First, working with Hamish Huggard to port over some of the data from effectivealtruismdata.com (as Nathan Young suggests). In particular, I think it would be useful to have a better impression of how EA and EA-adjacent philanthropic money gets spent.
Second, some charts covering long-run trends, such as: GDP over time starting around 0AD, world temperature or CO2 concentration since the end of the last ice age, agricultural production over time, energy consumption per capita, or population over time over millennia (sorry if you already have some of this). Obviously (with the exception of the climate stuff) the data is very sparse on this, but I am pro “here’s a reasonable guess and here’s how wide our uncertainties are” over “we’re not entirely sure so we’re going to say nothing”. And I trust OWID can do an excellent job at communicating the uncertainties and interpretational difficulties involved.
Third, maybe a page on space. For instance, number of launches over time, number of satellites in orbit over time, amount and size distribution on space debris, space debris incidents over time, cost of launching a kilogram into orbit over time. In particular, both the UN and the ESA have really detailed datasets for potential launches over time / objects in space graphs, but the UN one doesn’t have have an API so needs to be scraped, and I haven’t seen people present either datasets in an accessible way.
Here’s a few things I’d like to see —
First, working with Hamish Huggard to port over some of the data from effectivealtruismdata.com (as Nathan Young suggests). In particular, I think it would be useful to have a better impression of how EA and EA-adjacent philanthropic money gets spent.
Second, some charts covering long-run trends, such as: GDP over time starting around 0AD, world temperature or CO2 concentration since the end of the last ice age, agricultural production over time, energy consumption per capita, or population over time over millennia (sorry if you already have some of this). Obviously (with the exception of the climate stuff) the data is very sparse on this, but I am pro “here’s a reasonable guess and here’s how wide our uncertainties are” over “we’re not entirely sure so we’re going to say nothing”. And I trust OWID can do an excellent job at communicating the uncertainties and interpretational difficulties involved.
Third, maybe a page on space. For instance, number of launches over time, number of satellites in orbit over time, amount and size distribution on space debris, space debris incidents over time, cost of launching a kilogram into orbit over time. In particular, both the UN and the ESA have really detailed datasets for potential launches over time / objects in space graphs, but the UN one doesn’t have have an API so needs to be scraped, and I haven’t seen people present either datasets in an accessible way.
Here is the data from the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs.
Here is the data from the ESA, and documentation for their API
Update: we now have a couple of charts on outer space objects
Cumulative number of objects launched into outer space (line, bar, map)
Yearly number of objects launched into outer space (line, bar)
Thanks so much!