The Long Tail (7 page)

On the night
of February 23, 1987, the underground Kamiokande II observatory in Japan detected eleven neutrinos in a burst lasting thirteen seconds. Although eleven neutrinos may not sound like a lot, the observatory usually detects only one or two an hour, and rarely in a pack. So this was something special. But what it actually meant would have to wait a few hours, for other observations to be reported.

Astrophysicists had long theorized that when a star explodes, most of its energy is released as neutrinos—low-mass, subatomic particles that fly through planets like bullets through tissue paper. Part of the theory is that in the early phase of this type of explosion, the only observable evidence is a shower of such particles; it then takes another few hours for the inferno to emerge as visible light. As a result, scientists predicted that when a star went supernova near us, we’d detect the neutrinos about three hours before we’d see the burst in the visible spectrum.

The way to test this correlation between neutrinos and visible light was to make both observations and measure the time difference be
tween them. But the problem with the optical part of these paired observations was that you had to be looking in the right part of the sky. This wasn’t much of a problem for the neutrino observatories. Because of its spherical layout, the detector hall of Kamiokande could record neutrinos penetrating the Earth regardless of which direction they came from. Yet to see the explosion in visible light, a telescope would have to be pointed at the exact right spot at the exact right time. And, needless to say, there was an awful lot of sky to watch.

There just weren’t enough professional astronomers who could observe enough of the heavens to have much, if any, chance of spotting such an event. But there were thousands of amateur astronomers all too happy to do that job themselves. Armed with relatively inexpensive computer-guided telescopes with Dobsonian optics, which allow quite large apertures (twelve inches is not unusual) in telescopes less than five feet long, and sensitive CCD (charge-coupled device) sensors that can collect more light than the human eye, contemporary amateur astronomers can photograph the skies better than astronomers with house-sized telescopes could a century ago.

The first person to see Supernova 1987A was an observer somewhere between the amateurs and the pros. Ian Shelton, a Canadian grad-school dropout, was housekeeping an observatory in the Chilean Andes in exchange for time on its twenty-four-inch telescope when academic astronomers weren’t using it. One of those free times was the windy night of February 23. That night Shelton decided to use the telescope to run a three-hour exposure on the Large Magellanic Cloud.

As it happened, exactly 168,000 years earlier and exactly 168,000 light-years away, a star had exploded on the edge of the Tarantula Nebula. From Earth and Shelton’s view, however, the explosion looked like it was happening right then: a splash of light suddenly appearing in one corner of the Cloud where nothing of note had been before. Shelton stared at the photographic plates for twenty minutes before heading outside to see it with his own eyes. Sure enough, there it was: the first supernova to be witnessed by the naked eye since 1604.

The connection between Shelton and the Kamiokande II observatory is one of time. The neutrino observatory spotted its burst at 7:35
Universal time. Shelton observed the first bright light around 10:00 Universal time—a little less than three hours after the neutrino shower. So far, right on theory. However, could it have shown up even earlier, before Shelton was watching?

Fortunately, two other dedicated amateur astronomers were at work that night using smaller, nonprofessional telescopes. In New Zealand, Albert Jones, a veteran credited with more than half a million observations, had taken a good look at the Tarantula Nebula at 9:30 UT but had seen nothing unusual. Robert McNaught, another amateur, photographed the explosion at 10:30 UT in Australia, confirming Shelton’s timing. So the light arrived somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00.

That is how one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the twentieth century unfolded. A key theory explaining how the universe works was confirmed thanks to amateurs in New Zealand and Australia, a former amateur trying to turn professional in Chile, and professional physicists in the United States and Japan. When a scientific paper finally announced the discovery to the world, all of them shared authorship.

Demos, a British think tank, described this in a 2004 report as a key moment in the arrival of a “Pro-Am” era, a time when professionals and amateurs work side by side: “Astronomy used to be done in ‘big science’ research institutes. Now it is also done in Pro-Am collaboratives. Many amateurs continued to work on their own and many professionals were still ensconced in their academic institutions. But global research networks sprang up, linking professionals and amateurs with shared interests in flare stars, comets and asteroids.”

As Timothy Ferris points out in
Seeing in the Dark,
his history of modern amateur astronomy: “If one were to choose a date at which astronomy shifted from the old days of solitary professionals at their telescopes to a worldwide web linking professionals and amateurs…a good candidate would be the night of February 23, 1987.” Demos concludes: “Astronomy is fast becoming a science driven by a vast open-source Pro-Am movement working alongside a much smaller body of professional astronomers and astrophysicists.”

The enabling technologies of this Pro-Am movement in astronomy are Dobsonian optics, CCDs, and the arrival of the Internet as a mechanism for sharing information. These tools have swelled the ranks of the amateur astronomers and vastly increased their impact. Over the past two decades, astronomy has become one of the most democratized fields in science, in part because it’s so clear what an important role the amateurs play.

NASA often calls on amateurs to watch for specific asteroids that might be headed for Earth, an observation task coordinated via an email message group called the Minor Planet Mailing List that’s run by Richard Kowalski, a forty-two-year-old baggage handler at US Airways in Florida by day and an astronomer by night. Some of the eight hundred amateurs on the list record their observations for fun; others hope to be immortalized by having an important discovery named after them. What’s notable is that none of them do it for money.

Astronomy has a natural place for volunteer manpower. Again, the problem with the sky is that you need to be looking at the right place at the right time to witness most interesting new phenomena, such as asteroids or stellar evolution. It’s less a matter of how big or expensive the telescope, and more a matter of how many eyeballs are transfixed on the sky at any given moment. Amateurs multiply the manpower of astronomy many times—and not just by looking at the stars from their backyards.

