Throughout human history, engineering has driven the advance of the civilization.
From the metallurgists who ended the Stone Age to the shipbuilders who united the world’s peoples through travel and trade, the ancient world witnessed many marvels of engineering prowess. As civilization grew, it was nourished and enhanced with the help of increasingly sophisticated tools for agriculture, technologies for producing textiles, and inventions transforming human interaction and communication. Inventions such as the mechanical clock and the printing press irrevocably changed civilization.
In the modern era, the Industrial Revolution brought engineering’s influence to every niche of life, as machines supplemented and replaced human labor for countless tasks, health was enhanced by improved systems for sanitation, and the steam engine facilitated mining, drove trains and ships, and provided energy for factories.
In the century just ended, engineering recorded its grandest accomplishments. The widespread development and distribution of water and electricity, automobiles and airplanes, radio and television, spacecraft and lasers, antibiotics and medical imaging, computers and the Internet are just some of the highlights from a century in which engineering revolutionized and improved the quality of human life in every aspect of work and play. [ http://www.greatachievements.org/]
For all of these advances, though, the century ahead poses challenges as formidable as any from millennia past. As the population grows and its needs and desires expand, the problem of sustaining civilization’s continuing growth and advance, while still improving the quality of life, looms more immediate. Old and new threats to personal and public health demand more effective and more readily available treatments. Vulnerabilities to pandemic diseases, terrorist violence and natural disasters require serious searches for new methods of protection and prevention. And products and processes that enhance the joy of living remain a top priority of engineering innovation, as they have been since the taming of fire and the invention of the wheel.
In each of these broad realms of human concern — sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living — specific grand challenges await engineering solutions. In this century ahead, the world’s cadre of engineers — some now practicing, some still in school, some yet unborn — will seek ways to put knowledge into practice to meet those challenges. Applying the rules of reason, the findings of science, the aesthetics of art and the spark of creative imagination, those engineers will continue the tradition of forging a better future.
Foremost among the challenges are those that must be met to ensure the future itself. The Earth is a finite planet, and its growing population consumes resources at a rate that cannot be sustained at the present rate. Widely reported warnings have emphasized the need to develop new sources of energy, at the same time preventing or reversing the degradation of the environment.
Sunshine has long offered a tantalizing source of environmentally friendly power, bathing the Earth with more energy each hour than the planet’s population consumes each year. But capturing that power, converting it into useful forms and especially storing it for use during rainy days and nights, poses provocative engineering challenges.
Another popular proposal for long-term energy supplies is nuclear fusion, the artificial re-creation of the sun’s source of power on Earth. The long quest for fusion has stretched the limits of engineering ingenuity, but hopeful developments suggest the goal of practical fusion power may yet be attainable.
Engineering solutions for both solar power and fusion must be feasible not only technologically, but also economically when compared to fossil fuels. Even with solar or fusion success, though, it remains likely that fossil fuels will not be eliminated from the planet’s energy-source budget anytime soon, leaving their environment-associated issues for engineers to address. Most notoriously, evidence is mounting that the carbon dioxide pumped into the air by fossil-fuel burning is increasing the planet’s temperature and threatens disruptive effects on climate. Anticipating the continued use of fossil fuels, engineers have explored technological methods of capturing the carbon dioxide produced from fuel burning and sequestering it underground.
A further but less publicized environmental concern involves the atmosphere’s dominant component, the element nitrogen. The grand biogeochemical cycle that extracts nitrogen from the air for its incorporation into plants — and hence food — has long been altered by human activity. With widespread use of fertilizers and high-temperature industrial combustion, humans have doubled the rate at which nitrogen is removed from the air relative to pre-industrial times, contributing to smog and acid rain, polluting drinking water and even worsening global warming. Engineers must design countermeasures for these problems, while maintaining the ability of agriculture to produce sufficient food.
Chief among concerns in this regard is the quality and quantity of water, which is in seriously short supply in may regions of the world. Both for personal use — drinking, cleaning, cooking and removal of waste — and large-scale use such as irrigation for agriculture, water must be sustainably provided to maintain quality of life. New technologies for desalinating sea water may be helpful, but small-scale technologies to provide local water purification may be even more effective for personal water needs.
Water quality and many other environmental concerns are naturally closely related to questions of human health. While many of the scourges of the past have been controlled, even eliminated, by modern medicine, other old ones (such as malaria) remain deadly, and newer problems have remained resistant to medical advances, requiring new technologies and methods.
One goal of biomedical engineering today is fulfilling the promise of personalized medicine. Doctors have long recognized that individuals differ in their susceptibility to disease and their response to treatments, but medical technologies have generally been offered as one-size-fits-all. Recent cataloging of the human genetic endowment, and deeper understanding of the body’s complement of proteins and their biochemical interactions, offer the prospect of teasing out the specific factors that determine sickness and wellness in any individual person.
An important way of exploiting such information would be the development of medical simulation methods allowing doctors to forecast the benefits and side effects of potential treatments or cures. “Reverse-engineering” the brain, to determine how it performs its magic, should offer the dual benefits of helping treat neurological diseases while providing clues for new approaches to computerized artificial intelligence. Advanced computer intelligence, in turn, should enable automated diagnosis and prescriptions for treatment. And computerized catalogs of health information should enhance the medical system’s ability to track the spread of disease and analyze the comparative effectiveness of different approaches to prevention and therapy.
