Think Day

Distributed computing projects such as seti@home and folding@home have provided a quite staggering amount of processing power to projects that require it, replacing the supercomputers that were used before. Moreover, most of this power is provided by millions of fairly humble PC's. It strikes me that a similar approach could be taken with human beings, using the spare thinking power of millions of ordinary brains to analyse a problem where there are currently only a few specialist brains working on it. The problem would have to be carefully chosen; just as distributed computing projects are suited only to solving problems that require vast amounts of calculation of a fairly repetitive nature, distributed human analysis would only lend itself to problems that require plenty of creative thought and can be explained easily.

Here's an example. The US has recently announced that it's going off to Mars (not all of it, just a few representatives) and there is neither the budget nor the technology to do this yet. It is definitely possible but we still have to work out how to do it safely and cheaply. On Think Day, the whole of the US will be given the day off to apply themselves to this problem. Leaflets and websites will explain the various difficulties the mission will face and people can then suggest solutions. Educated people in each town (maybe a panel with hard-science degrees?) could skim through over the next few days and weed out the obvious rubbish (probably most of it) and pass the rest on to NASA for analysis.

Mr. Average may not be the smartest guy, but there's 200,000,000 of him in the US.

Inspired by [Inyuki]'s anno to Robot Day.