I'm continually amazed by the ingenuity displayed by members of this community. If the scientific community was really as intelligent as they would have us believe, then they could very easily solve all the problems facing the world today. All they need do, is make a game like "Particle Physicist 2019", and release it on Steam. Within a year or two, after you guys have had ample time to figure it out, @ZeroGravitas would then send them an itemized list of all the things they were doing wrong, and they could then apply them and come out of it looking like heroes. Simple. (and no Zero, i didn't mean that sarcastically) -Rooster
Similar things have been done in Eve Online, where players were given samples of cells to analyse. I think they also checked telescope data to find exoplanets. EDIT: Yep, they did: https://www.eveonline.com/article/exoplanets-the-next-phase-of-project-discovery Cool stuff.
Lol. Having tried to be a scientist and then an engineer, I can attest that real work problems are s few orders of magnitude more difficult. Both in terms of the maths being way beyond my brain's abstraction limit (working memory capacity, etc) and having horrible barriers to access not even related to the core theory, that end up taking up most of one's time and effort. Games are great, in avoiding all of that and being super-accessible. If only being a 'sandbox scientist' actually paid any money (without prolific and entertaining YouTube content), I might be set. Although, I consider the technical sides of TerraTech to be low hanging fruit, even by computer game standards (nothing personal devs, it just nicely accessible and relaxed). The main problem with citizen science (via gamifying, etc) is that you have to spend a huge amount of time translating the problem into a format that is accessible and somewhat entertaining. There's not many types of problem domains that are so pliable. Much of contemporary technological progress is based on materials science, which if just horribly abstract and unsuited to most human minds.
Oh, they are, and they can. The only problem is funding, and politics. Governments usually don't fund something if it doesn't benefit them in the near future, and they also deny things that the scientific community had provided plenty of evidence for. I think this picture sums it up nicely:
and for governments, the near future is until the next election (be it 3 days away or 2.9 years away), and even then they will only give it talk, no money or anything that could be useful, and try to regulate it to death (and if the first set of regulation does not kill it, then ADD EVEN MORE regulation (and demand all involved GIVE the government ALL results and information at no cost to the government)
Well, though you took the point I was making a little too literally, your responses did prove my point quite nicely anyways.
