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Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality (2014)

Chapter: The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future

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Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
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Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
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Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
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Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
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Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
×
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Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
×
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Page 50
Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
×
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Page 51
Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
×
Page 51
Page 52
Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
×
Page 52
Page 53
Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
×
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Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
×
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Suggested Citation:"The Next 50 Years--Looking to the Future." National Academy of Engineering. 2014. Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18966.
×
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The Next 50 Years Looking to the FUTURE “It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Countless examples attest to the truth of this famous quip, often attributed to Yogi Berra. In 1943, IBM chairman Thomas Watson said there might be a total world market “for maybe five computers.” Forty-four years earlier, Lord Kelvin predicted that “radio has no future,” proving that a brilliant practitioner in one area can completely miss the significance of developments in a different field. Past “expert” prognosticators doubted the utility or appeal of everything from personal computers and televisions to online shopping and overnight package delivery. Meanwhile, others forecast that by now we’d have flying cars, colonies on Mars, and fusion power too cheap to meter. Science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov correctly anticipated videophones and giant flat TV screens. But even Asimov sometimes got it wrong. In a 1964 essay looking ahead 50 years to 2014, he predicted that appliances would be powered by radioisotopes rather than electricity and that most jobs would be done by machines, freeing up people from actual work. “Mankind will . . . have become largely a race of machine tenders . . . [and] will suffer badly from the disease of boredom,” he wrote. Still, it’s deeply engrained in human nature to gaze into a crystal ball and imagine what the future will bring. And in many cases, we can look at today’s technologies and anticipate how they will evolve—and how they may bring surprising changes that emerge from a series of incremental advances. Until recently, driverless cars seemed like a distant dream, for instance, yet we’ve had most of the underlying technologies—from computer-controlled braking to detection of vehicles in the next lane—for years. So it’s worth taking a journey of the imagination down the path of continued development of today’s technologies. 44 Making a World of Difference

Grand Challenges Foremost among the challenges are those that must be met to ensure the future itself. In 2007 NAE at the request of NSF, convened a diverse international panel of some of the most accomplished engineers and scientists of their generation. The panel’s task: to consider broad realms of human concern—sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living—and propose a set of the challenges most in need of 21st-century engineering solutions. The panel did not attempt to include every important goal for engineer- ing. Rather, it chose the problems we must solve to ensure survival of a livable Earth and the well-being of its inhabitants. Earth’s resources are finite, and our growing population currently consumes them at a rate that cannot be Brought to You by Engineering sustained. Among the most pressing concerns, then, is the need to develop O ver the next half century, we can foresee tackling—and new sources of energy while also preventing or reversing the degradation of solving—many of the pressing problems facing humanity the environment. Another is to find new methods to protect people against and society today. An NAE report in 2008 describes 14 pandemic diseases, terrorist violence, and natural disasters. The engineering Grand Challenges for Engineering, such as creating better solutions to challenges such as these can no longer be designed solely for medicines, restoring and improving our cities, and providing more isolated locales, but must address Earth as a whole and all the planet’s people. sustainable sources of energy. Yet even as some of these challenges As the panel concluded in its 2008 report, “a world divided by wealth and are met, new issues will arise, sometimes in the form of adverse poverty, health and sickness, food and hunger, cannot long remain a unintended consequences of our successes. In every case, engineering stable place for civilization to thrive.” will be critical to the solution. Perhaps most important, though, while our imaginations may be • Make solar energy economical spot-on in some cases, in many others the future will be far different • Provide energy from fusion than what we now foresee. It will bring answers to questions we • Develop carbon sequestration methods aren’t asking, and solutions to needs we don’t know we have. It will • Manage the nitrogen cycle enrich and enhance human lives in ways that are simply impossible to • Provide access to clean water predict—surprising and delighting us, and creating innovations that • Restore and improve urban infrastructure soon will seem impossible to live without. Mobile phones, for • Advance health informatics example, were a staple of science fiction and a goal of engineers for • Engineer better medicines years, but the first clunky models were something of a hard sell, and • Reverse-engineer the brain we certainly didn’t know we needed smartphones—or social media— • Prevent nuclear terror until suddenly we did. Today’s youth find it hard to believe that • Secure cyberspace previous generations could function without these inventions. • Enhance virtual reality Whatever the shape of the future, the underpinnings and most of • Advance personalized learning the details will come from engineering innovations. As computer • Engineer the tools of scientific discovery scientist Alan Kay, president of the Viewpoints Research Institute once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”—and that’s To learn about the Grand Challenges for Engineering visit the precisely what engineering does.  project’s interactive website at www.engineeringchallenges.org Engineering Ideas into Reality 45

