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."

Comments

"Prevent nuclear terror"

[Sylos]

How is that an engineering feat? Seems more like a people feat.

Re:"Prevent nuclear terror"

[Zeinfeld]

How is that an engineering feat? Seems more like a people feat.

Ever heard of social engineering?

Seriously, what is securing cyberspace if not a people problem? The machines don't cause the problems, people do.

Securing cyberspace is easy, building systems to secure cyberspace that users can actually use is the hard part. People have been telling me to get a Mac as the solution to all my usability problems for years. So today I bought one.

OK so the Mac is nicer in many respects, but mostly as far as I am concerned on the hardware package side than the software. But the security usability is no better. None of the assistants in the shop were able to solve the simple security tasks I proposed. Which is good for me I suppose since there would be no point in trying to solve an already solved problem.

Now securing the fifty year old banking IT system, now that is much harder than securing the Internet, and that is the system the criminals are attacking because that is where the money is.

Re:"Prevent nuclear terror"

[dasunt]

> Provide energy from fusion

Shouldn't a list of the greatest engineering challenges be written by someone who understands the issues?

I'd like to see the reasoning behind why they are promoting theoretical fusion designs over working, proven fission designs. It better not be based on the fallacy that fusion doesn't result in radioactive waste.

Re:"Prevent nuclear terror"

[ApharmdB]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Waste_management

The biggest challenge, by far

[stox]

Getting funding for the top 14 engineering challenges.

Re:The biggest challenge, by far

[Zeinfeld]

Getting funding for the top 14 engineering challenges.

Well that is the point of the exercise here, NSF trying to get money from Congress. But its more of an aspirational list of goals and the real problem is that the feedback system is out of whack.

You might imagine that either industry or academia would care about stopping Internet Crime, but what Industry actually cares about is making the numbers at the end of the quarter and the best way to do that is to make your bank, business or other crime target a less attractive target than the business next door.

Academia is meant to do basic research, but the measurement of production is minimum publishable units, publish or perish. And to get a paper published it has to be novel rather than important or useful. So we know how to do secure email in principle but nobody uses it in practice - across the Internet at least. The academics never quite finished the job and the incentives are not quite right for industry to be bothered.

Often an academic will solve a problem long before it is understood to be a problem. By the time the problem is recognized and the time is right to finish the job and make it useful the field has moved on. Nobody is going to get the credit for pointing out that Fred proposed a solution for a problem twenty years ago.

Most academic papers in info security are describing solutions to boutique cryptographic puzzles. Real world constraints are irrelevant. So at FC this year there was a paper that started with the idea of stopping counterfeiting of currency by printing barcodes on the notes. Good, interesting. The scheme then involved people scanning them with their cell phone camera. WTF ???? Wrong problem, the challenge the fed is trying to solve is to spot the introduction of fake notes quickly, they can do that with scanners in banks. The banks can be persuaded to install scanners but no consumer is going to spend time scanning their change at the convenience store with a cell phone.

Re:The biggest challenge, by far

[flyingsquid]

Getting funding for the top 14 engineering challenges.

Well, it wouldn't be such a challenge if, you know, all the goals weren't so incredibly LAME. "Health informatics"? Bo-ring! Here's *my* list of challenges:

(1) Flying car.

(2) Cure for the hangover.

(3) Sex robot. As kinky as Madonna with the flexibility of a contortionist.

(4) Plug-in memory expansions so you can learn useful skills, equations, etc. without sitting through boring lectures and tests.

(5) Baldness cure.

(6) Beer that makes you skinnier instead of fatter.

(7) Dog-cat hybrid. Like a cat, it doesn't need your attention constantly, but it pays attention when you want it to, like a dog. It's comes when you call it like a dog, but it's clean like a cat. Plus, it barks AND purrs.

(8) Teleporter. I'm sick of commuting.

(9) Perpetual youth.

(10) Ballpoint pen that doesn't run out of ink just when you need it most.

(11) Formulas that make you grow bigger or smaller, just like Alice in Wonderland.

(12) Television remote with built in homing device and tiny little robot legs. So even if you misplace it, it always finds its way back to where it should be.

(13) A version of Microsoft Office that doesn't, you know, suck so much.

(14) Slashdot editors who are genetically engineered so that they can actually spell and are familiar with basic punctuation and grammar.

