Crowdfunding Satellites

do in a pinch. And here's the thing about science, you see, it's a it's something that requires an investment. It's not we haven't reached a point in the world where we can just study things for free and mankind can benefit from our studies. It turns out that to to conduct really good science, you often need a lot of the cold, hard cat. Yeah. Things cost money, especially mad signs. I would say, yeah, no, that's those various Tesla coils and uh and Jacob's ladders. They don't pay

for themselves. Yeah. Well, I mean you can sometimes get test subjects at a cheaper hourly rate if you promise them nightmarish hallucinations. This is true if you read any of the signs on Marta trains for college students who are desperate for money. Uh yeah, so, but but human experimentation out of the way, you still have materials costs and things like that. You uh, if you've ever done a science fair as a kid, you know you had to buy that three paneled cardboard backdrop and those things

ain't cheap. Soda glue and yeah, yeah no, and beyond that, I mean, we're making light of it, but obviously there are lots of different costs involved, everything from salaries or or at least some sort of compensation for the people doing the work because you know, they have to pay bills and things, to paying for the labs, for paying for all the materials, uh, and paying people to make sure and quality check all the research to be certain

that everything was done properly so that whatever findings come out as a result are logically based upon the experiment itself. I mean, the whole process is expensive. So where does that money come from? Traditionally from from three different kind of branches. Yeah, yeah, you've got you've got governments. That's a big one. Well, actually, i'd back up before we hit governments. Traditionally you may have also have independent wealth.

So a lot of scientists throughout history, certainly not all, but a lot of people who made scientific discoveries were people who had leisure who are or they had a patron who was who had that kind of disposable income. In fact, patronage was a big way of doing science before we got into the giant academy and things of that nature. Sure, these days that would probably fall under kind of the private grant kind of area, which was

going to be our second topic. But we can just mention now that there are lots of private foundations out there that that have it within their scope to specifically fund research that's right and right. So it you know, a few hundred years ago, it might have been like a duke or like the church or something like that. Now it's maybe more like some organization, a nonprofit organization. And in these cases, the the approach of getting funding from a private grant a private organization is not that

different from applying for a government grant for science. How government work? Well, how does government funded science work? Question? Yeah, So essentially you have pools of money that have been allotted by the United States. This is within the United States.

Obviously other countries are different. But the United States you have pools of money that are allotted for specific purposes, for instance, scientific research, and that's overseen by different departments like the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, etcetera, Department of Energy, etcetera. Yeah, yeah, even Department of Defense has a big one obviously, DARPA. They that whole area has got its own budget for research. Now, all of

these are meant for specific types of applications. Sometimes they're pretty broad, general categories like the National Science Foundations, pretty broad, National Institute of Health obviously that's more health related. So you have these pools of money that then are overseen by committees, and so in order to get at that money, you have to submit a grand application and hope that yours is chosen over all the other applications coming in knowing that that pool of money is pretty limited, and

sometimes we see those budgets cut year over year. It all depends upon what politicians feel is important from one year to the next. My guess is that the general public believes that that money is more abundant than it actually is. It is not, and it is not easy to get to but we'll cover that later on in the podcast. Okay, But so both like a private patron or organization and the government, they they're potentially likely to fund your exploratory science just to discover things about the world.

But i'd imagine there are also groups that are mainly interested in how science is going to make you some money. Yeah, those would be corporations. Yeah, I wrote down private companies, but corporations is more accurate because it doesn't have to be a private company. It could just be it could be a publicly traded corporation that funds. But yes, a corporation is usually funding the private sector. Yeah, funding science for a specific they're hoping for specific outcomes, something that

can be monetized down the road. Uh. And obviously that comes with its own set of pros and cons, which we'll get into a little bit later. And you can devil's advocate that if you can make that phrase into a verb, that that that that a given company might in fact be interested in promoting research for the good of mankind as well. But it's also it's it's always going to be sticky territory. Thank you for advocating devilishly, Lauren.