New Materials, New Possibilities F rom the Stone Age to the Iron Age, epochs of human history have been named after materials. That’s not surprising, because new materials open the door to entirely A new and unexpected applications and developments, weaving new threads into the tapestry of human progress and changing how we live and work. Today’s Information A new material— Age might justly be called the “Silicon Age” because of the enormous capabilities provided by graphene—is a layer of carbon silicon-based devices and applications, although modern advances have also required numerous only one atom other crucial materials, from optical fibers to high-strength alloys. The silicon frontier will be B thick, discovered extended farther, no doubt, but new materials may take us beyond a simple extrapolation of by physicists Andre Geim (bottom, left) today’s technology, meeting the needs that we don’t yet know we have. and Konstantin Novoselov, who won Scientists and engineers are now hard at work leagues at UCLA, Williams fashioned the the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their creating and exploring the potential of new world’s first molecular logic gate, the building C groundbreaking materials. In the early 2000s, for example, block of digital circuits. If such “molecular experiments. physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin electronics” devices could be used to create Novoselov at the University of Manchester in viable computers, they could put the power England were tinkering with graphite and tape. of a hundred workstations on a chip the size They realized that it was possible to peel off a of a grain of sand. D layer of carbon so thin that it was only one We don’t know if the central processors atom thick. This material, dubbed graphene, of computers 25 or 50 years from now will be was almost completely transparent, yet so built from graphene, self-assembled molecules, dense not even helium could pass through. DNA, or any of a number of other exotic Possessed of immense strength, it also had materials emerging from today’s laboratories. E interesting electrical properties, which Geim We do know, however, that the enormous and Novoselov nailed down by studying dozens advances in materials (and concomitant leaps of ultrathin electronic devices they made from in computing power) that have already graphene. Their work won them the 2010 Nobel transformed our lives in 2014 will continue— Prize in Physics—and pointed to a new path perhaps even accelerate. Engineers will create F for devices. “Graphene could change the ever-smaller devices, exploiting the strange electronics industry, ushering in flexible world of quantum mechanics, where atoms can In this series from devices, supercharged quantum computers, exist in different places at once and affect each HP Labs, each successive image electronic clothing and computers that can other across considerable distances. “Materials is magnified interface with the cells in your body,” predicted with genuine quantum properties will have about 10 times the the New York Times in 2014. enormous impact,” says Venkatesh Narayana- previous one, from (A), the wafer on Meanwhile, in Hewlett Packard’s Quantum murti, professor of technology and public which 625 64-bit Science Research Lab, Stanley Williams has policy at Harvard University’s School of memories are built novel devices with a completely different Engineering and Applied Sciences. And other imprinted, through (F) a close-up of approach. His idea: Use chemical reactions improved or new materials will enable continual a single memory, to grow switches and wires that assemble advances in everything from cars and planes to with one bit stored themselves into circuits. Working with col- the buildings we live in.  at each of the 64 intersections.

