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200,000 participants—and you might wonder if there is much more room for citizen science to grow. Or has the public appetite for citizen science already been exhausted? There’s a nice way of thinking about these questions, inspired by an analysis of the analogous questions for Wikipedia done by the author Clay Shirky, of New York University. To start, let’s figure out a rough estimate of the total effort involved in a project such as Galaxy Zoo. So far, the Zooites have done approximately 150 million galaxy classifications. If each classification takes, say, 12 seconds, then that works out to 500 thousand hours of work. That’s like having 250 employees work full time for a year! While this is an amazing amount of work, on the scale of society as a whole it’s a drop in the bucket. On average Americans watch five hours of television per day, which over the course of a year means that Americans are watching more than 500 billion hours of television. That’s a million Galaxy Zoo projects!

Let’s look at an activity that’s closer to Galaxy Zoo in scale. The English soccer club Manchester United seats 76,000 at their home stadium, Old Trafford. Games take two hours, with stoppages, so the spectators at a game are spending roughly 150,000 hours of time in total, nearly a third of the amount of time the Zooites have spent classifying galaxies! To put it another way, imagine that you filled up the Manchester United stadium, and instead of watching soccer, you asked people to classify galaxies for a couple of hours. If you did that three times, then you’d roughly match the effort put into Galaxy Zoo. Of course, Galaxy Zoo has been ring three years as I write, while Manchester United plays dozens of home games each year. So the Zooites are a notch or two down from the devotion shown by Manchester United’s home game fans. A closer comparison is to a much smaller soccer club, such as the Bristol Rovers, who get a few thousand fans to each home game. There’s a great deal of room for citizen science to grow!

Shirky has coined the phrase “cognitive surplus” to describe our society’s disposable time and energy—all the time we collectively have when we’re not dealing with the basic obligations of life, such as making a living or feeding our family. It’s the time we put into leisure activities such as watching television, or going out with friends, or relaxing with a hobby. Mostly, these are activities we do individually or in small groups. What the online tools do is make it easy to coordinate complex creative projects in a large group. It’s always been possible for a large group of people to get together and cheer at a soccer game. But it’s much harder to get a large group of people together to work toward a complex creative goal. One way is to pay all those people to come together and form a hierarchy organized into managers and subordinates. We call that a company or a nonprofit or a government. But without money it’s historically been difficult to hold such complex creative projects together. Online tools make it much easier to do this complex coordination, even without money as a motivator. As Shirky poetically puts it:

We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love.

Projects such as Galaxy Zoo and Foldit are doing just that, using our society’s cognitive surplus to solve scientific problems.

How much of our society’s cognitive surplus will ever be used to do citizen science? Today it’s not possible to answer that question. Citizen science is in the early days of a major expansion enabled by online tools. How far it ultimately expands will depend upon the imagination of scientists in coming up with clever new ways to connect with laypeople, ways that inspire them and help them make contributions they find meaningful. You get a glimpse of this in the story of one of the most prolific participants in Galaxy Zoo, a woman named Aida Berges. Berges is a 53-year-old