DeSci in Space: The Projects We Need to Survive the Void - Dane Gobel

now [Music] howdy hello hello people this is an enormous room uh it's usually i don't know this looks like a place to put a baby kaiju so it's very nice that it can accommodate people that are smaller like us so there's a slight slight change of plans as you can tell the title this talk is not something about space in the void it's broader it's decentralized science or how i learned to stop worrying and love web3 you know right something good to do with all the extra money that we don't know what to do with so uh my name is dane gobel as she said i'm the co-founder of methuselah foundation um we've been doing biomedical research for the last 20 years and i can tell from personal experience it's always difficult to find enough funding to do science so when we got started we did uh the first version of decentralized science which is called oh thanks cool much better which was called like open innovation prizes or open innovation challenges so this is the sort of thing that started with the longitude prize way back when the people kept getting lost at sea um went to like the ortega prize which maybe you heard of or the ansari x prize and then we started doing stuff inspired by that to encourage scientists to spend their time on aging research which 20 years ago when we got started was a very very fringe thing to do but now it's pretty normal billion dollar companies are getting funded um and so when when i came here i was very happy to to run into some folks who could help me fill this time because it's the worst thing in the world is to try to listen to me talk for 20 minutes so uh allison from foresight institute their organization has been going for 35 years and has been doing absolutely incredible you know deep tech research before it was called deep tech truly aspirational wild and crazy stuff that normally you know a long time ago resided only in sci-fi novels and that was becoming a little bit more mainstream so i will hand it over to her we have a bunch of really really cool people uh trying to do science in a nice serious way and actually do it in a way that scales thank you thank you dane so i'm alison i'm from forsyth institute i'm one of the organizers of the dsi track which was going on since monday monday tuesday and wednesday uh together with eugene and charity who you will hear from in a second so i also run fourside institute fawcett institute has existed for about 35 years it's one of the og futurist early stage funders of research and innovation that is too early stage and to niche or too interdisciplinary for other funders to take on so we started with molecular nanotechnology who likes diamond age diamond age stuff right um so who likes a totally precise manufacturing like building things with atomic precision you can basically build anything literally the way that you move bits you could move atoms so that's our molecular machines track that's what we focus on in this track we have newer technology is anyone here interested in brain computer interfaces whole brain emulations raise your hand yes i mean guys you like the metaverse come on um you need to plug in there somehow right ultimately uh who's here into longevity rejuvenation biotechnology who cares about that okay good okay that that's the obvious one i think for this crowd who here cares about space so all the way from asteroid mining to dyson spheres dyson spheres yeah okay good how about dyson swarms anyone yeah okay good and who here likes decentralized computing and doing it in a privacy preserving way using anything from homomorphic encryption to cooperate from humans to ais and across humans anyone into this good okay i hope so so we support all of these research areas and we do this via a fellowship in these areas we do this via seminars in which domain experts get together with funders and with folks that support this early site stage stuff we do this via workshops and prizes and so recently um there's been considered interest in doing a dao because usually my day to day life consists of me running around between a bunch of fellows and a bunch of funders and trying to match make them one-to-one and so people people now want to do this in a much more decentralized way that's why the falsehood tao um that's where we explore the fourth side down we already have um pretty good early confirmed investor interest from balaji srinivasan and a few others who i think should be names for you guys here but if you're interested in checking this out and collaborating in this either by getting funding or by doing um but do doing due diligence or any of the other bids then feel free to check out the foresight dao um we also do tech trees so who here has played the game civilization or any of the games in which you use tech trees yeah great okay so you know what those are and why they're important and interesting so one way in which we try to make it a little bit more accessible for other folks for outside folks and talents to actually plug into these areas that we work in is by building technology trees to map the entire space so basically we map the labs the organizations and private companies that are working on the individual nodes that are important for technology basically any one of these nodes you click on it it zooms out and gives you a page of the organizations working in this and ultimately open challenges so we're doing these tech trees for nanotech biotechnology molecular machines in space they're currently being built um through interviewing domain experts in particular what are open challenges that they want to see funded the idea is that at the end of this behind each of these nodes we can either bountify them or even put it out behind that to fund an individual ecosystem going from that currently we're collaborating with vida dao on the first types of prizes for the specific longevity research space who he knows about vita dao great yeah vitado is like another doll that's very close to my heart it's basically one of the ogs for longevity research funding and they do so via basically getting their community members ownership of their ip through nfts if you're interested in learning more about this i don't know if cathu is here are you here there she is okay lovely they're doing a meet-up tomorrow night i think um and so feel free to to talk to her in case you're interested in learning more so super excited to collaborate with them finally um you all care a bunch about nfts i heard today so we have an existential hope gallery the whole idea is to inspire folks that don't necessarily know why sci-fi