The future is now: Flying drones that deliver packages and cars that drive themselves are already being tested, while virtual reality software helps train aviators both to fly a plane and to jump out of it. A World of Embedded Intelligence I n 2014, we already have sports watches that record workouts and autonomous flying drones the size of birds. But imagine dramatically shrinking those devices and many others, while also adding the raw computing power of today’s supercomputers. Imagine similar giant leaps in sensors, communications capabilities, displays, software, batteries, and mechanical actuators. Put all those together and we can embed intelligence in virtually anything—from light bulbs and refrigerators to cars and complex manufacturing tools. Already, smart devices can answer simple inquiries and understand simple commands. It’s not a stretch to predict that these capabilities will improve enough to make it appear that devices are thinking, speaking, and acting independently. Some of these devices will fail in the market, but others will hit the sweet spot that delights consumers and improves or enhances their lives. Here’s just a sample of what may be possible, some of which is already taking shape: Virtual reality technology that trains the military. Cars that drive themselves, in constant communica- tion with other vehicles and with traffic signals. Appliances and houses that respond to voice commands—maybe even know what you want automatically. Displays that cover entire walls,

Entrepreneurs and engineers are using 3-D printers to create everything from custom toys and machine parts to working prostheses. enabling us to put an art gallery with treasures like the Girl with a Pearl Earring in our homes, visit with grandma in what feels like an adjacent room, negotiate a deal across the “table” with partners in Tokyo or Kazakhstan, have a prime seat at the opera or rock concert, work with a personal trainer, or take a virtual climb up Mount Kilimanjaro. One of the NAE’s Grand Challenges, enhancing virtual reality, will Reshaping Industries N be easily met, predicts Ray Kurzweil, now ew materials are one driver of change. Development of new manufacturing methods and tackling natural language understanding at tools is also crucial—another job for engineers. Consider 3-D printing. GE Aviation used to Google. “By the early 2020s we will be make jet engine nozzles by welding together 18 different parts. But not for its latest, most routinely working and playing with each other efficient engine. The company now builds the nozzles one layer at a time by precisely in full immersion visual-auditory virtual depositing material with a 3-D printer, in much the same way an ink-jet printer sprays on paper. environments,” he writes. Another Grand Challenge, tailoring education to meet indi- 3-D printing is a potential game changer for at his 3-D printer and hands it to you,” says vidual needs, will also be met, says Leah H. today’s factories, warehouses, supply chains, John Wall, vice president and chief technical Jamieson, dean of engineering at Purdue distribution systems, and delivery companies. It officer at engine and power systems manufac- University. “I absolutely believe it will be also has the potential to eliminate the waste of turer Cummins. Or imagine inventors dropping possible to build interactive systems that raw materials in manufacturing processes. by the local 3-D print shop to print out working provide personalized learning environments.” Instead of machining or forging a part like a prototypes of their latest ideas. You could even The future world could bring what Asimov connecting rod, a 3-D printer puts material just print stuff in your own home. anticipated a bit too early—the creation of where it’s needed, like an oyster building up its It’s also theoretically possible, if you have robots that read, learn, and even feel. Such shell layer by layer. “3-D printing sounds trite, the right materials, to print almost anything, robots could take care of the elderly, file tax but you can build structures that you could never including living tissue. If you needed a new returns, build houses, and discuss the origins of do any other way,” says Paul Citron, retired vice liver, say, doctors might extract a few of your the universe or the latest escapade of the next president for technology policy at medical stem cells, transform them into liver cells and generation of reality TV stars. “We will have device maker Medtronic. This technology makes print out your new organ. “By the early 2020s another intelligent species on Earth,” predicts it possible for anyone to become a manufacturer. we will print out a significant fraction of the Danny Hillis, chairman and cofounder of “Imagine that instead of having to stock parts at products we use, including clothing as well as Applied Minds, LLC.  an auto supply store, the guy goes to a keyboard replacement organs,” predicts Google’s when you ask for a part. He then makes the part Kurzweil.  48 Making a World of Difference

