Project summary

Space Science Guy is a 1-person YouTube channel that aims to expose more mainstream audiences to ideas relating to effective altruism and longtermism through space, science, and ethics videos. The project aims to unpack complex concepts in an accessible way to inspire action and new ways of thinking to address pressing problems. This channel has existed for 9 years, mostly under a different name. However, with newfound time to strategically grow the channel, the amount of effort, quality, and focus has substantially increased in the past two months.

I’m seeking funding to work on this project full-time for six months. This would allow me to stop looking for work in the immediate future and solely focus on accelerating channel growth. The goal at the conclusion of this project is for the channel to be self-sustaining for funding so I can continue to grow it part-time alongside a primary job or grow it into a permanent full-time venture.

Who is behind Space Science Guy and what’s your track record?

My name is Michael Dello-Iacovo. I did a PhD in astrogeophysics at UNSW, have been involved with effective altruism-aligned projects since 2015, most notably as CEO of Effective Altruism Australia and Strategy Lead & Researcher at Sentience Institute, and spent 4 years in leadership and public-facing positions with the Animal Justice Party. I have a passion for science and ethics communication, have a strong generalist research background which lends itself well to this project, and have been prolific in publicly communicating on science and ethics. Some notable examples include:

·         Guest on ABC News (TV) to discuss asteroid impact risk,

·         Guest on SBS Insight (TV) to discuss why I’m child-free, citing increasing my giving capacity as one reason (1.8 million people saw this on Facebook alone),

·         Guest on national and local radio to discuss space news, solar thermal energy, and GiveDirectly,

·         Delivering presentations to local EA chapters and at EAGx conferences,

·         Delivering a highly polished presentation on asteroid impact and black swan risks as part of the UNSW Unsomnia presentation series.

I also have some amateur and professional podcasting experience through my own (now retired) podcast Morality is Hard for 10 episodes, and as the host of the Sentience Institute podcast for 6 episodes, and have been a guest on numerous podcasts.

I aim to continue building a science and ethics communication YouTube channel, covering primarily space and EA-aligned topics. I see a lot of opportunity to discuss topics at the boundary between these two, such as discussing cosmic endowment in this video, and AI/artificial sentience through the technology lens.

The channel currently has 6,500 watch hours over 129 videos, and 1,785 subscribers (28% of watch hours and 20% of subscribers from the past 60 days). The first YouTube video uploaded to this channel was in 2015. From then until April 2024, I uploaded an average of one video every two months. Most had a decent quality of research input, but low quality in terms of production, including video, sound, and editing.

Since April 2024 I have begun to professionalise the channel, which includes taking longer with each video to increase the level of research and quality of production, and creating thumbnails for my older videos and deleting some which I didn’t feel belong anymore due to quality or topic. I may continue to delete or remake some more of the older videos at some point.

I have put significantly more effort into my last two longform videos than any prior video. I expect this to be the minimum standard for any future videos, so please take this into consideration rather than looking at the average quality of my past videos. It’s still early, but so far, the stats on my last two videos are strong, with 34.8% and 40% average percentage viewed and one subscriber per 44 and 100 viewers, compared to 23.3% and one per 56 viewers for my previously best performing video.

The most impactful anecdote about this channel’s impact might be that the co-founder of FinalSpark saw my video on artificial sentience and the brain organoid they created. Insofar as there is a chance it caused them to update their views in some way, it may be the highest impact view I’ve received.

These two videos each took an average of 26 hours to create, broken down as 10 hours for research and scriptwriting, 4 hours for filming, 11 hours for editing, and 1 hour for final details such as thumbnail. These were topics that I was already familiar with, so the research and scriptwriting component would be longer for any topic I’m less familiar with. Short videos take significantly less time, but I haven’t made a short video of the same quality yet for a comparison.

Over the last two months, I’ve tested a range of different video formats, including shorts, longform videos, level of seriousness, style, and time invested per video. I tend to get significantly more views on my shorts, and they require significantly less effort to create.

