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The Century's Top Engineering Challenges
coondoggie writes "The National Science Foundation announced today 14 grand engineering challenges for the 21st century that, if met, would greatly improve how we live. The final choices fall into four themes that are essential for humanity to flourish — sustainability, health, reducing vulnerability, and joy of living. The committee did not attempt to include every important challenge, nor did it endorse particular approaches to meeting those selected. Rather than focusing on predictions or gee-whiz gadgets, the goal was to identify what needs to be done to help people and the planet thrive, the group said. A diverse committee of engineers and scientists — including Larry Page, Robert Langer, and Robert Socolow — came up with the list but did not rank the challenges. Rather, the National Academy of Engineering is offering the public an opportunity to vote on which one they think is most important."
For those suffering: * 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 I suggest adding an item about faster web servers.
Implementation of effective birth control is by far the #1 priority we need to implement to improve global societal well-being. Face it, people: The only obstacles that fundamentally prevent us all from living like Bill Gates in the long-term are social economic ones.
When it comes down to it, if we collectively wanted to prioritize clean water, clean transportation, adequate and healthy food, elimination of communicable diseases, cheap communication tech, adequate housing, renewable energy, yadda-yadda-yadda, we already have the engineering know-how to do so perfectly well for decades to come for some 'reasonable' number of people. Whether 'reasonable' is a number as small as 2 billion or as large as 20 billion is somewhat open to debate, but it's not relevant to the larger point. That point is that no matter what the carrying capacity of our planet (or solar system) ultimately is, there still will be only finite resources collectively available to us, even while many of our sub-populations have religious and/or cultural incentives to continue to multiply exponentially.
No matter how we may strive to fix any specific technological problem, all such a solution can gain us is to stave off the inevitable by (at best) increasing the planet's carrying capacity. The underlying economic problem (exponential population growth) will remain the same, and it will still have only two possible solutions: (1) decreased human birth rate, or (2) increased human death rate.
Where solution (1) is inadequately implemented, solution (2) MUST prevail, and it will often do so in a cataclysmic fashion.
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
Perhaps because there are fundamental problems to be addressed, and the likes of Bloomberg, Gates, and Buffet are nowhere near being like say, Howard Hughes?
... crap spaced is name - the guy in charge of Virgin, or even perhaps Bigelow (not Bam-Bam). I'd list Rutan but he doesn't have the money behind him - he needs OPM.
It's one thing to appear to be solving problems, and donating money does that nicely. It's another to attempt to make money doing something that is actually hard and expensive.
Solar is very expensive. No, oil at 120 bucks/bbl ain't going to make it competitive. Remember (or find) all those posts from the anti-nuclear people about how nuclear power is just too damned expensive. Now know that solar is more expensive than nuclear.
An additional major factor is government regulation. If you've even looked at half, nay a quarter, of what it takes to get started in the power business you'd understand the staggering barrier this is. Donating money is much easier. Not that it really makes a difference in advancing the state of the art.
The third major barrier is the inculcated belief that the government should be doing this. People generally like to spout "Military-industrial complex" as a bad thing (it is), and some even understand they are referencing a speech by Eisenhower. However, most are entirely ignorant of the fact that he mentioned two specific threats. The second was a scientific-government complex.
Today we are reaping the "benefits" of failing to address BOTH/EITHER of his stated looming threats.
Why should anyone invest million or indeed billions into research that the government may suddenly take up the mantle of and give that money to someone other than you, someone with political connections (which happens under both Democrats and Republicans), that will then undercut you since they have a) government funding and b) government protection? Why, indeed.
The closest we have to people of the Howard Hughes caliber are people like Elon Musk (SpaceX) or
Yet, like Hughes, their interests are not in the "mundane" such as terrestrial power generation using "alternative" means. It's in going new places.
Most "alternative energy"[1] advocates are saddles with ideological and political beefs combined with a seeming inability to stifle their expression of those long enough to get real work done. Thus would-be backers tend to shy away and people in general want to back away from such extremism. It boils down to: Those who can't and have money give money so they can feel/appear like they've done something. Those who can't and don't have the money bitch and thus feel like they are "making a difference".
What we need are those who CAN and HAVE the money. Unfortunately, they will run into two major barriers, the hard and the harder one: the laws of physics and the government respectively.
1. The phrase "alternative energy" is itself indicative of and suffering from the ideological slant. Solar and wind are in use, but they have their limits (in particular their sporadic, non-const nature), so they aren't necessarily an "alternative" since they are incomplete solutions yet in place. As a result, "alternative energy" has begun to wear the mantle of "impractical".
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.