But but SpaceX would be a good example of that, right, SpaceX private company, but a lot of at least the pr coming out of SpaceX is along those lines, and I'm I'm willing to believe that there is a an actual sincere spot in the heart of that company. Doesn't necessarily mean everything they do is altruistic. I don't mean to go that far, but to suggest that they are very much interested in the pursuit of science beyond just hey,

here's how we can make some more cash. Now, an emerging way of paying for science is crowdfunding, which, of course most people think of things like Kickstarter and indiegog. Those are the two big ones, right, and more for things like like you've you've got a pebble, Jonathan, I like like goofy gadgets, I mean or useful gadgets, pebbles, not goofy gorgeous. Okay, explain what a pebble is. Well, it's a little rock, or it's also a smart watch.

It was a popular crowd crowdfunded smart extremely now now, granted I I ordered mine after the crowdfunding I was not one of the cool kids who backed it back in the kickstarter days. Even though it is a Kickstarter edition. But but many Kickstarter projects are for you know, artists or musicians or or small technology companies who are trying to put a product to market, not not necessarily for research. So so how does this research then come into the equation.

It's interesting because it's one of those it's one of those applications of the Kickstarter model that at least at first glance, does not seem to fit the parameters of what Kickstarter was all about. But Kickstar has been pretty flexible with those. I mean, there are examples of projects that have been approved on Kickstarter that again don't necessarily fit the terms of service that you are supposed to agree to, and you submit a project and knowing that

that project could be denied. I mean, not everything that gets submitted to kickstarters approved, but there have been several cases of science based projects that were submitted to Kickstarter and were approved and either funded or didn't fund um And Kickstar is not the only one. There's actually one called Experiment, which is just for scientific research and various scientific projects. So there are some that are specific for that.

But Kickstarter, I think is the most well known of crowdfunding, with maybe Indie Go Go taking second place. So um at any rate, there are a lot of different examples. The one I wanted to talk about specifically that made the news not too long ago was kick SAT. So I guess the kick is for Kickstarter and SAT for satellite, And the actual Kickstarter was launched back in two thousand eleven. So you muld say, well, why the heck is that

news now? Well, it's news now because it went from the Kickstarter project phase all the way through funding to reality. It actually became a thing that then got launched into space. But what the heck was it? So this was a project to launch very very tiny satellites tiny spacecraft into low Earth orbit. And when I'm talking tiny, I'm talking about like a little bitty square that's a circuit board that only has a few elements on it. I'll talk about that in a second. The project co creator named

Zack Manchester. He was a graduate from the Aerospace engineering department at Cornell University. The other co creator was Michael Johnson, and together they developed this tiny spacecraft. They called it Sprite. So each individual spacecraft is a sprite and they could be built and launched in low Earth orbit for just

a few hundred dollars each. So the idea was that by creating a whole bunch of small ones and then making a delivery system where you could package hundreds of small ones together, you could launch the equivalent of a hundred or a thousand satellites for the same price that you would pay for a relatively small piece of equipment that's just one piece to go into space. So kind of quantity over quality in a way, because these particular

spacecraft are not terribly sophisticated. Um, do you guys, you guys have heard about the the Soviet satellite sput Nick right, the first man made satellite launched into orbit. It essentially just produced a ping that could be picked up by by radio antenna and terrified the Americans. Oh, it absolutely did, because not because it made a ping noise, but because it was a very sinister ping. Mostly admit that the Soviet Union had a had missile technology that could reach

all the way across the United States. There's also this whole issue with Cuba going on at the time. But anyway, so my our former co worker Chris Palette used to call it the the sphere. What beat is essentially what spot Nick was and that's you know again, it didn't do much other than send out this little ping message to just say I'm here, Yeah, I'm here. It's proof

that this is a man made object in orbit. Well, the the kicks at Sprite spacecraft are pretty similar in the sense that that's pretty much all they can do. They only have a couple of antenna, a micro controller, a radio, and some solar cells that allow it to gather power from sunlight. And all it really does is transmit its own name, which you can you know, if you were to back this project, you could actually name your sprite, so it would send out that message over

and over and plus a few bits of data. So not that different from spot Nick. Right, you know, there wasn't It wasn't a practical application. It's more of a proof of concept, and the idea being that further more sophisticated spacecraft could be developed in the future, assuming that

