custom software that reads the output of random numbers, recording a 200-bit trial sum once every second. This process goes on for months and years. The data are transmitted over the Internet to a server in Princeton, where they are archived for later analysis. The objective “is to examine subtle correlations that appear to reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world.”