Another factor underlying efforts to develop new medicines is the growing danger of attacks from novel disease-causing agents. Certain deadly bacteria, for instance, have repeatedly evolved new properties, conferring resistance to even the most powerful antibiotics. New viruses arise with the power to kill and spread more rapidly than disease-prevention systems are designed to counteract.
As a consequence, vulnerability to biological disaster ranks high on the list of unmet challenges for biomedical engineers — just as engineering solutions are badly needed to counter the violence of terrorists and the destructiveness of earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural dangers. Technologies for early detection of such threats and rapid deployment of countermeasures (such as vaccines and antiviral drugs) rank among the most urgent of today’s engineering challenges.
While terrorist attacks, medical epidemics and natural disasters represent acute threats to the quality of life, more general concerns pose challenges for the continued enhancement of the joy of living. Engineers face the grand challenge of renewing and sustaining the aging infrastructures of cities and services, while preserving ecological balances and enhancing the aesthetic appeal of living spaces.
And the external world is not the only place where engineering matters; the inner world of the mind should benefit from improved methods of instruction and learning, including ways to tailor the mind’s growth to its individual owner’s propensities and abilities. Some new methods of instruction, such as computer-created virtual realities, will no doubt also be adopted for entertainment and leisure, furthering engineering’s contributions to the joy of living.
The spirit of curiosity in individual minds and in society as a whole can further be promoted through engineering endeavors enhancing exploration at the frontiers of reality and knowledge, by providing new tools for exploring the vastness of the cosmos or the inner intricacy of life and atoms.
All of these examples merely scratch the surface of the challenges that 21st-century engineers will face. The problems described here merely illustrate the magnitude and complexity of the tasks that must be mastered to ensure the sustainability of civilization and the health of its citizens, while reducing individual and societal vulnerabilities and enhancing the joy of living in the modern world.
None of these challenges will be met, however, without finding ways to overcome the many barriers blocking their accomplishment. Most obviously, engineering solutions must always be designed with economic considerations in mind — despite environmental regulations, for instance, lower-cost polluting technologies often remain preferred over more expensive, clean technologies.
Engineers must also face formidable political obstacles. In many parts of the world, entrenched groups benefiting from old systems wield political power that blocks new enterprises. Even where no one group stands in the way of progress, the expense of new engineering projects often deters action. Meeting many of the century’s challenges will require unprecedented levels of public funding. Current government budgets for infrastructure improvement alone falls hundreds of billions of dollars short of estimated needs. Securing the funds required to meet all the great challenges will require a project of its own to elicit popular and political support. Engineers must join with scientists, educators and others to encourage and promote improved science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in the schools and enhanced flow of technical information to the public at large — conveying not just the facts of science and engineering, but an appreciation of the processes and methods that scientists and engineers employ to acquire the knowledge and tools required to meet society’s needs.
Public understanding of engineering and the science underlying it will be important not just to provide support for funding, but to enhance the prospect for successful adoption of new technologies. The ultimate users of engineering’s products are people with individual and personal concerns that must be addressed. In many cases resistance to new ways of doing things will have to be overcome. Teachers must revamp their curricula and teaching styles to benefit from electronic methods of personalized learning. Doctors and hospital personnel will have to alter their methods to make use of health informatics systems and implement personalized medicine. New systems for drug regulation and approval will be needed when medicines are designed for small numbers of individuals rather than patient populations as a whole.
A prime example of a personal barrier is the challenge to reduce vulnerability to assaults on cyberspace, such as identity theft and computer viruses designed to disrupt Internet traffic. Systems for keeping cyberspace secure must be designed to be compatible with human users — cumbersome methods that must be rigorously observed don’t work, because people find them too inconvenient to use. Part of the engineering task will be discovering what approaches work best at securing user cooperation with new technologies.
In sum, governmental and institutional, political and economic, personal and social barriers will repeatedly arise to impede the pursuit of solutions to the great engineering problems. As they have throughout history, engineers will have to integrate their methods and solutions with the goals and desires of all society’s members.
And “all society’s members” must be interpreted literally. Perhaps the most difficult challenge of all will be to provide the fruits of engineering progress widely around the globe, to rich and poor alike.
In the world today, many of engineering’s gifts to civilization are distributed unevenly. Around the world at least a billion people do not have access to adequate supplies of clean water. Countless millions have virtually no medical care available, let alone personalized diagnosis and treatment. Solving computer security problems has little meaning for the majority of the world’s population on the wrong side of the digital divide. Sustainable supplies of food, water and energy; protection from human violence, natural disaster, and disease; full access to the joys of learning and exploration, communication and entertainment — these are goals for all the world’s people.
So in pursuing the great challenges, engineers must frame their problems with the ultimate goal of accessibility to all clearly in mind. Just as Abraham Lincoln noted that a house divided against itself cannot stand, a world divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and hunger, cannot long remain a stable place for civilization to thrive.
Through the engineering accomplishments of the past, the world has become smaller, more inclusive, more connected. The challenges facing engineering today are not those of isolated locales, but of the planet as a whole and all the planet’s people. Meeting all those challenges must make the world not only a more technologically advanced and connected place, but also a more sustainable, safe, healthy and joyous — that is, a better — place.