In June 2024 I changed the name of the channel from Vegan Space Scientist, which it had been for around 8 years, to Space Science Guy. I did this to try and reach a broader audience reflect the fact that I don’t primarily make videos about veganism anymore, although animals will come up as a topic incidentally, for example when talking about moral circle expansion in this video. I also worried that the name was turning away potential viewers to videos that had nothing to do with veganism or animal protection, based anecdotally on several disparaging comments I received in the past few months.

I receive a remarkably high amount of engagement per view on my videos. From my research, one comment for every 200 views is considered strong YouTube engagement. The typical ratio for my channel is one comment for every 40 views, exceeding the above benchmark by five times. The comments I receive are often quite long and insightful and create further discussion. This speaks to the community that is organically developing. Speaking to its growth potential, this engagement is around three times higher than the average of the last four videos by Robert Miles and Rational Animations, two of the highest quality EA-aligned YouTube channels I can think of.

My most viewed YouTube video is this video on antinatalism through an EA lens, which received 38,700 views/3,000 watch hours and 1,118 comments over four years. This is in spite of the fact that that I was using a digital camera microphone, and the camera was out of focus for the first half of the video. 684 of my 1785 subscribers and 3,000 out of 6,500 watch hours at the time of writing came from that video. I don’t talk about antinatalism as much anymore, but I do see an opportunity to reach this audience on topics like effective altruism and artificial sentience, which I have as a guest twice on the Antinatalism Advocacy Podcast to discuss effective altruism and artificial sentience, strategically releasing a video about artificial sentience at the same time. I should also say that, if there are concerns about optics, I consider myself a soft-antinatalist and am not an efilist.

Most of my short videos have also been posted on Tiktok, but they’ve underperformed there, so I’ve all but given up on that platform.

What are this project’s goals?

Primarily, the goal of this project is to expose more people to ideas and ways of thinking relating to effective altruism, and to encourage people to take action, such as donating to EA-aligned causes or work on various EA-aligned cause areas with their career. The secondary goal is science education and communication more generally.

I see part of the value of this project as being a test of my personal fit for science and ethics communication as a career path. I’m currently working on this project unpaid, and have put in perhaps 170 hours over the past two months. There is a plausible path to earning money from this, but it will take significant upfront time and money investment. Receiving funding would give me a chance to progress towards that point without compromising on research integrity and the other values of the channel.

YouTube requires either 4,000 watch hours on longform videos or 10 million views on shorts in the last year to become monetized for ad revenue. I have switched to focusing on longform videos due to it being an easier pathway to monetisation for YouTube, but may create more shortform videos once I reach that goal. At my current trajectory, I expect to be monetized on YouTube in approximately 4 months. Earning money through sponsors and brand deals is another potential income stream but is more difficult to forecast. I will not take any money from any organisation that does not align with my values, which you could broadly phrase as ‘any organisation that has values or goals in contrast to that of effective altruism’.

How will I achieve these goals?

I’ll achieve my primary goal by creating high quality videos and building an engaged audience that is interested in space, technology, and related ethical ideas. I’ll continue to improve the quality of my videos through better equipment and spending longer on each video.

Refusing to compromise on honesty, research integrity, and trust are an important part of my long-term vision. I listen to my viewers and try to make content that they want to see within my scope. Where possible I give my videos a hook by using recent news or contemporary events, but also make them timeless with a broader discussion. Where it makes sense, I’ll also look to collaborate with other YouTube channels and interview key individuals to increase my reach and growth.

I could create more short videos like this one (but with higher quality) about Vasili Arkhipov and nuclear war risk to explain EA-aligned concepts. This is a good place to say that I welcome feedback from any prospective funders on what types of videos they’re more excited to see me make.

The next video in my pipeline is about radiation safety with the hook of measuring radiation in my neighbourhood with a Geiger counter. I have arranged to record an interview with a specialist from a radiation safety body for this video. Depending on how this goes, I may include more expert interviews as part of my videos. Another video in my pipeline is about the frequency of asteroid impacts of different sizes, with the hook being me searching for micrometeorites in my neighborhood with a magnet and a microscope.

Ideas for other future videos include:

·         What are the downsides of space exploration (Dark Skies)?

·         What will we eat in space if we become spacefaring (slotting in a discussion about the inefficiency of animal products)?

