Grand Engineering Challenges for the 21st Century
The National Academy of Engineering has listed the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. You can even go to their web site and vote for which you think is the most important challenge to meet in the next 100 92 years
They listed challenges in four areas: sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living.
- In the area of sustainability, they identified challenges in environmentally friendly power, nuclear fusion, capturing carbon dioxide, countermeasures for nitrogen cycle problems, and providing acess to clean water.
- For the area of health, “reverse-engineering” the brain, computer catalogs of health information, and developing new medicines.
- The section on vulnerability covers a counter to the nuclear threat, sustaining the aging infrastructure of cities and services, and could potentially include the improved medicine challenge mentioned earlier.
- For the joy of living area, challenges in personalized learning, improved virtual reality, securing cyberspace, and my personal favorite, engineering the tools used for future scientific discovery.
While I have to agree that these are all noble pursuits, and these would really solve some of the major problems we currently face, I really feel like it is a bit short sighted. If you look at the list of the greatest engineering achivements of the 20th century, I really doubt anyone would have even hit half that list when making predictions in 1908. I would say we are in for things in this century that are barely on the radar for anyone at this point.
