Citizen Science Fiction

Citizen Science facilitates the rigorous, formal, scientifc participation of lay citizenry in research, usually under the auspices of academic leadership. This augments the pace and breadth of research, but more importantly, it makes for vastly increased general scientific literacy. Democracy depends on an informed, rational nation.

“The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.” - Thomas Huxley

“We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public.” - Hans Bethe

Science Fiction is a powerful way to introduce topics from physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, computation, and numeracy. That is often the purpose of SF (many SF authors are scientists). Game-based applications that use SF concepts to structure and popularize citizen science projects have even blossomed.

In recent years, the term ‘Citizen Science Fiction’ has been used to define this relationship.

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Fascinating… I didn’t realize Citizen Science was such a widespread collection of organized efforts — or that there’s a US Govt. website supporting it.

And I’m not sure if he coined the term Citizen Science Fiction, but scholar Jerome Winter has written the book on it.

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Yes, I’ve spent some time looking at the available excerpts & reviews of that book - it looks really good. I was going to link to it, but the Kindle version is $60!
I’m looking around for a better deal.

Between 2008 and COVID, I ran a large computational citizen science team called Geopense (Earth Think).In my happiest career days, I’d occasionally do corporate training by day and citizen science sessions by night. The interest for such in red states is tremendously encouraging. A stroke ended all that.

I did find an interesting talk from Notre Dame on this topic listing many SF-inspired citizen science pedagogical games.