this one proved to be successful. Oh sure. And also, I mean these these are very very small, which is impressive in terms of just circuit board technology and and the way that things have advanced since for example, spot Nick back and right, yeah, yeah, where you don't have a giant silver ball going around the Earth. Yeah, I know, it's pretty exciting. Um. And then the kick Sat itself was the delivery system. So it looked like a like

a kind of like a bread box. This is a big rectangular thing that could hold hundreds or thousands of these sprites. And then at the appointed time, the the various doors on this would open up and launched. Yeah, yes, you get a cloud of sprite, actually cloud of sprites, but close enough. And uh So, the whole idea was to be able to launch these then make sure you could actually locate them and track them and see that

the project was in fact a viable one. That's that would mean that they could build on it in the future. The goal was just thirty dollars, and I say just because when we talk about space projects, thirty dollars is really not that much at all. Um. It was a very successful project ended up getting more than twice what they were asking for. They got seventy four six bucks. I don't know who threw in these six dollars, but

that was pretty cool of them. Uh And in total, in May two thou fourteen, the kicks Sat satellite, the first one ever, carried a hundred and four sprites courtesy of a space X launch. Already mentioned them once in this podcast, but that's the company that actually launched the rocket that carried the kicks at. It was a c R S three rocket and it was actually on the way to the I S S, the International Space Station,

so it was up in. Yeah, they hit stor ride, they did their little uh thumb out the on the side of the highway, sad Hulk music playing in the background, and this rocket picked him up. Elon Musk was like, yeah, sure, come along. Yeah, He's like, dude, we're totally going that way,

come on, hop in. So the only thing is that there's a couple of people who have said that maybe this project is not the best thing in the world, not not for this particular implementation, but because of implications down the road, being that uh yeah, like like space debris, Like you're you're purposefully launching a couple of hundred useless bits of technology into an already crowded air field. Yeah, that would be the space that would definitely be the criticism, right.

I mean, now we're not saying that the spacecraft are useless, we're just saying that's kind of what the critics would say, and uh, and you know, the response is that the spacecraft are designed to deteriorate, their orbits deteriorate rapidly, so within a week or two they would be burning up

on reentry and not be an issue in space. They're not going high enough in orbit for them to stabilize or to or to Yeah, that would take quite a bit of ways, or to just become an issue like getting in the way of other communication satellites or anything like that. However, so while this particular implementation is not a problem in that sense, the worry is that by proving that this is a viable option, we might see lots more stuff get launched into space over time, and

that an aggregate could become an issue at some point. Now, granted, that's saying like we shouldn't do this thing because this other thing may or may not happen, and that's that's a tough argument to make. It's very discouraging and sort of a pessimistic view of what could happen, but it's still something to think about. It's something to consider when moving forward. Is let's at least acknowledge that that's a possibility before we hit the launch button, because then we

can still be responsible while continuing research. We don't want to we don't want to discourage people from doing science. We just want to do a response. But we can form a plan this way and right exactly. So that's not the only Kickstarter science project that's out there. There's actually a few. Well, in fact, there have been other

satellite projects from Kickstarter. The remember the Planetary Resources ar kid project, right y, Yeah, where they wanted to launch small satellites and and through Kickstarter they gave people the chance to help aim the satellites at certain funding levels or to have their picture displayed on a on a picture taken by the satellite up over the curve of the Earth. Right Yeah. That was a really cool way

of trying to get public support behind a project. Another one that was pushed by one of the co founders of kicks At, Michael Johnson, you know I mentioned him, was called Pocket Spacecraft. Now, that was a follow up project to kicks At, which had at its root of an even smaller spacecraft than than the little sprites, so tinier form factor. It was supposed to be more um sophisticated. It was called Scout, but this one was going to travel to the Moon, and they held a Kickstarter, but

that one did not fund. However, the project gained the interest of private investors, who then poured about five thousand dollars into Were these private investors wearing long robes with funny hats and carrying umbrellas, not that I know of. Sorry, I'm making a little journey to the moon. Yeah, I get the joke. But as far as I know, they, as far as I know, they were not um dressed in such a manner. But it's possible I was not there.