·         The science and ethics of terraforming (longtermism)

·         Visualisation of what current economic growth looks like if it continues into the future using lego blocks as a hook for discussing some of Robin Hansons ideas

Potential impact

The potential impact is to reach a lot of people with EA ideas by tapping into the huge public interest in space. I’m not aware of any EA-aligned YouTube channels which focus mostly on the space angle, so I think there is potentially some low-hanging fruit here.

With that said, it’s very difficult to estimate how many views a single YouTube video will get in advance, let alone predict the growth of a channel, especially for smaller channels. As a lower bound estimate assuming zero growth, if I continue to get around 200 hours of watch time per video, one video per week would give 4,800 hours of watch time over six months, which is 4,800 hours of people’s attention on EA-related topics and ideas. At one video per month, where I’d likely be in the mid-term without funding, I’d be at just 1,200 hours of watch time.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

The most likely cause for this project to fail is that the channel doesn’t get a lot of extra engagement, doesn’t grow, and is not plausibly on a trajectory to being self-sufficient by the time this funding runs out.

Another risk is that after 6 months of working on this full-time I decide that I don’t have a good personal fit for YouTube. I’d see this as only a partial failure, since there would be value in the existing videos being public, and in my having tested my fit for this work.

How will this funding be used?

The first ~$5,000 would go to equipment, particularly a camera since I currently use my phone, software, licensing, and possibly paying an editor to improve the quality of my videos and reach a wider audience. The remainder would go towards allowing me to work on this project full-time.

Items I anticipate purchasing with enough funding include (roughly in ascending order of priority):

·         Desk microphone (audio quality is king for YouTube)

·         Camera and related accessories

·         Green screen

·         Training to upskill in filming, video editing, etc.

·         Music and stock footage licensing

·         Paying someone to edit my videos

·         Software licensing

·         Miscellaneous equipment (e.g., I’ve bought a Geiger counter, a magnet, and a microscope for upcoming videos)

Minimum funding

1330 USD would allow me to purchase some equipment to professionalise my production setup, but not allow me to go full-time.

Funding goal

35,000 AUD (23,295 USD) is the minimum I would need to stop looking for work (which would cause me to lose my unemployment payments), and work on this full-time for 6 months. This is $10,000 more than the minimum wage salary for a full-time worker in Australia, $5,000 of which is for equipment and other expenses, and $5,000 of which is just extra salary for living expenses. Based on my research of other EA-aligned YouTube channels that have received grants, this salary/stipend seems about right. This would be a significant pay cut compared to previous roles I’ve had, but it feels acceptable for six months of testing a new career path.

Additional funding

If I received additional funding, I would use this as further runway to allow me to work on this full-time for longer. I don’t have any training in video recording and editing and am mostly self-taught via YouTube guides, so I may spend some funding on a training course.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

Basically none. Since registering a Buy Me a Coffee page, I have received $78 in donations. I intend to apply for other funding, including the EA Infrastructure Fund, the Long-term Future Fund, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and Open Philanthropy’s Career development and transition funding.

What would I do without funding?

Without funding, I would ideally find a full-time or near-full-time role in the for-purpose space, ideally in an EA/longtermism-aligned research, communications, or strategy role, and work on YouTube in my spare time. I expect this would reduce my rate of high-quality videos from once a week to once a month and would reduce their potential quality due to lower quality production equipment. However, there is a chance that with a full-time job I would not have the time or energy to make videos at this rate, or perhaps at all.

If I were to find a part-time or casual job or some consulting work that is enough to sustain me, there is a chance that I would just do this and spend my spare time working on YouTube.

Miscellaneous notes

If you think the content is not specifically EA enough or you’re not excited that some videos are about space/science with no obvious EA application, I’m open to a structure where funding pays for say half of the expenses, and I pay for the rest out of pocket (I have some runway from previous employment, so this is plausibly manageable).

19.1% of my audience is 18-24, 31.7% is 25-34, and 22.4% is 35-44, which is about right for what my ideal target audience would be. However, 92.2% of my audience is male, and I would ideally like to achieve a more balanced demographic split. 29.1% watch from the US, 10.6% watch from Australia, 6.9% watch from the UK, 5.6% watch from Canada, and 4.6% watch from Germany.