The Century's Top Engineering Challenges 290
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."
Re:"manage the nitrogen cycle?" (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently you didn't look that hard - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_cycle#Human_influences_on_the_nitrogen_cycle [wikipedia.org] found that by typing "Nitrogen Cycle" in google. It was the first result.
Re:"manage the nitrogen cycle?" (Score:5, Informative)
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)
The List (with annotations) (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. These goals don't qualify.
Re:I would add: (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The biggest challenge, by far (Score:3, Informative)
I read NSF and heard "NSA".
me - dumbshit
Re:Carbon sequestration (Score:2, Informative)
Turning CO2 into graphite, diamond or soot is the opposite in a way - it would be an energetically uphill process that must be driven by non-fossil energy or else you have no choice but to produce more CO2 in the process. One could see this as storing renewable or nuclear energy in solid carbon by splitting CO2, similar to recycling CO2 [slashdot.org] to liquid fuels [slashdot.org].
Re:I would add: (Score:2, Informative)
For some reason people think that when you extract money from every company at once, that it would come out of existing profit or something like what would happen if you fined a specific company with lots of competitors. But lets say you tax telephone providers for each line they sell. What happens? It doesn't come out of their pocket, there is a cost recovery fee at the bottom of the bill explaining that it went up X dollars because of Y tax. (and yes this has happened).
The idea that come companies would look for alternative energy sources and those that didn't would pay is sort of ridiculous too. First, No company produces everything from start to finish. Raw materials are collected, transported, energy is used in this process, then maybe some assembly is done, same with the energy, then maybe it is sold to another person who adds a few finishing touches and then places it in a store for you to go buy. If any single one of the people handling that doesn't goto alternative energy, your still paying for it. And currently, the costs of stabile and reliable zero carbon alternative emissions is so high, it would probably prevent any meaning full adoption as long as they had to pay the carbon tax.
This carbon economy sounds like a good things when spouted by a couple of circus clowns attempting to scam money from you, or some disillusioned do gooder who hasn't thought about the big picture and think that companies would be hurt by a tax or fine like you and I would when we have to pay a speeding ticket. But when you really examine the situation, the only way for it to do anything meaningful besides jacking the cost of everything up and causing inflation is if went ahead and developed reliable and cost effective alternative energy sources. I simply don't see why we can't skip the carbon tax step, make the development happen, and then simply faze it's use in.
more generally... (Score:4, Informative)
Proliferation of any means of provoking large scale mayhem is an increasing problem because of the number of players alone. If every country(or any organisation that's big enough) had an array of such weapons, chances of things going very wrong increase, in part because of things getting out of control in tit-for-tat reactions. Imagine 1962 with 10 players instead of 2.
There's also a point in distinguishing "terrorists" from "sane people", but here I would agree that the point is overestimated and it places an insane trust in the power of sanity. Uh. Also, terrorists blowing up a big city isn't the end of the world. It's only one city. Humanity will survive
Re:"Prevent nuclear terror" (Score:5, Informative)