All hail the Zooniverse
All hail the Zooniverse! The Zooniverse is the largest collection of online citizen science projects (which includes Planet Four) and as of Friday, the Zooniverse is now 1 million people strong!
Image Credit: Zooniverse
Congratulations to everyone involved on reaching this milestone! In just a single year, Planet Four represents over 40,000 of the 1 million registered Zooniverse volunteers. (This number just represents the logged-in volunteers. Over 100,000 people have participated in Planet Four to date). Check out the global map of the Zoonvierse community (made by Rob Simpson) to see where all the registered volunteers (including Planet Four participants) come from. If you don’t have a Zooniverse account, you can sign up today.
To give some history, the Zooniverse started back in 2007 with the launch of Galaxy Zoo to study galaxy morphology. It turns out that human beings are the best beating computers at determining whether a galaxy is a spiral or an elliptical or if the galaxy hosts a bar at its center or not. 7 years later, Galaxy Zoo is in its 4th iteration and the Zooniverse now hosts over 20 online citizen science projects which have contributed to date in total over 50 scientific publications. You can see how the Zooniverse has evolved over time in this blog post by the Daily Zooniverse. Although the Zooniverse started in astronomy, it now spans a wide range of fields including projects determining if whales have accents and transcribing World War 2 diaries.
Congratulations to everyone involved in the Planet Four community and thank you for the clicks. We couldn’t do the science without your contributions and your time. The Planet Four science team is working hard to use your classifications to understand the seasonal processes on the South Pole of Mars. Stay tuned to the blog for updates on our progress over the coming weeks and months.
Keep your fan and blotch mappings in Manhattan coming at http://www.planetfour.org and don’t forget to check out all the Zooniverse projects at http://www.zooniverse.org
Planet Four Blog 
I BEEN ACTIVE ON MANY ZOO PROJECTS AND CONSTANTLY CHECK THE NEW LAUNCHES, NEED TO KNOW THAT THE DATA TAGGING WE ARE DOING WILL BE USED FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE COMMON MAN OR THE BIG INDUSTRIALISTS WHENEVER IN THE FUTURE, ESPECIALLY MOON AND MARS DATA..
Darshan, I agree completely. From Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit on April 12, 1961, space became part of humanity’s universal cultural heritage, just as the stars had been since the days of the Babylonian astronomers and even before. Private industry will surely find a place “out there”, but our best and greatest journey will be the human one. All of humanity needs to see the “final frontier” as touching their lives in some way — expanding our collective horizon to the point where, finally, we may attain a Level One civilization – defined by Carl Sagan as a social system that coheres at a planetary level, beyond nation states, beyond multi-national corps.
There’s some hope here on earth: the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs focuses on the international, peaceful uses of outer space.
http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/
UN/OOSA’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) was given its mandate in 1961, the same year Yuri Gagarin entered the history books. Seems kind of appropriate in retrospect.
hey Noharr, thankx for your comment, hope all here on this forum and the tagging community also takes a note of this and spread awareness. as todays world is marred with political and religious sectarianism i dont know how much to believe even on organizations like UN where all of us know on numerous instances the decisions are so biased and seems clearly coming form the biggies of the first world et al. well but Zoo surely is a freshness and reprive from all of this and ofcourse as you said- could be a platform where from social system which coheres at a planetary level as we move towards future in space. 🙂