Expanding Our Connections M any visionaries foresee that people in future decades will want to be connected even more than they are today, and that such connections will improve their quality of life. If so, engineers will be the architects of this hyperconnected future. “The connectivity of everything is within a decade,” predicts Charles Holliday, Jr., former CEO of du Pont. “It will change how we think about managing our lives.” And by 2025, “information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries,” according to a 2014 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet Born without an arm, six-year- Project. The developing world will continue to leapfrog old Alex Pring the old wired infrastructure, as remote villages connect of Groveland, to the larger world with wireless broadband networks. Florida, practices picking up objects with his new 3-D As is frequently the case with new technologies, printed prosthetic hyperconnectivity will offer challenges along with arm and hand, opportunities. Will the regulations written for telephone designed and made by engineering communications need to be rewritten for the Broadband students at the Age? Can cybersecurity efforts not only keep the hackers University of at bay but also keep criminals and terrorists in check? Central Florida for about $350. Can we find a balance between hyperconnection and personal privacy that is acceptable to most people? GE Aviation’s new Governments and societies will need to grapple with jet engine (left) includes a fuel these questions and challenges, but engineering nozzle made by advances will underpin the solutions.  3-D printer. Engineering Ideas into Reality 49

Making Energy Sustainable I ntelligent, hyperconnected devices, 3-D printers, and other technologies will bring surprises, meet unanticipated needs, and change our lives in ways that are hard to imagine. But some aspects of the future are easier to predict. To create a better, richer, and healthier future for all people and nations, we know we must tackle and solve problems that are already obvious now. to warming has increased in recent years. energy more efficiently. Something as simple J. Craig Venter (far left) is working on There’s “compelling evidence that increasing as better insulation, such as ultralight aerogels, synthesizing algae temperatures are affecting both ecosystems can dramatically reduce the energy needed to to replace fossil and human society,” warns the 2014 National heat and cool homes and factories and run fuels. In France an experimental Climate Assessment. refrigerators. thermonuclear Thus, the energy mix is as important Engineers are also working to design reactor project is as—or more important than—the total energy safer, cheaper nuclear reactors. As a virtually under construction (above). needed. If we want to avoid contributing to the carbon-free source of reliable energy, “nuclear carbon dioxide buildup by burning fossil fuels, power has to play a significant role in the efforts both to switch to renewable or other future,” says Cummins’s John Wall. It may also low-carbon power and to use less energy must be possible to harness the fusion reaction that go forward. Wind power and solar power powers the sun—another NAE Grand Challenge. currently represent about 7 percent of overall A research reactor, the International Thermo- One of those big challenges is creating a generating capacity, and engineering advances nuclear Experimental Reactor Project, is now sustainable supply of energy. Energy is crucial there and elsewhere are in the offing. Improve- under construction in Cadarache, France. to maintaining and boosting standards of ments in wind turbines and solar panels, for Although fusion energy still faces daunting living. To bring billions of people out of poverty, example, are rapidly making them more technical hurdles, many experts remain hopeful. therefore, we’ll either need more energy or efficient and cheaper, and new battery “I think we’ll have fusion, maybe not in 50 huge improvements in energy efficiency—or, technologies promise to solve the problem of years, but eventually,” says Julia Phillips, vice most likely, both. But right now, because of intermittency. Argonne National Laboratory, for president and chief technology officer at our dependence on fossil fuels, humans are instance, is leading a major multi-institution Sandia National Laboratories. emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse effort to build a battery with five times the Meanwhile, other creative ideas abound. gases into the atmosphere at a rate that energy density of today’s best, at one-fifth the For example, Caltech’s Frances Arnold, winner exceeds anything the Earth has experienced cost. Such batteries could also make electric of the 2011 Draper Prize, is using the techniques in millions of years. Since 1900, the planet cars far more practical and attractive, weaning of directed evolution to produce new biocata- has warmed by about 0.8 degree Celsius much of the transportation sector from the lysts to convert cellulose to sugars and then to (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit), and the number of fossil fuel pump. biofuels. In other labs researchers use catalysts extreme weather events scientists are linking Huge improvements are possible in using and other materials to mimic photosynthesis 50 Making a World of Difference