Re:The biggest challenge, by far

[wall0159]

Based upon your list, I'd conclude that you're

1) a nerd
2) a drunk
3) virginal
4) ignorant
5) bald
6) overweight
7) lonely
8) lazy
9) middle-aged
10) a stained-shirt wearer
11) have an inferiority complex
12) TV obsessed
13) a nerd (did I say that already?)
14) somewhat OCD

but hey! it's just a list ;-)

(ps. I'm just taking the piss - please take this in the spirit in which it is intended.)

what about DARPA's list?

[pha7boy]

that's what I would like to see. DARPA's list. Of course, that's probably classified. as for the NSF's list, "access to clean water" is not so much an egineering challenge as a bureacratic and resource management challenge. Same with preventing nuclear terror. I would much rather add "creating a functioning AI" (though not sure this is engineering), improve baterry techology, and redesign propulsion methods.

Re:what about DARPA's list?

[TubeSteak]

as for the NSF's list, "access to clean water" is not so much an egineering challenge as a bureacratic and resource management challenge. Do you realize what you're asking for by calling the clean water issue a "bureacratic and resource management challenge"? You're asking for fundamental changes in laws & enforcement in poor countries that are rife with government corruption, lax/nonexistent oversight, pollution, contamination of water supplies and tribal divisions.

Turning the clean water issue into an engineering challenge means you can bypass all that crap & distribute the solution directly to the villagers who need it.

I caught this on the news the other day.
The idea is to dig a well, strap a playground whirl to a mechanical pump & have kids pump the water up into a big holding tank. It'll only be useful in villages where there's a school or a large number of children to keep the thing spinning, but it's a perfect engineering solution that means villagers don't have to use river water that people & animals have used as a toilet, trough & clothes/dish washer.

I would much rather add "creating a functioning AI" (though not sure this is engineering), improve baterry techology, and redesign propulsion methods. That's amazingly selfish... Access to clean water is & always has been "the century's top engineering challenge" somewhere in the world. The worldwide industrial revolution has made the problem worse in many countries, but there are still many many areas where finding clean water is the same problem it was a thousand years ago.

Re:what about DARPA's list?

[donscarletti]

Do you realize what you're asking for by calling the clean water issue a "bureacratic and resource management challenge"? You're asking for fundamental changes in laws & enforcement in poor countries that are rife with government corruption, lax/nonexistent oversight, pollution, contamination of water supplies and tribal divisions.

Turning the clean water issue into an engineering challenge means you can bypass all that crap & distribute the solution directly to the villagers who need it.

If the engineering solution involves something that has any monetary, government corruption will make it infeasible. If it involves anything but extremely small scale and localised cooperation then lax/nonexistent oversight will make it infeasible. If the solution involves taking water in its current state from the environment in any way then pollution and contamination of water supplies will make it infeasible. If it involves anything that is possible to destroy to impoverish its users then tribal divisions will make it infeasible. I guarantee that any possible solution for any engineering problem is either stealable, destroyable, polluteable or can be distroyed by arguing.

Engineering HAS a solution for this problem, have a clean government to provide strong oversight, manage pollution and contamination and overcome divisions to retain the harmony that lead to this. We can build pipes, wells and treatment plants very effectively, even servicing huge countries like Canada and countries with massive populations like the United States. Development is easy, it's just a natural product of peace and desire to improve the lives of one's people. I have a strong feeling that India's growing middle class will lead the way for that country to become mostly clean and healthy in a few decades time, the Chinese government is somewhat working on fixing the problems with its basic services to poor rural areas and is furiously trying to clean up the worst of the pollution in time for the Olympic games. The poorer nations of South America seem to be creating public services like fresh water, unfortunately sometimes it's a little rocky like in Bolivia but they're getting there. Soon the only nations on earth without these services will be the nations (predominantly African) torn by civil and ethnic strife and that's the problem. That's the only problem since even if the water wasn't killing people, people would be. That's why people problems must be addressed first.

I would add:

[Frank Grimes]

I would add: An electric battery with an energy density comparable to gasoline.

Re:I would add:

[rah1420]

Good luck with that. An oil company would buy up the rights and suppress that just like they did with the Ovonic battery.

See the section in the linked article entitled "Patent Encumbrance" and then go to Cobasys and try and buy a rack of Ovonic NiMH batteries to build your own plug-in electric vehicle. Let me know how that works out for you.

