Welcome Etech: Take the Outlier Challenge!

Here at the Signtific Lab, we love outliers. That's why we want you to take the Outlier Challenge.

In future forecasting terms, outliers are the most surprising ideas. They are what scientists call "non-obvious", and they're the opposite of "wisdom of the crowds" consensus. They take the crowd by surprise. Outliers might not be the most likely ideas, but they would have a huge impact if they actually occurred. They're especially hard to see coming, but when they do come, they disrupt everything -- precisely because so few people anticipated them.

The main benefit of a platform like the Signtific Lab is that we can expose each other to many more outliers -- and avoid getting blindsided by the future.

To help you uncover new outliers, we've created the Outlier Challenge. Your mission: Avoid "Outlier Fail" and steer towards "Outlier Win."

OUTLIER FAIL
This is a list of apparently obvious ideas about the future of free space. We call them "outlier fail", because they have shown up literally 100 times or more in our forecast feed. You can feel free to create new micro-forecasts about these ideas, but you'd better say something extremely surprising if you want to avoid the outlier fail! Don't just tell us this stuff will happen. We've got that already. Can you say anything surprising or non-obvious about these topics? If not, AVOID! AVOID! AVOID!

•         Junk in space
•         Falling junk from space
•         Porn in space
•         Terrorists in space
•         Stalking from space
•         Reality TV from space

OUTLIER WIN
This is a list of the topic we think have the most potential for non-obvious ideas about the future of free space. So use these as springboards to surprise yourself and the other Lab members. The more you explore any of these topics, and the deeper you get down the chain of forecasts, the more potentially outlier you'll get! WANT! WANT! WANT!

• DIY space research
  
• Crowdsourced eco-monitoring
• Disaster spotting & response
• Hacking democracy
• Cubesat entrepreneurs
• Social capital in space
• News from space
• Serious games in space
• Climate change applications
• Food/agriculture innovation
• Chemical/materials research
• Bio/life sciences research
• Oceanographic research
• Tracking and protecting all living things (migration patterns, etc)
• MOST IMPORTANTLY: STUFF WE PROBABLY NEVER THOUGHT OF OURSELVES!