The last century ushered in technological marvels that made everyday life for billions of people easier and more convenient. For all of its modern miracles, however, the last 100 years failed to provide solutions to some of the biggest debacles facing doctors, scientists, and engineers today. The following situations are just a few of the biggest engineering challenges that they continue to tackle in the 21st century.
Scientific studies continue to suggest that it would only take 1/10,000th of the sun’s light to solve all of the world’s energy demands. Even so, engineers today struggle to come up with inventive and effective ways to make this scenario into a reality for people across the globe.
Still, renewable energy is growing at a rate of six percent a year and is expected to contribute to 45 percent of the world’s energy by the year 2035. If scientists could discover a way to fully harness the power of the sun, it could lead to a smaller carbon footprint for factories and businesses around the world while also reducing the globe’s dependency on gas, coal, and oil.
Artificial intelligence in use today is modeled after many of the functions of the human brain. Despite their advances in uncovering the power of the brain, scientists have yet to unlock fully all of its secrets.
With that, efforts are underway to reverse engineer the human brain. Once the brain is reverse engineered, scientists could uncover ways to make up for what it lacks. For example, they could discover ways to compensate for brain injuries and illnesses.
A person with dementia could one day soon regain his or her memory because of reverse engineering. Likewise, a disabled person might walk again while a blind person could regain his or her sight.
It is widely known that the infrastructure in the U.S. is in dire need of upgrades. Experts say that more than $3 trillion will be needed by the year 2020 to make these repairs and improvements.
This money will be vital to revamping highways, interstates, railways, bridges, and other parts of the infrastructure in order to keep up with future demands put on it. The influx of cash is also critical for making improvements to systems responsible for the country’s electricity, water, and sewage.
Many critical functions of everyday life are now handled solely in cyberspace. Everything from the electrical grid to national security is relegated to its safekeeping. Many of the world’s financial institutions also use cyberspace to manage and safeguard their clients’ money and private information.
With that, more work is needed to secure cyberspace from threats like hacking. Engineers currently use primary defenses like firewalls at the point of entry. However, they admit that more work is needed to protect individual websites and servers from hackers and cyber thieves. They suggest that biometrics like fingerprint readers could hold the key to this level of cyberspace security.
Scientists the world over face a growing challenge of how to provide clean water to people across the globe. In fact, in the next twenty years, the world’s population is expected to grow by two billion people. Already, one in six people in the world lack access to clean and safe water to drink.
Further, more than 5000 children per day die from drinking tainted water. Scientists acknowledge that there is plenty of water in the world for the earth’s population.
The challenge lies in how to sanitize and make it accessible to people especially those in third world countries. To solve part of this dilemma, they continue to research ways to dig wells and build dams at a rate that will accommodate the increasing supply and demand in countries like China and India.
Another major dilemma that scientists face today involves how to secure the world from nuclear terror. They admit that it is a real possibility that nuclear bombs could be sold to private buyers with malicious intentions. Further, anyone can find out how to make a nuclear bomb by reading about it online.
With that, they continue to come up with ways to secure materials like plutonium that are needed to make nuclear bombs. They also are developing technology that would allow security experts to monitor and intervene in nuclear threats from afar, render bombs useless, create emergency responses for entire populations, and discover who is to blame for the threat of nuclear terror.
These modern engineer challenges are but a few that those in the scientific community face. They could be solved sooner rather than later. They are needed to protect people across the world and also meet the demands of a growing global population.
