It is not only of solutions that lists are made, but also of the directions in which people ought to point their efforts. At the US National Academy of Engineering, a special committee including Danny Hillis, Jaime Lerner, William Perry, Dean Kamen, Craig Venter, Larry Page, Ray Kurzweil came up with 14 grand challenges for engineering in the coming years.

1. Make solar energy economical
2. Provide energy from fusion
3. Develop carbon sequestration methods
4. Manage the nitrogen cycle
5. Provide access to clean water
6. Restore and improve urban infrastructure
7. Advanced health informatics
8. Engineer better medicines
9. Reverse engineer the brain
10. Prevent nuclear terror
11. Secure cyberspace
12. Enhance virtual reality
13. Advanced personalized learning
14. Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

See also the video here. Obviously, in many cases, finding a solution to one of them, helps solving other ones as well.

Not all challenges humanity faces are of the engineering kind. To get a glimpse of the bigger picture, check out the UIA‘s World Problems and Global Issues project, aka The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 16:12 and is filed under future, science, society, technology, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.