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Island’s European discoverer, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, arrived in 1722, he found an island stripped of natural resources. There was not a single tree higher than three meters anywhere on the island. Today, by analyzing pollen from the island, we know that Easter Island was formerly a subtropical forest, with at least 21 species of tree, some of them growing up to 30 meters high. Roggeveen also found not a single species of land bird. Today we know that at least six species of land bird used to live on the island. As the Easter Islanders destroyed their stocks of food and timber, they began to starve, and the population crashed, dropping perhaps 90 percent. Easter Island culture descended into warfare and eventually cannibalism.

The author Thomas Homer-Dixon has coined the phrase “ingenuity gap” to describe the gap in difficulty between the problems faced by a society and that society’s capacity to solve problems. What happened to the Easter islanders is that they were overcome by the ingenuity gap facing their society, unable to find solutions to the problems they had created. That ingenuity gap caused the collapse of their civilization.

Modern global society faces its own ingenuity gap. We have problems such as HIV/AIDS, which reduces average life expectancy in the most highly affected African countries by 6.5 years, from 54.8 years to 48.3 years. We have the problem of nuclear weapons, with a nuclear-armed India and Pakistan arguing over Kashmir, and the world’s two new superpowers, China and India, vying for supremacy in Asia. As nuclear proliferation continues, the number of plausible nuclear conflicts is rapidly rising. We face potential shortages of oil and water, and the possibility of future bio-terrorism. And, of course, there’s the best-known existential threat of our time, human-caused climate change. Many of these are problems that we understand scientifically. But just because we understand the problems and their solutions at a factual level doesn’t mean we can muster the collective ability to take action. We are lacking the institutional ingenuity necessary to turn our knowledge into real solutions. Today, online tools are giving us an opportunity to create new institutions to change and redefine the relationship between science and society. It is my hope that this opportunity will help us create a more resilient society and, in the memorable phrasing of Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey, bridge the ingenuity gap.

CHAPTER 8

The Challenge of Doing Science in the Open

Late in the year 1609, Galileo Galilei pointed one of his newly built telescopes up at the night sky and began to make one of the most astonishing series of discoveries in the history of science. Galileo’s first major discovery, made in January of 1610, was of the four largest moons of Jupiter. Today, this discovery perhaps seems unremarkable, but it caused the biggest change to our conception of the universe since ancient times. The discovery became a sensation, and Galileo was feted throughout Europe. It also brought him the patronage of one of the wealthiest men in Europe, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo de’ Medici.

With fame and patronage came pressure to repeat his success, and Galileo wanted more discoveries to match the moons of Jupiter. He didn’t have long to wait. Shortly before dawn on the morning of July 25, 1610, Galileo pointed his telescope at Saturn, and observed that it wasn’t just a single round disk, as had hitherto been thought. Instead, alongside Saturn’s main disk he saw two small bumps, one on either side of the main disk, making it look as though Saturn consisted not just of one body, but rather of three. Those two bumps on either side of the main disk were the first ever hint of the rings of Saturn. Unfortunately for Galileo, his telescope wasn’t quite good enough to clearly resolve the rings. That would have to wait for the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, in 1655. Still, this was another momentous discovery, and Galileo is often credited, along with Huygens, as the discoverer of the rings.

Eager