Re:I would add:

[nexuspal]

Heh, very close to done, on a previous article here on slashdot, a discovery come through that would do such a thing. In fact, IIRC, lithium ion batteries are already packing more power than high explosives, and close to as much energy as gasoline per unit of mass.

Re:I would add:

[cgraves]

I would add: An electric battery with an energy density comparable to gasoline. The problem is that gasoline combustion gets about 80% by weight of its reactants from the air (O2). Though the energy stored in batteries can be much more efficiently used, they store their oxidizer inside, so even if we could gasoline itself in a battery, it cannot be as dense. Unless it is an air battery, at which point you are looking more and more like a fuel cell.

But, yes hopefully we can approach "comparable".

let's see

[Darth_brooks]

* Prevent nuclear terror

how exactly should we do this, hmmm? get rid of all the nuclear weapons on earth, destroy all knowledge relating to the atom, and shoot all nuclear waste into space? Better extinguish the sun while we're at it, and ignore that goal of fusion power since it is "nuclear" fusion. Why not just pick a less ambiguous goal like "end uphappiness."

* Secure cyberspace

* Enhance virtual reality

1996 just filed a lawsuit for trademark infringement.

* Advance personalized learning

* Engineer the tools for scientific discovery

W00t! Buzzword bingo!

There are some decent goals in there, but like so many projects laid out for engineers, they are engineering projects laid out entirely by non-engineers. There's no thought to implementation here, just feel good "hey we oughta" crap.

Re:let's see

[Torvaun]

Preventing nuclear terror is easy, just invent a better and more easily accessible weapon for them to use. Home gene-splicing labs would probably do it.

Holy funding program Batman

[zappepcs]

What? World peace is not on the list?

* Make solar energy affordable
- Just wait till oil goes to 120/barrel

* Provide energy from fusion
- isn't that solar energy?

* Develop carbon sequestration methods
- I thought the atmosphere of Earth was doing a good job already?

* Manage the nitrogen cycle
- Fat chance with corn farmers working over time

* Provide access to clean water
- That would just ruin the coke/pepsi wars... not happening

* Restore and improve urban infrastructure
- Isn't this program already underway? I understand NYC has had some renovations. (yeah, that's low)

* Advance health informatics
- subcutaneous ID chips?

* Engineer better medicines
- Yeah, big pharma has been doing good at this one lately - check Chantix

* Reverse-engineer the brain
- Ok, this is a new idea, lets get behind this one guys, what do you say?

* Prevent nuclear terror
- GW has this one covered, right, he's the decider guy.

* Secure cyberspace
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA here's your sign

* Enhance virtual reality
- Why not worry about first life a bit more for a while?

* Advance personalized learning
- Yes, All those free or lowered tuition costs, online resources, open course materials... those are great ideas, hope someone does that soon.

* Engineer the tools for scientific discovery
- This will obviously become reality and really simple once the brain has been reverse engineered??? WTF

Ok, seriously, is it just me or does everyone else think perhaps not smoke so much weed should be on the list?

Who are these idiots?

[Anonymous Coward]

* Develop carbon sequestration methods
No thanks, I'd prefer real alternative energy solutions.

* Restore and improve urban infrastructure
Could you be any more vague?

* Prevent nuclear terror
I thought these were engineering challenges.

* Advance personalized learning
Give me a break.

Missing option: holes.

[w3woody]

I'm with Scott Adams: Holes.

To summarize, what we need is a better way to dig cheap holes.

Think of it: with a cheap way to drill a hole we can drill down close to the mantle of the earth for cheap geothermal. With a cheap way to dig a tunnel we can expand our freeway infrastructure by placing new roads below ground. Infrastructure can be run underground more cheaply--if we have a cheap hole to run them through.

Holes are the future.

Re:Missing option: holes.

[edwardpickman]

"I'm with Scott Adams: Holes.

To summarize, what we need is a better way to dig cheap holes.

Think of it: with a cheap way to drill a hole we can drill down close to the mantle of the earth for cheap geothermal. With a cheap way to dig a tunnel we can expand our freeway infrastructure by placing new roads below ground. Infrastructure can be run underground more cheaply--if we have a cheap hole to run them through.

Holes are the future."

I'd like to submit a proposal for genetically engineering gophers the size of a bus. They'd be a cheap source for tunneling and could be bred instead of expensive manufacturing. So long as they don't start digging up lawns or develop a taste for human flesh they could be a major resource and not use any fossil fuels.

Re:Missing option: holes.