futures are amazing and we have an nft art collection and um a bunch of the money goes like the the any dividends that gets raised on this goes to the artist to the scientists so it's a very decentralized way of actually funding early stage signs this one here is to raise awareness about cryonics and this is specifically about the choir preservation of pets and so this is the first reanimated dog and it's now up on openc and you can go through it for the existential hope website if you're into any of this again this is how you can subscribe to any of it um and so yeah we're working on making cypher futures real i hope you join us and with that i want to give it over to shadi to tell you a bit about opsi come find me if you want to thank you a round of applause for alison forsyth's incredibly incredibly amazing institution that's been around for many years that's been pushing the envelope forward on technology that we're all using today like some of the first smart contracts right so one one round of applause for allison yeah so let me give you a little introduction to myself i am trained as a cognitive neuroscientist and i have been green-pilled i believe in the power of regenerative economics for science uh so this is why i started opsai which is a non-profit pending 501c3 certification to explore the use cases of web 3 for improving and fixing some of the major problems in science and one of the major issues we're trying to target are broken feedback loops of value flows in research and development you i'm assuming there's quite a few americans in the audience today what if i told you that your tax funding doesn't go doesn't get caught in a sustainable cycle within science that all economic growth is due to science but scientists do not benefit from those funds that value sinks are are sucking out the lifeblood of scientific funding and it's very difficult to fund the projects that we care about that improve our lives make us healthier and make the world a better place so we're tackling the problem how do we grow a self-sustaining knowledge creation community that is as prosperous as it is productive how can we move away from legacy capitalist systems that extract value from pure scientific discovery and curiosity we're tackling this by building an open access knowledge commons for scientists one of our fellows kinsha kashyap might be in the audience today as is leading the charge onboarding hundreds of terabytes of neural imaging data on decentralized file storage and making that open access and free for any scientist that wants to use it we're also building here at east denver as part of a hackathon a decentralized science identity directory for single sign-on with ethereum we have a team a really talented team including kinshuk nanak and lily who might be in the audience building out this stack which will allow us to import all of the web 2 credentials and academic basically knowledge graphs into web3 commit them to a proof of record on on a blockchain system and be able to have a single place where we can start collecting verifiable information regarding scientific output and also i should mention that that's really important if we're trying to track incentives and contributions down to the root level right the individuals that actually make science happen uh can be recognized in a much better way this way we're also exploring publishing and how to deal with some of the issues that are challenging scientific publishing today so we have a fellow uh akshata who's working on a digital permit library for scholarly article articles that's opera operates on ar we for permanent archival of this data and these papers there's a number i think 17 of papers every year uh become extent and that's just a fancy word meaning that they're unavailable so how can we curb this problem and make sure that the taxpayer-funded research is available for people to use to be able to develop open source technology and improve our lives and so as part of this we're also really diving deep into web 3 tokenomic design systems uh then it's one thing to design tokenomics for a d5 protocol for a financial application it's another thing completely entirely to design a token system for something as complex as science with many overlapping interests shareholder groups and unintended consequences of commercialization so as part of this one of our fellows jakob smekkal is putting together a toolbox called dark spice which is a fork of uh uh if you're familiar with it a software toolbox multi-agent software uh simulation toolkit that allows us to simulate how tokonomic value flows would would be able to be constructed for decentralized science communities dark stands for decentralized autonomous research communities and we're really really excited to open up this toolbox for everyone to submit their own model for how they think a tokenized system for funding execution and dissemination of knowledge should should exist or behave and lastly we are incredibly dedicated to community mentorship fellowship and scholarship so we have an open web fellowship program that's sponsored and funded a lot of the projects that you see here today and you can go ahead and take a look at our website pulse.opside.io and you can read about all the amazing work and see the spotlights on the different fellows there so as part of this outreach we also have put together as alison and dana mentioned the first ever decentralized science community conference here at eth denver where we're green pilling other d phi d gens and bringing them into the regenerative economic space thinking about how we can improve scientific research we've budgeted 6 500 for travel scholarships to bring people out here but with minimal outreach and prep and marketing we just kind of had word of mouth tried to boost the signal as much as we could within about about two weeks we've had over 25 000 requested uh and more than 40 applications for travel grants to come out here despite that we've been able to run eight events for over 10 hours at these venues over 400 co-apps on-chain records of attendance have been claimed from these events nine travel grants issued 23 speakers on a wide variety of topics that will blow your mind and attendees from over six continents these guys are working on these guys and gals are working on over seven hackathon proposals right now and i'd like to introduce eugene to kind of give you an idea of the overall design landscape this is just a slice of a very rich and vibrant ecosystem that's just getting started great thank you shoddy round of applause for shoddy allison and dane so far it's been very