NASA managed to re-establish contact in the final days to adjust Skylab’s angle for as smooth a re-entry as possible, and final calculations predicted a trajectory across the Southern Ocean and a sparsely populated tract of Western Australia.

Humans have a lot to think about and even more to process when it comes to solving the problems we face. Somewhere in all the data we churn out is everything from a HIV cure to the perfect videogame character. Computers with narrowly-programmed parameters have the speed but not the creativity to find what we need amid messy abstracts

The term crowdsourcing wasn’t coined until the web age, undoubtedly because it enabled the collecting, aggregating and processing power we need to let crowdsourcing take full flight. Today it’s used for everything from judging the most attractive female posterior to gathering the funds to make movies.