Kickstarter doesn't really necessarily make you, you know, it doesn't disclose the fashion of the participants all the time. And I wasn't there for the private investment, so it could be you know what, let's just say yes, yes, they

were in fact doing that. Another science project that appeared like Kickstarter with Songbird, which, uh, while it was a songbird migratory pattern Kickstarter, it was really kind of a cool thing, this idea of putting tiny little geo locators on the California hermit thrush as a two thousand dollar goal,

and it funded. And this was the whole idea was just to find out where these birds go when they travel in the winter because they would always return to the same spot, but no one was entirely certain exactly where they would end up. And so by putting these little gl locators on the birds, they're going to learn more about the migratory patterns of this particular species, unless, of course, it weighs them down, in which case they'll stop someplace closer along the way and then we'll all

think that that's where they always went. So you know, of course, the thing about science you can't observe when it affected. Granted that usually applies only to the quantum world, but go with me on this one. Another one was plasma jet electric thrusters super awesome, you know, alternate alternate propulsion system. This was really just to test out a

propulsion system, so not something to that would be built. Yeah, this is more to to try and perfect the actual technology here on Earth so that one day it could be incorporated into spacecraft that would launch from some other means, you know, we would get it up into space and then this would be its propulsion once up in space. So that was really cool. That's successfully funded back in two thousand and twelve, and there are a lot of

other checks on Kickstarter. Almost all of them are space related, not not every single one, but most of them. Space tends to be one of the ones that people get really excited by. It's pretty inspiring. Yeah, it's you can see how that could get someone's imagination going. You know. It's it's a little harder sometimes to suggest to people, Hey, uh, why don't you contribute to this. We're going to be studying this fungus. You know, space is the final frontier.

Threshes are not. No, but it was successful. Of course, it did have a very modest goal. Two thousand dollars was not a whole lot. So as far as the pros and cons of all these different kinds of funding strategies go, there's some that are pretty similar. Like I said before, the government and private foundation grants are pretty close in the way that generally you have to go about trying to secure one. So if you're a scientist and you need to get funding for your project, probably

want to write up a grant proposal. Yeah, probably gonna write up lots of grant proposal because the first you need to learn how to do that thing, because it's actually really complicated. No, it's not easy. The people who who specialize in this. I mean they can spend, you know, quite a long time just working on one let alone multiples, and you'd never want to put all of your scientific eggs in one scientific basket. So you're probably applying for

multiple grants. Especially if there's a limit on how much can be rewarded and your project has a budget that's greater than that limit, you're going to need multiple grants. So uh, that means that you're going to have to apply to lots of different either government programs or private foundations, or a combination of the two. And while you're doing that, you've got to keep in mind all the other scientists

are doing the same thing. Everyone is competing for that same pool of money that is represented either by the government or these private foundations. Now, in some cases, private foundations are concentrating on specific types of science, So it may be that your project falls in their purview and you're fine, but some other project doesn't, and so you don't have to compete directly with them. But they're still

going to be competition no matter what it is. Oh yeah, and and as we mentioned earlier, the amount of money that the government has to give according to budgets is not usually greater year over years. No, it's sadly our our investment in science has either for most year's plateaued

or taken a dip um. There are some special initiatives that give more money to very specific areas of research, and that's really cool, right, you know, when you get to just broad exploratory science, that's where it starts to get It's hard. It's a hard sell because you're asking people, look, we're specifically wanting to look into the mystery to find out what's there. We don't know what's there, and we don't know that anything we find will be of any

practical use. It's hard to convince people to pay for that because that's tough, especially if you're trying to convince bureaucrats and politicians or for that. I mean, it's not just anybody. It's people who specifically are uh very conscious about the budget because they have to answer to the

people for it. And then a lot of times they're not necessarily sympathetic to what you're trying to research, especially if they themselves don't have a background in science, because it's harder again for them to have that sympathetic view you've heard these clips before of politicians making fun of government funded science projects that studying you know, fruit flies or studying mold. Ha ha ha ha ha. It's like they just don't understand that, Oh, that's actually something worth studying.

