The 14 greatest engineering challenges for the 21st century?

Posted by Thomas Thu, 21 Feb 2008 04:54:30 +0000

This looks like an exceptionally bad list of things to explicitly set out to accomplish, even if my ultimate boss was on the list of contributors:

* Make solar energy affordable
* Provide energy from fusion
* Develop carbon sequestration methods
* Manage the nitrogen cycle
* Provide access to clean water
* Restore and improve urban infrastructure
* Advance health informatics
* Engineer better medicines
* Reverse-engineer the brain
* Prevent nuclear terror
* Secure cyberspace
* Enhance virtual reality
* Advance personalized learning
* Engineer the tools for scientific discovery

Any list of far reaching predictions is usually way off, but for something so broad as things to engineer in the next 100 years, would be things like:

* Get everyone to get along through broad cultural education
* Increase global quality of education by 2 orders of magnitude
* Make more good food and make it ridiculously cheap (including water)
* Make eating better and exercise absolutely foolproof, including reducing people’s dependence on drugs (the legal kind)
* Find a transportation fuel to replace oil
* Get the US over its aversion to fission

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Comments

  1. Chad said on February 26, 2008 @ 6:12 pm:

    Cause fission roxors.

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