Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

I am legally blind; I cannot drive without prescription lenses and when I do not have lenses on, I only see blurry blobs of color. When I took the time to attempt to clarify galaxies, stars, and other anomalies, I guess I expected my contact lenses to assist in my quest to open myself to a world of amateur astronomy. This was not the case.

In many instances, I squinted, I held my laptop in various angles, I heightened the intensity of the brightness on my screen, I inverted the photo, and then overall, I just felt like what I was working towards was an inevitably wasted effort. Here is the dilemma: I think citizen science is great if you have the background and if you are aware of what to look for; I, on the other hand, feel like another statistic in the pool of inaccurate data in science.  There are many people in society that have no formal education or training in sciences, yet they have just as much capability and knowledge as a gentleman who graduated from Harvard. Not only do I not have an interest in astronomy, I despise the subject. Good riddance to twinkle,twinkle little star and the nursery rhymes that tried to change my mind. I can understand and appreciate the idea of citizen science, but as a whole, it will never be accurate.

To eliminate bias, I also took part in a project I thought I would enjoy, which requested volunteers to classify little sea creatures of the saltwater floors. Who wouldn’t enjoy classifying and learning about Nemo’s neighbors? Well, turned out that pessimistic person was I. This became a repetitive and boring process of looking at the same species of scallops, starfish, and the occasional hermit crabs. I am all for the idea of taking part in research, definitely if it is something I am interested in, but Zooniverse just wasn’t my forte. I believe that citizen science is the fraud branch amongst scientists and the general public, making us feel like we are involved in their occasional discoveries. Then for the general public, we feel stupid whilst attempting to guess the measurements of scallops and the amount of spirals in a galaxy formation, yet we are praised for our good intentions to have attempted to help. Don't get me wrong; there are the several whom actually input valid, hard-thought data, but the majority are people who guess as they go. Sounds like a red tape scenario: may the wasted efforts begin.