We're learning very important things from doing that. Yeah, it's once and again it's hard to communicate that with someone who doesn't have that same background, especially you know, and some scientists are are great scientists, but not great communicators. So that actually problem so very complex here. Also, on top of that, it requires scientists to dedicate a huge amount of time just to try and try to get

through all the bureaucracy. In fact, according to uh to Scientific American, in the university realm, so specifically within university research areas, faculty members spend their time just going through red tape, so that leaves only to do the actual job. Yeah. I mean that's even if you're just a pure research scientists at a university and you're not also carrying a load of coursework, you know, or you're teaching courses. So I mean almost half your time just getting through to

try and get the funding you need. So you can understand how a lot of people talk about this system being broken or at least inefficient. You know, if not broken, it's it's not working at full potential. Um. So that has definitely been a big issue. Next, let's talk about the corporate sponsorships. You know, we mentioned that, uh, we get the corporations involved sometimes, Uh, you know, it's it's more frequent that we see corporations look for practical uses

of science. So it's even more difficult to kind of just get pure explored territory science funded by corporations. Not that it never happens, but it's rare. Yeah, and there's I certainly don't want to cast a shadow over all corporate funded science, but there is always a question when you have corporate funded science out there. You know, so you've published results that are favorable to whatever industry it is, the oil industry or the you know, or or or

towards a specific kind of medication or treatment over another kind. Right, it seems to be that you've got the money for this experiment from those people. Right, it seems like there's a there could be a bias going into the results. Yeah, Like you said, Lauren, I mean the medical world is a great example, because something like se of all clinical trials in the United States are paid for by corporations

through corporate sponsorship. So if you have a a corporation that has a vested interest in a particular let's say it's a it's a a new experimental drug that they want to have pushed through approval, uh, and they're the ones funding a study to make sure that the drug is actually has efficacy, that it's that actually does what it's supposed to do, that it doesn't have the serious side effects that could potentially sideline at all that kind

of stuff. Um, if they're the ones funding a group of scientists work to do this, and the scientists want to continue to be able to do work, there's always the question of was biased introduced? Where the scientists biased at all because the source of their the funding for the project came from the same company that has a

vested interest in the outcome. Well sure, I mean, but but there's there's something to be said for, um, for pure research and development and and a lot of the I mean, the kind of clinical trials that we're talking about here are not internal research and development trials. Of course, a company also, to to balance it has a vested interest in making sure that the product that they put

out doesn't kill people. Um, that's bad for your customer. Yeah, they don't want to have to completely you know, regenerate generations in order to sell more more products. Yeah. I think typically they will be concerned for liability, so they don't want to try to like hide the fact that this is going to kill people in a way that's traceable to them. But but I mean more like what I imagine happens more often. That might be a problem

with corporate funded researches. Selection bias in publishing. So if if they've got a bunch of results that say, this drug is very effective in this one study, and then this other found that it's not really effective, and this other found it doesn't do any better than placebo, they

might publish only one of this set of results. Well, there are really complex laws for how any given research team is allowed to or or should um accept and report the funding that they receive from from any from anyone, I mean, whether that's that's a government agency or private foundation or one of these privately held companies, or publicly you know, from from a corporation, and and and there are a whole lot of of of law laws internationally, nationally, locally,

and at the at the academic like university institutional kind of level. And I mean technically most journals, most reputable journals, will not publish something if they suspect there's too much of a conflict of interest. However, I mean, you know, it's it's it's always it's always messy, and it's always difficult to really get to the bottom of something like whether someone was unbiased. And you know, keep keep in

mind that bias exists everywhere. There's literally no person on this planet that is completely unbiased, and also no organization that's completely unbiased. Even if you're talking about a government organization, you're you're going to have at least a little bit of an agenda there. Well, yeah, I mean it's where we're not totally objective. We can't be. We can be as close, we can try and be as rigorous as possible to maintain an objective point of view, but it's

never going to be. Yeah, I think that's given. It just be a question of relative level. Where on the