and capture energy from sunlight. At least five different designs are Feeding the competing to turn the energy from ocean waves or tides into electricity. Smart micro-grids promise not only to keep the lights on in U.S. cities, but World’s Billions T also to bring renewable power to remote villages in developing countries, he combination of massive harvesters bypassing the need for expensive power lines and central power plants. and other farm machinery, precision Some visionaries believe human ingenuity and engineering wizardry fertilization, genetically modified crops, can easily wean humanity from fossil fuels within 50 years. Kurzweil, for one, and other advances has dramatically predicts that “by 2030 solar energy will have the capacity to meet all of our boosted yields of corn and other crops across the energy needs”—including providing enough extra power to purify vast United States and around the world. At the dawn amounts of salty water. Meeting the Grand Challenge of making solar energy of the 20th century, about 50 percent of the U.S. economical thus could also satisfy the growing need for clean water, another population was involved in food production. Grand Challenge. A surplus of energy would also make it possible to power Today that number has dropped to 2 percent. scrubbers that can pull carbon dioxide and all other forms of pollution from the air, says Cherry Murray, dean of Harvard University’s School of Engineer- But to feed the world’s growing number of people, ing and Applied Sciences. we will need another increase in productivity. One The conventional wisdom, though, is that wind and solar alone can’t of many possible answers to this problem is provide enough energy for a growing world, especially when the wind dies harnessing the potential of genetic engineering or the sun sets. Many experts insist that the world will depend on fossil fuels and fermentation. Biological engineers are already for a sizeable percentage of its energy for a least 50 more years. “Energy is growing gene-spliced algae that make a full set of going to come from a lot of different sources,” says Holliday. In particular, if the protein building blocks, or amino acids, that for no other reason than it is plentiful and cheap, the world is unlikely to we need in our diet. Turn that algae into flour, and stop burning coal soon, with 2,300 existing coal plants and more than 1,000 we could replace millions of acres of amber waves proposed new facilities. So, to reduce emissions in the medium term, even for the long-term, wide-scale implementation of improved technologies for grabbing the carbon from fuel or carbon dioxide from smokestacks is essential. And additional innovations are needed to pave the way for safe storage of that carbon, meeting the Grand Challenge of developing carbon sequestration methods. Creating a cleaner, more sustainable energy future will require hard decisions based on data and evidence, which can come from engineering advances such as more powerful supercomputers and sophisticated sensors on land, in the oceans, and in space. The decisions themselves are typically outside the realm of engineers and scientists—but scientists and engineers will need to engage them as they work to create solutions to the world’s energy problems. As a practical matter, according to the National Climate Assessment and a joint report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom, carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperatures presently in place make some climate impacts inevi- table, even if greenhouse gas emissions were to cease. So, as we hedge our bets by striving to change the energy mix, engineers also face the challenge of helping society adapt to the changing global environment. 

