"There was great speculation in the scientific community about how the problem would be solved..."

finding things with crowds -- 5/5/15:
"In December 2009, DARPA offered $40,000 to anyone who could locate ten balloons that they had placed in plain sight around the continental United States. 
DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an organization under the U.S. Department of Defense. DARPA created the Internet (more precisely, they designed and built the first computer network, ARPANET, on which the current World Wide Web is modeled).

At issue was how the United States might solve large-scale problems of national security and defense, and to test the country's capacity for mobilization during times of urgent crisis.
Replace 'balloons' with 'dirty bombs' or other explosives, and the relevance of the problem is clear.
...One of the interesting questions that social networking engineers and Department of Defense workers had wondered about is how many people it would take to cover the entire country in the event of a real national emergency, such as searching for an errant nuclear weapon. 
In the case of the DARPA balloons, it required only 4,665 people and fewer than nine hours." "