spectrum do you fall on chrony ism or or reputable scientist. Yeah, and and so really what that kind of thing comes down to is being more educated when you know, when we as researchers, or when you as a consumer of a product or or or s as a consumer of a product or anyone is looking at this research that has been done, it's really critical to to go to the part where they disclose what funding they have received and check it out right and just you know again,

just because even if if a research team gets their funding from a corporation that has a vested interest, it does not necessarily mean that the science they did was bad or the findings were inaccurate. It just means that you might want to look and see if there are any other independent studies that were also done. Right. It's a factor. It's it's that grain of salt that you really need to take. So then we have crowdfunding, which also has both pros and cons. One of the big

pros is that it gets people excited about science. Now, being excited about science is a great thing because not only does it allow the scientists to do their work, but that can send a message to government officials to say, you know, this is important and we should invest more in it. So it kind of has has sort of a ripple effect where it's possible if crowdfunding gets to be exciting enough that you could see some more government

interests play apart in funding science. Down the road, of course, you could also get the other side where the government says, well, we don't need to fund science, look that people are doing it on their own, so let's just get out of that game. Um So there's always there's always that possibility too. I like to be more of an optimist and hope that we just find new ways of funding science. But another advantage is that sciences don't have to jump

through as many hoops necessarily like they have. Imagine that kickstarter standards are a lot lower than the government. Well, yeah, for one thing, Kickster really what they're looking for is to make sure that you you are following the rules that Kickster has set up, and as we've pointed out already, they're not always that. Um yeah, there are a couple of projects I'm thinking of right off the top of my head that that clearly did not meet the goals,

but not not scientific ones either. But as long as they as long as you do, you've got a good shot of getting your project approved. So the first thought I had when we were talking about crowdfunding science as through Kickstarter is Hey, I never got these results I was promised. Well, see, that's the thing is that you have to you have to define your project properly so that people know what it is you're trying to do and if you are responsible because this is this is

approach that a project manager has to do. The project manager needs to be able to explain whatever the scientific project happens to be, whether it's any kind of experimentation for for you know, just scientific exploration purposes, or if it's building a specific piece of equipment, whatever it is. They have to be very clear on what the goals of the project are and what a successful outcome will

look like. Even if they don't know what the results are, they would say, you know, knowing the results would be the successful outcome. And so you have to be very good at communicating that because otherwise what can happen is if you're if you're not good at communicating it, and people fund these things and then they never hear anything about it ever again, it just very quietly kind of fades away. Let's say that everyone was on the up and up and they actually did whatever it was they

said they were going to do. But either it just didn't pan out, or it wasn't really reported on, or they kind of forgot to get back to their user base and send out that update like like, hey, check it out. We learned that this stuff happens. Right. If that doesn't happen, then that is bad news for everybody, because what it does is discourage the folks who supported that particular project from ever supporting another one. So you

have to be really careful with crowdfunding as well. You've got the fact that you don't have to jump through as many hoops, and all you have to do is appeal to people's sense of whatever what exploration or adventure, whatever your scientific project is related to, could be conservation, could be anything. Really, you have to appeal to that. But then you have to make sure you make good on the promise or else you you run the risk of alienating those people and making things worse for everybody

down the road. Right. Well, what I was referring to was all those kickstarted projects and we all know something that you know that they got funded and they got their money, and Okay, I'm still waiting for all three of my crowdfunded backed smart watches. I got an update on two of them today and uh yeah, there are a few months overdue, so I know exactly what you're talking about. But anyway, yeah, this in this case, it's

not so much. You know. One of the things you have to remember whenever you're backing any kind of crowdfunded project is that you're not really don't think of it like a store. You know, you're not supposed to think of it like a shop. But you're funding is someone's uh work to create something, whether that's work of art or a scientific project or a piece of technology. You're funding that work which may or may not work out. You are like an investor, and sometimes investments pay off

and sometimes they don't. And if you if you think of it that way instead of hey, I sent you a check for this thing that I was promised and I still don't have that thing. Unless it was something small that was just supposed to be a guaranteed uh delivery, like you know, a key chain or something, then chances are it's because the project didn't work out the way the people had anticipated. So you just have to take

that into account. Well, you should think about it like giving a gift or giving some money to your friend you do it because you like your friend, not because you're expecting to get some charge so much interest on the gifts I give to my friends, And I don't know that you can call it liking, but all right, that's fair. I kind of understand what you're talking about.