A Healthier Future A mong the many medical advances from the lab of MIT chemical and biomedical engineer Robert Langer are polymers designed to dissolve at different rates in the bloodstream. Encapsulate a drug or a vaccine inside tiny spheres made from these materials, inject them into the blood, “We’ll have local food in home gardens, and the microspheres will “deliver” the actual medicines to the site of cancers or other tumors days or weeks later. “It may sound hanging gardens, and hydroponic gardens trivial, but it can help change the face of medicine,” says Langer. in all sorts of interesting places.” To fight deadly diseases such as tuberculosis or Ebola, doctors must of grain with giant stainless steel vats filled with fermenting microbes. Slip in treat people with multiple, periodic doses of drugs or vaccines. Yet in the genes for muscle and blood proteins like actin and myogloblin, along with many parts of the world, it’s hard enough to get patients to health genes for healthful fats, and algae or other microbes could even make what clinics once, let alone every few weeks. Microsphere technology J. Craig Venter, chairman and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, dubs solves that problem. Patients could be given full courses of treatment “motherless meat,” ending the need for a home on the range. or vaccinations with a single injection. Suddenly, once-intractable Venter calculates that microbial factories could produce as much food diseases can be cured or prevented. as our current system of agriculture using only one-tenth the land area. If we Over the next few decades, bioengineers are expected to create wanted, we could turn the Great Plains back into a vast prairie teeming with many more such weapons in the fight against infectious diseases. buffalo, or bring forests back to many areas of the world that were cleared for These innovations might include malaria and tuberculosis vaccines as cultivation. Plus, the approach would solve one of NAE’s Grand Challenge well as cheap, effective (and simple to administer) drugs against HIV, problems—managing the nitrogen cycle to reduce the nutrient pollution and robust technologies for delivering clean water and providing that’s harming the world’s creeks, rivers, lakes, and coastal areas. basic sanitation in underdeveloped countries. By 1980 the world had Of course, that’s just one possibility. Harvard’s Murray and others have eradicated smallpox. It’s not a great leap of imagination to think that different ideas for feeding the world’s billions of people. Murray predicts that we can finish the job of eliminating polio and make dramatic inroads a global disaster—such as a disease that wipes out all wheat or rice crops— against cholera, AIDS, diphtheria, and other terrible infectious will bring a dramatic shift from today’s industrial monoculture agriculture to a diseases. The benefits would be enormous, not just in reducing infant distributed, local system, where a wide range of plants are grown on rooftops mortality and increasing life expectancy, but also in boosting produc- and other spaces throughout cities and communities. “We’ll have local food in tivity, economic growth, and standards of living all over the world. home gardens, hanging gardens, and hydroponic gardens in all sorts of But that’s just the beginning of how science and engineering interesting places,” she says. In fact, this trend toward more local food is have the potential to transform health. Drop in, for instance, at the already beginning—even without a major crop failure.  Stanford lab of Karl Deisseroth, which recently tackled a project so 52 Making a World of Difference

The idea: make an intact, transparent brain with all of the body before we ever get sick,” he predicts. Paul Citron, retired from Medtronic, expects that its internal structure and wiring visible.... As a result, for diabetics “an artificial pancreas will become researchers can now chart all the connections between a reality,” staving off the many complications of neurons, a significant step on the journey toward meeting diabetes by precisely controlling blood sugar. MIT’s Langer—who was awarded the 2002 another Grand Challenge, reverse engineering the brain. Draper Prize for “bioengineering of revolution- ary medical drug delivery systems”—predicts that it will be possible to regenerate spinal cords, to replace failing organs and body parts with engineered tissue and to turn the body into its own drug factory by injecting the manufac- turing instructions in the form of messenger RNA. “The combination of biology and engi- neering will lead to all kinds of new things, improving the quality of care and quality of life,” he says. Just as with computer power and the connected world, these advances could be of tremendous benefit to humanity. We’ll get longer, healthier, more productive lives—and, with advances in brain science, a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. But the technology will also raise difficult risky that Deisseroth enlisted only those intervene successfully in everything from questions and ethical dilemmas. Will society be colleagues whose careers were sufficiently addiction and epilepsy to schizophrenia and willing (and able) to pay for expensive new established that they would not be set back by Parkinson’s disease. Meanwhile, researchers treatments and approaches for everyone, or will a failure. The idea: make an intact, transparent predict that advances in understanding the these advances benefit only brain with all of its internal structure and wiring biology of the rest of the body will make it pos- the rich? Once it becomes visible. The team succeeded, figuring out how sible to tame autoimmune diseases and cancer. possible, will we rush to to support a mouse brain with an external Similar gains will come from reading tinker with our genes to hydrogel skeleton, then dissolving away its humanity’s genetic code, from cataloging all of create new generations with opaque fat. As a result, researchers can now our proteins, and from manipulating genes and superior athletic abilities or chart all the connections between neurons, a biology. Danny Hillis of Applied Minds foresees intelligence? It could indeed significant step on the journey toward meeting making real-time measurements of the be a brave new world. another Grand Challenge, reverse engineering chemicals coursing through the body, and then “Human engineering will be the brain. using computing tools like data mining and inevitable,” says J. Craig Eventually, with better understanding of pattern recognition to spot chemical signals Venter. Once again, how brain chemistry as well as brain circuitry and going awry—long before any actual symptoms tomorrow’s society decides the underlying mechanisms of biology and of illnesses appear. “We’ll be able to see a to use its new engineering disease, medical professionals may be able to problem coming and intervene on the side of powers will be crucial.  Engineering Ideas into Reality 53

