So here’s a project for you. I live in a rural part of the tiny Kingdom of Swaziland/eSwatini in south-east Africa. I became a Swazi citizen at independence in 1968, nearly 50 years ago. I returned home specifically to seek out a deep rural area where I can avoid telecoms masts, as I am sensitive to microwave radiation from base stations (I’m an old radio ham, my callsign is @3DA0KM on Twitter now, so I’ve put up plenty of masts myself, I do know exactly what a microwave field feels like.)

So how do you guarantee that no masts go up around you? There’s only one way that I know: you create a Radio Quiet Zone for radio astronomy; there’s legislation in South Africa to designate such areas, to accommodate the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), planned to be the world’s biggest radio telescope. With such zones, even planes have to turn off their radar if they fly near you, and no mobile phone use whatsoever is permitted. Just one “noisy” car spark plug can completely destroy any chance of radio astronomy.

However: while no microwave communications are allowed, you still need the most massive bandwidth of any application on the planet. The SKA is projected to require ten times the bandwidth of the entire World Wide Web. Please think about that.

Take a deep rural area, with absolutely no telecoms infrastructure at all, as is essential for radio astronomy; and now run a fat, fat fibre optic cable into it. You have a certain recipe for rural development here, if you can only crack the code. (Achtung! Achtung! There is code to be cracked here, make no mistake.)

In technical terms, you “evert” the network, or turn it inside out. What were the most completely unconnected areas, suddenly become information super-duper-highways.

The trouble is: the areas of the Karoo desert with the SKA have seen no development at all, apart from big ugly dishes of no use to anyone; the impoverished local population is highly pissed because they can’t even use cellphones; and now there are (completed inflated) rumours of natural gas in the area, so all the ANC politicians want to do is give concessions for fracking, and hope for a bonanza before they poison what little water the area contains.

You would think under this kind of pressure, the radio astronomy people could spare one of their big switches and apply some of their vaunted IT expertise to connecting the surrounding areas and generally do something useful for the community; but the whole project is struggling like hell over funding, from the last I heard.

So: if you can’t think how to use your bandwidth to help communities, can anyone think of a way to make money out of radio astronomy? And the vast computing it requires?

Please forgive me, I’m not an expert at all on blockchains, but I understand one thing: “mining” for Bitcoins, for example, consists of applying huge computing power to “looking for a solution to a pointless puzzle”, to quote one learned description of the system.

My question to you, Ms Kasireddy: why do these have to be “pointless puzzles”? Is there no way someone can actually think of doing something useful with all this vast distributed computing power?

Now think of SETI, where people donated machine time on their PCs at home in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, surely a worthy cause, but one for which there was no government funding. This still stands as a paradigm case for “citizen science”.

Why can’t you get “miners” to apply designated algorithms to solve radio astronomy puzzles; where “proof of work” constitutes a vast churning through data that may be absolutely routine, to return an unexceptional result; or might turn up a diamond in all the dirt that you’re shovelling, in the form of a unique binary star, or a new supernova. Either way: it’s perfect fodder for setting up never-ending, routine, algorithm-driven puzzles, and whoever solves the puzzle first… gets a Kosmicoin, my best call for the name of an astronomy-based cryptocurrency. And finder’s rights to any particular astronomical discovery they might make in the process.

Again: you have fat, fat fibre-optic cables going out to deep rural areas. We have lots of sunlight in Africa, lots of wind in some places, you could grow hemp for biofuel, hydro, any combination. You don’t need to run power lines out to these areas: all you need is the fibre-optic link.

Then: why can’t you have server farms out in these rural areas? Virtually invisible on the landscape, highly secure, a few poles sticking out of the ground the only sign that radio astronomy is being done (dishes are on the way out, so 20th century): fixed, phased arrays are the thing now, where you can look in all parts of the sky at once, if you only have enough computing power.

Everything depends on having that phatt cable, running to radio astronomy standards, and working in real-time coordination with other radio telescopes, so you have the very best global communication protocols, apart from the military.

I’m sitting here in a rural part of the Third World (South). After years of campaigning and lobbying, we finally got an ADSL line to our cottage three years ago. I immediately got a job online as a scientific editor, I now handle documents for international agencies, even statistical and econometric papers written by the Japanese Cabinet Office pass my desk. You can do any of this kind of work anywhere these days. My only problem is huge thunderstorms, when I have to unplug and hunker down.

We have a company, Radio Astronomy eSwatini (Pty) Ltd, which has a business plan based on setting up an astronomical observatory within a designated radiation-free conservation area.

The thing is: although it’s designated as a conservation area, it could still hold people, in fact, it could hold a whole community and all kinds of smart industries — all you need is that fibre-optic cable, and the whole world opens up to you. I am already being inundated with requests from potential “radiation refugees” from all over the world, so there’s more than just astrotourism involved here. People need conserving too.

You might think this is all completely mad; but you answer me this one question: why do these puzzles have to be “pointless”? Why can’t you have distributed networks working on real puzzles? And if there’s no good reason: can you fault my concept of the Kosmicoin?

Well, if you can’t: you heard it here first, this is absolutely the first time I’m floating this idea. The nice thing about radio astronomy, is that you have an absolutely catastrophic surfeit of data pouring in every day, it just never ends, and there are endless puzzles you can set for any given set of data.

And who knows? What would you win, as a prize, if your computer was the first to detect an intelligent signal from outer space?

Good luck in LA, Ms Kasireddy: I regret to tell you, however, no matter what you may have heard, you won’t see many stars there.