[zippthorne]

It's not drilling the hole that's the problem. It's holding back the walls against hydrostatic pressure, while still having a usefully open space to pipe water down to be turned to steam. The places where we already have geothermal aren't drilling all the way down to the mantel. They're drilling down to a convenient pocket of magma close to the surface. There are many places with magma-resources that are yet to be tapped, but it is by no means practical for any arbitrary point on the earth's surface to simply keep drilling until they reach magma.

The necessary advance isn't a "hole drilling robot." It's incredibly strong, heat-resistant pipes, and some kind of trick for installing them while drilling without affecting the bore diameter or preventing bit replacement.

Re:"manage the nitrogen cycle?"

[Zakabog]

"Yes, I've tried Google and Wikipedia."

Apparently you didn't look that hard - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_cycle#Human_influences_on_the_nitrogen_cycle found that by typing "Nitrogen Cycle" in google. It was the first result.

My top challenges

[syousef]

1. Socks that don't have to be paired every time they're washed.
2. A device to selectively block out the sound of an episode of "The Golden Girls" my wife insists on putting on to fall asleep to
3. A device that detects reality tv and automatically adds a warning "This show is for morons. Watching by non-morons may lead to brain damage" across the screen
4. A filter for slashdot trolls.
5. A robot capable of doing all your arguing for you in a flame war.
6. An irrationality meter that warns you how irrational a person you're talking to is being at the time.
7. A superstition meter
8. Something to prevent assholes on public transport from touching my personal property (especially people bumping my laptop with oversized baggage and not even realizing it)

Re:My top challenges

[Propaganda13]

1. Socks that don't have to be paired every time they're washed.
2. A device to selectively block out the sound of an episode of "The Golden Girls" my wife insists on putting on to fall asleep to
3. A device that detects reality tv and automatically adds a warning "This show is for morons. Watching by non-morons may lead to brain damage" across the screen
4. A filter for slashdot trolls.
5. A robot capable of doing all your arguing for you in a flame war.
6. An irrationality meter that warns you how irrational a person you're talking to is being at the time.
7. A superstition meter
8. Something to prevent assholes on public transport from touching my personal property (especially people bumping my laptop with oversized baggage and not even realizing it)

1. Buy the same socks
2. Get a divorce
3. TV Guide
4. Done
5. In a flame war, you don't have to respond to the person or have an intellectual viewpoint. Just write a script for it.
6. meter is pegged already
7. no clue
8. It's called a car

Re:I AM A FUCKING TROLL

[calebt3]

+1 Inciteful.

Re:Carbon sequestration

[Raul654]

First, diamonds are *not* a rare commodity. That is a myth that the De Beers diamond cartel has spent a century trying to create. De Beers tightly controls the supply, so that they appear to be rare. It's also a self-reinforcing myth - people think diamonds are rare, so they don't sell old family heirlooms, and thus there is no secondary market for diamonds.

Second, we already have the technology to create diamonds in a lab. See the wikipedia article on the subject. (At this point, I should mention that De Beers also tightly controls the diamond cutter workforce -- any diamond cutter who cuts for a company other than De Beers is immediately cut off from doing any De Beers work)

Re:"manage the nitrogen cycle?"

[Mspangler]

I hope it means to get cereal grains to fix their own nitrogen so you wouldn't need nitrate fertilizers, especially with natural gas heading for its own production peaks. North American natural gas is expected to peak about 2010, unless the deep Gulf is more productive than they currently think.

If we don't come up with that, we'll need three or four thousand LNG tankers cruising to the middle east and back to keep the pipelines full. (Worse case admittedly, but eventually one of them is going to go boom, then the others won't be allowed to dock, and then ...)

"No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow." (S. Ivanova, 2260)

Re:"Prevent nuclear terror" - also

[sien]

Apparently nuclear war is just dandy. It's nuclear terrorism we have to worry about.

The declared nuclear states (and Israel with it's undeclared undeclared weapons) and their delivery systems and willingness to invade other non-nuclear states is just fine, it's the people with no weapons and little realistic hope of getting them.