China alone must build the equivalent of a city the size of Boston every 17 days to accommodate the 14 million additional people per year projected to live in the country’s urban areas. alone must build the equivalent of a city the tion systems to cope with higher populations. size of Boston every 17 days to accommodate In the United States, urban engineers can the 14 million additional people per year envision a future where the number of cars projected to live in the country’s urban areas. drops and an increasing proportion are shared. How can we keep all these people from ending When not in use in the denser, future city, many up in sprawling shantytowns cars might sit around in automated multistory all over the world? garages. Need a car? Call one with your Cities, Limits, and New Frontiers Many urban planners suggest that the answer smartphone. It may even drive to you and chauffeur you around. When you’re done, A half century from now, one of the most critical factors determining lies in taller, denser cities. “push a button and the car parks itself in the what the future looks like will be this: how many people will be According to Antony Wood, parking garage,” says Holliday. Urban planners packed onto the planet? The United Nations’ best estimate is that the executive director of the and engineers are already exploring many of global population will climb from today’s 7.2 billion to 9.6 billion in Council on Tall Buildings and these possibilities. 2050. But higher fertility could send that soaring past 15 billion by the end of the Urban Habitat, engineers With more than 40 percent of the world’s century. Or if the developing world emulates the low birth rates of countries like already know how to build population living within 60 miles of coast- Italy and Japan, the number could actually decline by then to 7 billion. soaring structures two or lines—and many more along rivers—engineers three kilometers tall. What’s must also figure out how to make cities more Either way, the consequences will be profound. harder is maintaining the vitality of urban life in resilient against rising seas, river floods, and A more populated world increases the chal- a city of super-skyscrapers. So much of the extreme weather events. In the aftermath of lenges of providing food, health care, and vibrancy of a city goes on at ground level—in 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, for instance, New housing—even bumping up against the limits of parks, shops, and restaurants. The answer may York City has developed a detailed plan for what the planet can support. On the other hand, be to bring that vitality upward. “If a city gets reducing the damage from future storms. The lower population numbers mean that average ten times more vertical and ten times denser, engineering steps that New York and other age will climb quickly, making it harder to care then we need to replicate the ground level in cities could take are as simple as elevating for the elderly. The number of people older than the sky—creating urban habitats in the sky,” homes and moving the mechanical guts of 65 is on track to exceed those younger than 15 in says Wood. That shift would be a major buildings from the basement to higher floors, most countries within a decade or two—for the undertaking for urban planners and civil or as complex as re-creating and reengineering first time in human history. engineers. the buffer of coastal wetlands that can protect One trend that’s safe to predict, however, Of course, future cities won’t be able to cities from raging storm surges. is increasing urbanization. More than half the function without other vital engineering But engineering the path to the future is world’s people now live in cites. A million more advances: replacing and redesigning aging not just about planning for disaster, coping are born there or move in every week. China water mains and sewers; reshaping transporta- with potential limits, or finding solutions to 54 Making a World of Difference