So one of the interesting things I came across while looking at how science is funded was some stories about just inefficiency the problems that come upon the administrative side. Like let's talk about you are one of those. You you run a foundation that gives out money to people who are applying for for scientific grants. But your job is to look at each grant proposal as it comes in and to evaluate it and to decide whether or

not this represents a a viable scientific experiment. You have to figure out, I mean, forget whether or not the outcome is going to benefit someone directly. You just have to decide whether or not it even looks like the group that applies can do what they say they're going to do. That alone is really hard to do. Oh, sure, it's a very specialized job. And should we really trust

to the general public with making that decision. Yeah, that's another crowdfunding thing is that can Let's say that I I see something on there about you know, belly Bob's Cold Fusion Emporium, and and that's some guy who's talking about, you know, with a couple of beer cans and some good old American ingenuity, is going to make a cold fusion reactor elbow grease, yeah, headlight fluid. You. I sit

there and think, um, I you know, I don't. I don't have expertise in this field, so maybe I shouldn't just leap in and assume this person knows what they're talking about. Well, the same is actually true for people who are responsible for granting actual like government grants, private foundation grants. They have to be able to evaluate these things. Not all of them have a background in science necessarily,

so that's a challenge. And according to Scientific American, back in two thousand nine, Canada spent forty million dollars just on determining how to award grant money. Forty million dollars, And in fact, they pointed out that it would have been less expensive if they had just given every single applicant that had sent in a grant application the average amount that was granted. So keep in mind some of the grants were smaller, simple grants were larger, but the

average amount was thirty thousand dollars Canadian. So if they had instead of evaluating all of these grant applications, just given everyone money, Congratulations, you sent in an application, here's your thirty thousand dollars, that would have been less expensive than the amount of money they spent evaluating those applications

and then sending out the grants. So that just shows you that, you know, in order to do good science, whether you're thinking about it from a a scientific approach or a funding approach, it's not a simple you know, yes, no switch. You have to really look at and evaluate this stuff. And uh, and that's why you know, it's

it's a complicated issue. Um. But one other method that was mentioned in that Scientific American article was you could use a lottery system where you have a certain pool of money and that's all all there is, and you figured out what the grant is going to be for any one grant and then essentially they draw lots and then uh, whichever projects get the winning lots get funded.

And that means like there's no evaluation whatsoever. So you could have you can you can have a whole bunch of billy bobs out there, or you could have have a whole bunch of you know, life saving drug research. You never know. So there it seems to come down to a question of what's more important, fairness or funding good science exactly? And see this the thing is that

there's not an easy answer for this. Oh sure, And and at that point, maybe crowdfunding is the best option if you if you put it out to a crowd of hopefully increasingly educated people and and say, hey, um, we want you to be informed about where your money is going, because the public is paying for this one way or another. I mean in our taxes, in the products that we buy, in the donations that we make, And so wouldn't it be better overall to have us

all making our own educated decisions. I think. I think the bigger that audience gets, the better off we are, because, like you say, Lauren, that gives the opportunity for people who are knowledgeable in the field to weigh in one way or the other. And that may not necessarily sway everybody,

but it gives me more comfort. Like when I start reading into scientific discussions, I like going to different forums where there are various experts who engage in debate or discussion about the topic, because it lets me learn a lot more about it than just reading scientific papers um, which you know, some I find really accessible and some I don't. So being able to kind of jump into a community like that, I think is very helpful. I

think crowdfunding overall is uh an interesting approach. Obviously, it's not gonna work for everything, so there's some scientific research that's going to be well beyond the scope of any crowdfunded approach, although you can maybe offset some of it. But I find it pretty positive out overall. I mean, for one thing, it gets people excited about science, and that to me is really cool. Well, I guess that wraps up this discussion about where the money for science

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