The twelfth year of our new millennium has been a fast paced adventure into the new endeavors of human discover and exploit. Not only is information technology approaching the apex of the mobility era; but privatized space travel is starting to explode onto the front page of news outlets around the world. At long last, the pace of outward human expansion might be under way. I don’t know about you, but that prospect excites me at the reptilian level. The prospect of new horizons to follow a concept both daunting and attractive.
When Planetary Resources announced their intentions to reap the benefits of near earth asteroids the world over shook in anticipation. Theoretically we could have been at this point decades ago. It doesn’t matter. Ten years in the cosmic scale nothing but the blink of an eye. With the potential demise of NASA, the timing on this couldn’t be any more critical, and this project is a defining piece of this era. As Jon Stewart so fittingly stated “Do you know how rarely the news in 2012 looks and sounds how you thought news would look and sound in 2012?”
Today, the same company announced that it would be offering individuals and groups the chance to purchase telescope time on their upcoming fleet of Arkyd “Leo” Space Telescopes. I saw this post on the bus ride in so I quickly asserted a response on their Facebook forum. After listening to Peter Diamandis’ plea, it struck me that this is a very Reddit style approach to allotting telescope time.
Reddit raised $80k+ to build an orphanage in Kenya, countless other good acts of monetary kindness have been delivered through such a channel. There was also a recent case where The Oatmeal raised $100,000 to smear it the face of Charles Carreon. Crowd-sourcing has enormous potential if enough publicity can be put behind it. I feel like with the right incentive, Reddit could buy one of these telescopes outright and give space telescope access not just to those who are willing to pay for it one $100 target at a time, but to the entire public. A sub-reddit could be instituted where submissions are submitted for targets in space or on the earth. It would create a public sphere where meritocracy, curiousity and humor guide the principal objectives of the instrument.
This would not directly compete with the proposed system P.R. wants to have. People who want a sure bet could totally pay directly for the use of telescope time. This would be a wide dissemination of observing opportunities, rogue scientists, primary schools, disenfranchised young professionals (me?), the list goes on. I have several friends that were part of an asteroid hunting group in college. I myself was part of a few different groups working in observational research; so there’s people like me, trained on how to do something like image reduction in astronomy but with very little application for it the business world until something like the Arkyd comes along.
Then there’s hundreds of technically inclined space enthusiasts who build software or participate in amateur astronomy. The technical public is more than simply naive consumers; there’s not only curiosity out there but raw skill and talent. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, I just happened to be at the right place at the right time (and pay the right amount of tuition) to learn some really exciting methods of doing astronomy. If a person can handle calculus and a FOR loop, they are qualified enough to learn how to work on most observing projects. With spiraling tuition costs and limited space at universities, opening up a space based observation platform to the general public would be a brilliant way to involve the world in the outward exploration of the cosmos.
Thanks to digitized sky surveys, sophisticated catalog work could be done easily by undergraduates. But surveys require follow up observations to confirm candidates. That was the case for SDSS and it will be the same for the LSST and others to come. There will always be an abundance of observing to be done and “work” to be had. If you’re interested in doing something like this, help me spread the word, take leadership and come up with ways to extend outreach opportunity. Crowd sourcing requires a crowd!
And stay tuned, I have some cool ideas about a pulsed Alcubierre drive! Happy Friday!
http://www.iontom.com/2012/06/21/crowd-sourcing/ http://ifttt.com/images/no_image_card.png One Column Posts, Science, Space Travel, Uncategorized, asteroid, asteroid mining, astronomy, crowd sourcing, planetary resources, reddit, science, space, space telescope, telescope
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