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The following are elaborations on some of the primary topics covered by Black Sky Nexus:

Large-scale networks of cooperation
With the rise of smart contract technology it has never been easier to globally pool and self-administer capital over common missions, allowing people to work together towards anti-industrialist, democratic societies that favor ecologically sound technologies and economies.

DAOs that exist today typically have under 10,000 active members and are most successful when they have focused missions or projects. Black Sky would like to explore the possibilities of what larger scale DAOs, with as many as 100 million members, can accomplish and how these DAOs would operate. An autonomous organization with this many members entails each individual only contribute a small amount of capital on a yearly basis, such as $10 to $100, to be able to make a large-scale impact.

Research for this will draw on Öcalan’s democratic confederalism, John Restakis’ “Humanizing the Economy”, the outputs of the Metagovernance Project, and Design Global, Manufacture Local, the latter being an emerging productive model converging the digital commons with local manufacturing technologies.

To lead towards a realistic implementation, the following technical areas will also require analysis: 
- Solutions for anonymous participation;
- Sybil protection method to enable democratic governance;
- Innovative systems for accountability;
- Collaborative systems to share and distribute knowledge, analyze proposals, and prioritize ideas.
Open source resources for new crypto explorers
Newcomers to cryptocurrency often have difficulty finding comprehensive resources pertinent to their specific areas of interest. Additionally, the crypto community has created many resource guides in the form of blog posts or Notion spaces, but these resources cannot be easily edited, enhanced, or expanded upon by others beyond the original authors. Black Sky Wiki is an open source project that will include an evolving knowledge base that will initially focus on resources for those interested in learning about cryptocurrency, contributing to or founding DAOs, creating NFTs, and having more privacy or anonymity.
The role of technology and privacy in the evolution of human rights
Internet culture has deviated from the earlier cypherpunk/hacker ethos of protecting freedom of speech online. Simultaneously entrepreneurs in software and tech now monopolize the market with sophisticated surveillance technology. The average person has sacrificed privacy and freedom for convenience without transparency. As technology evolves and becomes more ubiquitous, an amenable definition of human rights that is holistically integrated into technology development is crucial.
How crypto can benefit the arts and vice versa
Unpredictably, a vehicle for greater crypto adoption has been art in the form of non-fungible tokens. Black Sky Nexus is exploring the relationship between art and technology, and its potential to impact artistic expression in novel ways. NFTs, AR, and innovative printing techniques are traversing the boundaries of the physical and extending the medium of the written word and artistic communication.

To elaborate on the role of art in innovation, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s classic The Theories of Games and Economic Behavior makes the profound point that the only strategy an opponent cannot predict is a random strategy. Black Sky Zine will deploy unpredictable, comedic, memetic, satirical, and even bordering on absurd content as a heuristic strategy to open the minds of readers to new ideas through these art forms.Black Sky would also like to explore the role of crypto counterculture in providing arts grants, fellowships, and support to working artists of various mediums.
New modalities for healing the ecosphere
Addiction and mental health issues have reached a state of crisis all around the world. Alternative plant medicines may be able to accelerate mental and physical healing as well as having a marked impact in addiction recovery. PsyDAO is an emerging organization focused on funding advancements to psychedelic research with cryptocurrency. Black Sky Nexus will explore how crypto-enabled medical research can innovate alternative medicine in ways traditional institutions would either not consider or would only offer at exploitative costs.

Other areas of interest for crypto-backed research include ways of living more compatibly with the ecosphere such as: regenerative agriculture, off the grid living, and ecovillages.
Humanity’s relationship with the cosmos
We’re interested in the ways that cryptocurrency can further extraterrestrial intelligence research and facilitate a decentralized space program. Ideally humans can take preventive measures so as to avoid bringing colonial practices beyond Earth once space settlement and resource extraction become possible.

Black Sky Nexus is currently in talks with Marc Cohen, a NASA veteran with over 30 years of experience in the space industry, to collaborate on a project in which the topics of space exploration and psychoactive plant research are made more open to the general public, pairing experts with everyday citizens to further our knowledge base.

Beyond these more practical projects, Black Sky envisions the space programs of the future having a deeper integration with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. There is mass appeal for understanding more about the existence of non-human intelligent life on Earth, yet the research has usually occurred by disparate groups. Black Sky Nexus is interested in the ways in which cryptocurrency and decentralized organizations can accelerate coming to more well-informed conclusions about the question: “Are we alone?”
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