SETI@home (“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home”) is a project that harnesses the spare computing power of more than half a million home computers. After collecting hours and hours of white noise recorded from space, the project distributes its radio telescope data to the computers of volunteers. When they’re not using their computers, a special screen-saver kicks in. While it displays cosmic imagery, it scans bits of each recording in the hopes of locating a signal that may have come from alien intelligence. By divvying up its data to these volunteer computers, the project is able to examine a far greater number of signals than it would otherwise; and all anyone has to do to participate is download some software.

Another project has open-sourced the analysis of Mars imagery.
NASA put up decades-old photos snapped by the Viking orbiters and asked Web visitors to click on all the craters they could see, classifying them as fresh, degraded, or “ghost.” Usually, this is a tedious job for scientists and grad students that can take months or years, but in just three months the “Mars Clickworkers” project got volunteers to identify more than 200,000 craters. Averaged over all the clicks, this amateur collective was almost as accurate as expert planetary geologists.

In “open-source” software, where anyone can contribute to a project, the mantra is “With enough eyes, all bugs are trivial.” Likewise for astronomy: With enough eyes, we’ll see the asteroid with our name on it—and early enough to do something about it.

Of course, there are limits to what Pro-Ams can achieve. They’re largely collecting data, not creating new theories of astrophysics. Sometimes, they are unable to analyze properly the data they collect. Nevertheless, their place in the field seems assured. As John Lankford, a historian of science, put it in
Sky & Telescope
magazine, the bible of U.S. amateur astronomers: “There will always remain a division of labor between professionals and amateurs. But it may be more difficult to tell the two groups apart in the future.”

DEMOCRATIZING THE TOOLS OF PRODUCTION

What’s new about this is the way it’s done, not the concept itself. Indeed, Karl Marx was perhaps the original prophet of the Pro-Am economy. As Demos notes, “In
The German Ideology
, written between 1845 and 1847, Marx maintained that labor—forced, unspontaneous and waged work—would be superseded by self-activity.” Eventually, he hoped, there would be a time when “material production leaves every person surplus time for other activities.” Marx evoked a communist society in which “…nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes…to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

To continue with Marx’s vocabulary, Pro-Ams are a creation of the
first force of the Long Tail, the democratization of the tools of production.

The same effect we see in astronomy is playing out in countless other fields. Just as the electric guitar and the garage democratized pop music forty years ago, desktop creation and production tools are democratizing the studio. Apple’s GarageBand, free with every Mac, greets a user with the suggestion to “Record your next big hit,” and provides the tools to do just that. Likewise, digital video cameras and desktop editing suites (free with every copy of Windows and every Mac) are putting the sort of tools into the hands of the average home moviemaker that were once reserved for professionals alone.

Then there’s the written word, always the leading edge of egalitarianism. Although it was the photocopier that first put lie to the aphorism that “the power of the press goes to those who own them,” it’s blogging that has really sparked the renaissance of the amateur publisher. Today, millions of people publish daily for an audience that is collectively larger than any single mainstream media outlet can claim. What sparked blogging was, again, democratized tools: the arrival of simple, cheap software and services that made publishing online so easy that anyone could do it.

So, too, for desktop photo editing and printing, video games that encourage players to create and share their own alternative levels, and print-on-demand book publishing. A few decades ago, there were two reasons why most of us weren’t making hit movies: (1) we didn’t have access to the necessary tools, and (2) we didn’t have the talent. Today, there’s only one excuse—and even that is not as solid as it was. Hollywood, for all its efficiencies, can’t find every potentially great filmmaker on the planet. Technology, cheap and ubiquitous, can do far better. Once upon a time, talent eventually made its way to the tools of production; now it’s the other way around.

The consequence of all this is that we’re starting to shift from being passive consumers to active producers. And we’re doing it for the love of it (the word “amateur” derives from the Latin
amator,
“lover,” from
amare,
“to love”). You can see it all around you—the extent to which amateur blogs are sharing attention with mainstream media, smalltime bands are releasing music online without a record label, and fel
low consumers dominate online reviewing. It’s as if the default setting of production has shifted from “Earn the right to do it” to “What’s stopping you?”

Author Doc Searls calls this a shift from consumerism to participative “producerism”:

The “consumer economy” is a producer-controlled system in which consumers are nothing more than energy sources that metabolize “content” into cash. This is the absolutely corrupted result of the absolute power held by producers over consumers since producers won the Industrial Revolution.

Apple is giving consumers tools that make them producers. This practice radically transforms both the marketplace and the economy that thrives on it.

I can see it in my own young children, who are, as I write, into machinima—short computer-animated movies made with video-game software. Using the 3D rendering engines of games such as Halo 3 or the Sims for all the visuals, machinima directors need only write a script, control the characters, and voice the lines. Everything else—sets, camera, character, and vehicle models—is done by the game software. It’s like having a mini-Pixar in every Xbox or PC.

The first reaction of the kids was to watch and enjoy the machinima movies as entertainment. Their second was to express curiosity as to how they’re made. And their third was to ask if they could make one themselves. (The answer, of course, is
yes
.) What machinima lacks in Hollywood polish, it more than makes up for in creative inspiration. A generation is growing up watching people just like them produce impressive works of creativity. This can’t help but make an impression.

It’s one thing to see a movie or listen to music and to think “genius”—that some gifted person and exalted apparatus has put together this unique work of art we appreciate. However, once you know what’s behind the curtain, you begin to realize that it could be
you
. It is when the tools of production are transparent that we are inspired to create. When people understand how great work is made, they’re more likely to want to do it themselves.