Star Sailors, developed by Signal Kinetics is the world's first decentralised gaming platform built specifically for citizen science. Large data sets from projects such as the Kepler Space Telescope, and resources from companies like Ambasat & CSIRO allow us to build a platform that allows anyone to contribute to scientific research, regardless of education or financial status. Interest and engagement in the scientific fields are lacking in our community, especially in Australia and a large reason for this lack of interest is due to the perceived high barrier of entry to learn and research. There is a common misconception that to understand anything, to be able to contribute anything you need to be a university graduate. Our platform aims to remove this misconception by showing scientific theories, models and methodologies in a fun and free-form environment, allowing players to learn and contribute almost automatically.
A very real problem with increasing engagement and interest is the high cost to learn about the latest discoveries in the fields of interest. Scientific journals are expensive, convoluted and in short are not the right way to get people enthusiastic about science. Star Sailors aims to solve this by providing a cheap game built on our open-source technology, and by presenting information as part of a game, making it easier to learn as the users simply learn game mechanics and put what they learn into place.
It is said that until you can truly explain something clearly, and until you can measure it, you do not truly understand your subject. In every game, there is a learning curve where the player needs to learn what items do what, what animals are safe and which are hostile, and what key presses do what in game. Once they learn this, often through trial and error, they immediately commit this to memory. Whenever a new mechanic is bought into the game, the players follow the same steps to master it. For the average person who has a minor interest in the Solar System, rather than asking them to read expensive journals full of jargon they don't understand, it is better to put them into a familiar situation and methodology → play a game, make mistakes, learn what's going on. Repeat.
Today, interest in science is at an all-time high, however due to a myriad of factors (paywalled journal articles and a global disinformation campaign, for example), it's hard to get accurate information about the latest scientific endeavours and discoveries if you aren't working in those fields. It's even harder to get free AND accurate information for a regular user. The internet was created to allow information to travel freely and without restriction, yet the very disciplines that created the protocols of the present-day internet are locked behind paywalls by greedy journals and corporations. It's also become incredibly hard for small research teams to conduct studies due to the cost of acquiring information & resources, and then processing the data gathered by the project.
If a person today wants to find out about the possibility of life on another planet, say, Mars, they have to wade through multiple pages of search results online that contain out of date information, conspiracy theories, incorrect information, ads, disinformation, and the final challenge - technical jargon. People today are more easily distracted than ever, and the simple truth is that the correct information about topics users may be interested in is just not presented in a fashionable way, and is too hard to find, for the average person to search for. This ferments a distrust in scientific institutions and pushes users further into the web of conspiracy theories, harming scientific pursuits, public interest in science and by extension, public funding into research projects by government organisations.
We're not currently selling any products yet, but we have formed some partnerships to date. Currently we've got a partnership with members of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, which provides us with a plethora of data from projects like the Square Kilometer Array. It also provides us access to dozens of research students and their products, which adds more content to the Star Sailors ecosystem.
We've also got a partnership with DeSciLabs, where we are contributing to the Nodes program as well as some scientific fraud detection software. In return, we get even more data from hundreds of organisations, which again adds more content and thus creates more interest in Star Sailors.
I'm incredibly passionate about science communication and contributing to projects I'm passionate about, and above all else I want to know the answer to the question that's dogged humanity for centuries - are we alone in the universe? I believe the answer is no, but it's an answer that is impossible to come up with until we can commit huge resources in dozens of different disciplines and research projects.
I went to a school which was very much focused entirely on academic scores and I never really fit in. Because I was very sheltered and isolated from people in general, I thought that every school was as focused and high-ranking as my school was, and around 2018-2019 I became convinced that my skills would never be good enough for me to be able to get into a good university. I decided then that I wanted to create a product that would allow anybody to contribute to scientific endeavours regardless of their technical background, skill level, or experience. Today, after I've seen my potential and experience, I still believe in that mission and goal. I truly believe that only with millions of people from all different backgrounds, with different sexualities, genders, religions, and experience levels, can we successfully provide the answers to the questions that serve as a bottleneck to humanity's next giant leap