innumerable problems. As this chapter tries to V I E W F R O M A FA R convey, it’s also about eradicating diseases; lifting millions out of poverty and sickness; forging stronger, more resilient communities; and A First Step to Other preparing for many possible futures. It’s about Planetary Systems making life richer and more fulfilling. It’s about The Kepler Space Telescope, launched in 2009 pushing back the frontiers of knowledge—even to search for planets orbiting other stars, has freeing us from the bounds of Earth. “Within 25 found many such systems, including at least one, years, we’ll go to space as routinely as we go the Kepler-186, with a planet similar to Earth in what grocery store today,” predicts Wanda Austin, astronomers call the “habitable zone”—the dis- president and CEO of The Aerospace Corpora- tance from a star at which liquid water can exist. tion. “It could be for fun or because it’s critical Kepler-186 is 500 light-years away, meaning that for our survival.” light from its star takes 500 years to reach us. cal axis of the solar lens—to the closest point Just imagine what it would mean to use With the technology of the next decade or two, where the light from the object we want to look 500 light-years is much farther than we can send at, bending around the Sun, comes into focus engineering advances to finally understand the a probe to do a flyby. (above). The trick is getting our telescope out mysterious dark matter that makes up most of But we can undertake missions in the next there. The focus of the solar lens begins 3.2 light- the universe or to discover extraterrestrial life. few decades that could let us look more closely days from the Sun and continues outward, with “Contributions from engineering will bring many the image quality improving as the telescope at some of the planets Kepler has found. Scien- more astonishing insights about ourselves, our tists and engineers have proposed to do this by gets farther away from the Sun. Earth, and our universe in the next 50 years,” taking advantage of an effect first predicted by Over the next half century, engineers will says Princeton University’s Robert Socolow. Albert Einstein in 1936—namely, that the gravity develop new probes that will be smaller, lower Decade by decade, century by century, of large objects would bend light, just as a glass mass, and easier to propel to high speeds than engineering has taken us further and further lens does in a traditional telescope. Astronomers anything we’ve launched so far. They will be from the first glimmerings of human art and already use gravitational lensing to get better powered by new propulsion systems, such as ion culture on the walls of Paleolithic caves. And to images, from our perspective on Earth, of objects rockets or “light sails” (below left) that catch the located beyond large stars or galaxies. However, solar wind speeding from the Sun at more than some experts, it’s even helping us leave behind they can’t “aim” a galaxy or re-position Earth to million miles per hour. With a push from a laser some of the darker side of human nature. Harvard choose what to examine. beamed from Earth, our telescope’s light sail University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker argues We could use our Sun itself as a gravitational could reach the focus of the solar lens in a few that as human society becomes more modern years. As engineering advances make probes still lens—except we can’t do it from Earth, or even (in large part from technological advances), we from Earth orbit; we’re much too close. Instead, smaller and less expensive, we could even launch become a kinder, gentler species. “You can see we have to send a telescope out along the fo- a swarm of space telescopes to different focal [the decline of violence] over millennia, over points of the Sun’s gravitational lens, giving us centuries, over decades, and over years,” he says. close-ups of more distant stars and the means to “We are probably living in the most peaceful time detect radio or optical signals that might in our species’ existence.” indicate an advanced civilization. It’s a highly controversial idea, but a hopeful “The new frontier of the 20th century was and attractive one. If the march toward greater our solar system” says David Messerschmitt, Roger Strauch Professor Emeritus of Electrical enlightenment continues—and the flowers of Engineering and Computer Sciences, University engineering bloom as they have throughout of California, Berkeley. “And the new frontier for history—then the next half century really will the 21st century will be interstellar space in our be worth looking forward to.  region of the Milky Way galaxy.”  55

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Fifty years ago, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) was founded by the stroke of a pen when the National Academy of Sciences Council approved the NAE's articles of organization. Making a World of Difference commemorates the NAE anniversary with a collection of essays that highlight the prodigious changes in people's lives that have been created by engineering over the past half century and consider how the future will be similarly shaped. Over the past 50 years, engineering has transformed our lives literally every day, and it will continue to do so going forward, utilizing new capabilities, creating new applications, and providing ever-expanding services to people. The essays of Making a World of Difference discuss the seamless integration of engineering into both our society and our daily lives, and present a vision of what engineering may deliver in the next half century.

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