exciting seeing just how much activity and excitement there has been around this kind of desai community that's forming and i'm eugene leventhal i'm the head of operations at the smart contract research forum and our initial foray into kind of exploring this space was looking at the various dows that are forming to perform research on dows or on governance so we were very focused on who is using web3 tools or structures or at least funds from the web3 space to be able to advance some research and knowledge around web3 but we very quickly started coming across a number of great organizations that are using web3 tools but to advance science much more broadly and to think about what are the different ways that we can again use either this community the tools or at least the funds in this space to be able to truly accelerate research much more uh the research the review side and the publishing side and so this is sort of a map and i realized as soon as we went out here i was like i forgot acorn and they're here and they've presented at east denver and there's so many different projects coming up right now that we know this is not a complete map but this is at least who we've been able to directly connect with and represent whether they've been physically on the ground here in east denver or at least were able to connect with us and be part of a twitter space that we held right as the conference was getting kicked off last friday and it's been really great to see that from the organizations here adam's braid desai world desai foundation opsai lab labdao governauts dao research collective metadao sainet arendao scurf talent dao vida dao research hub they're all here and we all gathered together and we got to be part of something that many of us didn't even realize was a global community a lot of folks whether it's participants or even some of the folks representing these organizations have kind of openly stated of hey i didn't realize we were doing a desai thing i didn't realize we were part of this much bigger group and that's why we're really excited to be able to try to put together all of this energy and momentum and think about how can we actually carry this forward beyond this event and what's been going on here and that's why we're really excited to announce that we're putting together this desai community fund to be able to fund more individuals actually being able to get to these kind of events right we've had a lot of organizers uh and desai contributors who weren't able to travel to denver because travel especially for projects that are just being bootstrapped and ones that are public goods and non-monetizing it can be very difficult to actually be able to afford to just get to the places where these conversations are happening and so we want to dedicate uh this uh community fund via dsi.ed and it's exciting that we're just letting the world know and we already have one eth in there and we're trying to gather funds to be able to again pay for contributors who are especially who are bootstrapping their projects to be able to make it to these kind of community events as well as for actual just community members anyone showing up to these conversations showing up to our twitter space conversations showing up to the virtual events that we're going to host to make sure to highlight all of the projects who couldn't be here with us in denver now we want to make sure they equally get love and support from this wonderful community that's forming and so this uh this wallet is feeding into sort of a multi-sig that a number of core contributors that have come together here that we're going to be managing and paying out these kind of grants so that uh as shoddy mentioned we had 25 over 25 000 requested with practically no advertising and no global community to fall back on how do we actually make sure and we only were able to give 6 500 or not we that was the upside community that did that wonderful task how can we actually expand this and provide a constant source of support for anyone who's trying to be very active in this community so if you do wanna if you do want to and you are in a position where you are able to contribute to this kind of fund to be able to make it to future events so that we can have more speakers come out this is the place to give a donation to and from that perspective we want to make sure that the next event we're starting to think about is going to be around eath amsterdam in late april we also want to make sure to organize around ecc in paris because we know they were already starting to have some design conversations uh last year even if it wasn't exactly called decide at the time but i know there were at least a few folks here in the audience who were there and part of those discussions and in the fall we want to make sure to be at eth bogota uh and in this fall in the spring next year we want to come back here to eat denver and report back to the all of you folks and any of our contributors and supporters what the progress has actually been in this first year of going from a bunch of disparate individuals to an actual global community that's really trying to support each other and try to think of how can we best be this kind of network that can springboard into a lot more activity and i know just with the groups that we've had to connect with and had the chance to kind of break bread with and spend more time with it's been wonderful hearing all the amazing ideas whether in the direct projects mentioned or just what else we all can be doing as a community but the first step for any of that to be possible is we need to actually be a single global community so again this fund is really intended to bring us all together and have a dedicated way for more folks to make it out to these events and we'll make sure to keep doing virtual things to keep this open and accessible for anyone who is not able to travel but you know for those who are not in a position to contribute you can still absolutely be part of this community uh this qr code is heading to the telegram group that we've been running over desai at east denver and we're going to make sure to merge this with the other main kind of dsi groups that have been forming in other areas and we're going to make sure to connect individually with all the folks who aren't here in denver so if you do want to be part of this community you just want to hear what's going on you want to join one of the wonderful organizations and potentially contribute your skills to them whether it's technical or non-technical this telegram group is the right place to join to just be part of this conversation so