14-Year-Old Forecaster Challenges My P(Doom) — Eli Goldfine

Let's talk about your current project.

I know you've been vibe coding with Claude to control telescopes throughout the country, right? It's kind of decentralized or it's a network of telescopes that are all going to be talking to your server and you're going to coordinate them to collect data.

Tell us more about that.

So what we're doing is basically there's been a rush of new consumer telescopes called Seastar, specifically their S-50 model, and they're actually very, very well designed.

They've become extremely popular for consumers, but people have them out and they're imaging the same five objects that's recommended to them in the app or whatever.

And so what we're trying to do is we're autonomously gonna control them because lots of people have them and our value proposition to people is like you already have this thing you can join our network for little to no effort and all you have to do is bring your telescope inside when it rains and then you get co-credited on actual astronomical discoveries um Find something.

So it's pretty cool.

And I'm actually working with a little bit.

I'm working with an engineer at the University of Vienna for the extremely large telescope on this.

So, yeah.

Amazing.

So it's kind of like SETI at home, but it's not about using people's compute resources.

It's about using their visual sensor resources.

Yeah, that's a good assessment.

And then we collect the data and we do post-processing on it to get the metadata of the photometry.

And then we can submit that to data organizations.

And then we also run AI image processing.

So the AI will run the processing on all of it.

If it detects something, it can give us an alert.

Then we can send it to different organizations who can verify whether it's a discovery or not.

It's a pretty exciting project.

Hopefully we'll get a couple dozen people using it or something.

It should be pretty interesting to see how that plays out.

I'm pretty curious about how much of an impact this is going to have, because obviously there's observatories distributed all around the world.

But what are the applications where people are like, oh man, if only a bunch of people went into their backyard and pointed their relatively small telescope at something, that would be so valuable.