The List (with annotations)

[RobBebop]

1. Make solar energy affordable - Done
2. Provide energy from fusion - This is something I don't know anything about.
3. Develop carbon sequestration methods - More information
4. Manage the nitrogen cycle - More information. I feel like on a basic, local level this can already be accomplished easily. On an advanced/global level though... Manage it? In the next 100 years maybe we can gather some data points so we can UNDERSTAND it. Until then, any attempts to "manage" it would be foolish
5. Provide access to clean water - Tried and true method and 1, 2, 3 Orgs doing it.
6. Restore and improve urban infrastructure - And run on-time and build more parks - but who will fund it?
7. Advance health informatics - This "engineering goal" is too general to discuss. It's like, make it easier to get useful data on our health. Duh!
8. Engineer better medicines - I think "Engineer better robots" would be a more worthwhile engineering goal... but that's just me.
9. Reverse-engineer the brain - Teaching it, and studying it
10. Prevent nuclear terror - This is a political bombshell that I won't go near, but from what I see the strategy is (a) deterrence, and (b) threaten anybody with a nuclear project.
11. Secure cyberspace - Ha!
12. Enhance virtual reality - In a practical way or just enough so that my brain can be tricked into thinking that an incredibly hot women is going down on me?
13. Advance personalized learning - Not sure what this is...
14. Engineer the tools for scientific discovery - Another overly general one, but I'd like to think "discovery" is a misspelling of "exploration". Lately I've been thinking that our satellites are similar to the Triremes of Greece times (which are bound to stay close to our shores), the Apollo/Space Shuttle is like Viking ships (which couldn't (or weren't) be used to setup a new settlement), and then this would be the equivalent of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria (except they will be called Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln).

I am going to be fair... this is really a list of things that can be completed in the next 25 years. These are not "100 year" goals. They are simply to generalized, for the most part. A real engineer knows that goals should be Specific, Measurable, and ARTistic. These goals don't qualify.

Re:Carbon sequestration

[Dahamma]

The technology that's being talked about is carbon mineralifcation - the technology to turn CO2 into graphite, or diamond, or soot. That's would be a huge help in fighting global warming.

Hah. ok, the obvious problem with this is that turning CO2 into coal is the opposite of what we have been doing for the past 200 years. How do you accomplish that? Put the energy back into the coal! But if we could do that, the first thing we'd do is use all of that energy to replace the energy we still obtain by burning coal (and other hydrocarbons) in the first place.

So, it seems like the only way to do that is to solve the "energy problem" that is putting so much CO2 into our atmosphere already. Once we fix that, then the surplus energy can be used to remove all the CO2 we have already put into the atmosphere...

I understand that's a total oversimplification, but the point is: cure the disease, not the symptoms!

Re:"Prevent nuclear terror" - also

[Anonymous Coward]

actually yes...

Known nuclear states are not much of a threat as they leave a trail back to them that ensures their own destruction.

It is the fringe groups that only need a single weapon that you have to worry about... because they WILL use them!

Diamond-cutting guilds

[Dr. Cody]

(At this point, I should mention that De Beers also tightly controls the diamond cutter workforce -- any diamond cutter who cuts for a company other than De Beers is immediately cut off from doing any De Beers work)

The diamond cutter workforce is also dominated by Hasidic Jews. When I first saw a documentary on the industry, I thought it was an odd combination, but then, it came to me. Hundreds of years ago, there's this guy, and he's thinking:

"Hmmmm... I've got all these diamonds; now who can I hire that has experience in precision cutting work where any mistake has grave consequences...

"I've got it!"

Re:"Prevent nuclear terror" - also

[tsotha]

Declared nuclear states (and states like Israel that are unofficially declared) are just fine. If the Israelis lob a nuke at the Russians, they know they have only twenty minutes or so to make peace with whomever they worship. India and Pakistan, both nuclear armed countries that have, what, seven wars under their collective belt haven't nuked each other. Fear is a wonderful demotivator.

But terrorism is different. Let's say Al Queda gets ahold of a nuclear bomb. What, exactly, is their downside to actually using it? Who would we retaliate against if they used it to blow up New York? Hell, they might not care if we went on a big bombing spree, since all the dead Muslims are gonna get their virgins.

And why are you so sanguine about their chances of actually acquiring one? The technology is over sixty years old - you can get plans off the internet. People have been caught selling stolen Russian fissionables now on more than one occasion. And terrorist groups don't seem to have a big problem attracting engineers. Sure, they probably couldn't build a fusion bomb, and a crude fission bomb might be large and have a yield of "only" 50kt or so. That would be enough to kill millions.

Personally, I don't think nuclear terrorism is an "if" question. It's a "when" question. But short of a verifyable, complete international ban on all nuclear devices, including power stations, I don't see how it can be prevented.