Introducing Astro Ledger: Funding space grants with blockchain star naming. Part 2.
Attention all you lonely hearts waiting for a crypto-collectible that you can finally understand. Say hello to Astro Ledger: a platform for assigning and recording hand-picked names for stars, while raising funds for important space projects.
Astro Ledger trading cards represent real objects in outer space, like stars and planets. Players select meaningful names for their stars, and anyone can vote for free on the names they like.
Card collecting helps raise funds for our radically transparent grants program. This is a feature unique to blockchain technology: all our revenue is implicitly public, and all our grants are disbursed directly from our public wallet into the grant recipient’s public wallet. This makes it easy to track how we spend the funds we raise.
But Astro Ledger isn’t just about funding public-spirited space projects: its heart is in creatively engaging our community in astronomy.
At the moment, there are many awesome stars which are known only by their scientific designation — that is akin to being known only by your government ID number, which makes it boring to talk about interesting star systems. As space missions become more ambitious, it is vital that people aren’t boggled by boring names and instead come to appreciate our collective inheritance of the universe.
The volunteer astronomers at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) do an excellent job of collecting and preserving ancient historical star names. However, several bright stars have multiple conflicting names from different cultures, while there are many awesome astronomical objects that the IAU is not interested in naming at all. Even when they do assign a name, they follow strict, traditional naming conventions. In this regard, they are more like a museum of well-preserved artifacts than a living history.
At the Astro Ledger Institute, we take a different perspective. Star naming is a public activity which should embrace modern culture in all its glorious variety. The Astro Ledger cards are a living story: regular people like you can use them to build a narrative of the universe we live in. What are the patterns and shapes we see in the sky? Which are the stories we tell our children when we point to the stars?
By naming star cards, or by simply voting for free on your favorite names, you are helping us create a meaningful, accessible, and interactive star catalog for future generations of earth-people. You will also be participating in one of the oldest pastimes of humanity, cultivating and preserving a snapshot of your own culture — in the stars. Besides, it’s fun!
Curious? Want to name a star? Check us out at www.astroledger.org.
