by podesta67

Yesterday(s) I stayed awake roughly 36 hours as I lived through the final day of the Academia Film Olomouc festival, and then drove – flew – drove home from Olomouc, Czech Republic to Edwardsville, Illinois, USA. This was an accidental dry run for next weeks Hangoutathon. As I suspect will happen next week, I hit my bed and slept for 12 straight hours. As won’t get to happen next week, this 36 hours of wakeful adventure and travel left me with a lot of time to reflect. One of the things this trip taught me is I’ve managed to create my own reality as I, and those I work and play with, have tried to shape the world into what we want it to be. I’m going to write about that more on starstryder (Stay tuned for link).

CosmoQuest is a major part of what I’ve poured my life into for the past several years. When asked on Saturday what I wanted to accomplish before I died, I said that I wanted to see CosmoQuest become financially secure enough, and staffed well enough, that if I get hit by a bus CosmoQuest will keep going. I think that today I have a staff and collaboration base that can together keep what we have going until the money runs out. But… I don’t know if they could keep things going beyond the money, and that deeply troubles me.

In order for CosmoQuest to reach the point that an accidental bus accident won’t destroy our program, we need your help. I know that’s a morbid thought but… That’s how I have to think.

We need your help in a lot of different ways. While I’ll never turn away money, what we need just as much is help promoting what we do, help (in the form of constructive criticism) learning how to do what we do even better, help (often in the form of advising a grateful me) learning how to understand money/funding/commercial worlds, help understanding you need to keep our site interesting. … Basically we need this to be a two way dialogue where we’ll engage you in science and you’ll help us grow and help us understand the non-science factors required for success.

Part of my reflection was deciding I want to take the time this week to explain to you, beloved community, what all goes into making CosmoQuest: what inspiration, what funding, what, well, dreaming makes everything possible.

Over the next several days, I’m going to put out a series of blog posts and permanent content pages that discuss the origins of CosmoQuest, and go into what kind of funding we need, and exactly how you can help. The first pages are here:

1. The Making of CosmoQuest
   1. Origin Story