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Interesting Problems
About twenty years ago, I sat down to have a good think about what I wanted to do with my professional life. What was an interesting and valuable enough artifact to spend a life building? I settled on helping build the Internet, which was a bit ironic, because twenty years ago most of the core technology was already in place, it just wasn't evenly distributed yet[1]. But I was thinking about this question the other day. None of my new answers are in the field of Computing; I'll touch on that at the end.
But without further ado, here are a bunch of things I'd like to see smart people thinking very hard about how to accomplish in commercially viable ways[2]:
Carbon Scrubbing - we've been dumping a lot of carbon into the air. Our ecosystem is poorly prepared for how much carbon we're dumping. Addressing this would be good.
Soil desalination/recovery - a lot of the world's most arable land has been destroyed over the centuries by inadvertently irrigating (or eroding) salt into the soil. Learning how to time- and cost-effectively reclaim that soil would be good.
Desert recovery - a permutation of the above. At the very least, if we can report 'recovering desert reliably costs $$$/hectare,' that becomes an available, rational choice, and perhaps people will then optimize it further.
Low-water agriculture - if we use a lot less water on agriculture, we can spend it on other things instead. This would be good.
Improved water reclamation / desalination - so long as cities are heat islands, we'll be drying microclimates as we put people into them. Being able to reclaim water more cheaply would make the world a lot better, both in cities and out; a lot of the water cost of climate change is that we're finding ourselves wanting to pump water from lower and lower quality water sources.
Biodiesel - this is getting a *lot* of attention at the moment, it's part of the generalized 'fossil petrochemicals are a very poor energy strategy over time, let's do something better' problem. There are better ways to do this (algae that can grow in hydroponic beds in the desert to produce biodiesel) and worse ways (refining biodiesel from corn - yeesh, at least use palm instead, please?!) to do this, but getting really good at it could improve the world dramatically.
High efficiency / low-cost solar power - this is one of the short list of ways out of our coal problem. Although it's getting a lot of attention, which is good.
High-efficiency / low-toxicity batteries - this is *huge.* It's what could free us from the catch-22 that the only ways to avoid coal involve scary amounts of toxics. Also getting a lot of attention, because small consumer devices have even more demanding battery requirements than transportation, so they're driving the costs down. Which is good.
Further out there...
Very high tensile strength carbon fibers - this way lies cheap access to space, and much lighter laptops, cars, industrial machinery, ships... This would be good.
Ironically, *none* of these improvements are in industries that I touch directly. Interesting things are happening in computing, but we've basically got the core communications and computing infrastructure we need to do a lot of interesting things, and the most compelling problems in front of us are not going to succeed or fail on the back of the next high-power processor or high-density memory core. Although I really want a bunch of the flexible screen / electric paper people to be really successful, because that would *personally* improve my life.
Notes:
[1]: The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed - William Gibson. People are working on many of these projects, which is a very good thing. The next hard part (which is the current hard part for some of them, I suspect) will be making them sufficiently inexpensive/accessible/available that they can become broadly distributed, and finding business models that can work well enough that it's possible for people to make money distributing them.
[2]: A standard caveat across all of these: When I say 'I'd like high-density, low-toxicity batteries,' I intend to imply that these are manufacturable in industrially significant volumes, at relatively low cost, using manufacturing methods that are not themselves hopelessly toxic, and that can be improved over time so that they eventually become absolutely low cost as well.
But without further ado, here are a bunch of things I'd like to see smart people thinking very hard about how to accomplish in commercially viable ways[2]:
Carbon Scrubbing - we've been dumping a lot of carbon into the air. Our ecosystem is poorly prepared for how much carbon we're dumping. Addressing this would be good.
Soil desalination/recovery - a lot of the world's most arable land has been destroyed over the centuries by inadvertently irrigating (or eroding) salt into the soil. Learning how to time- and cost-effectively reclaim that soil would be good.
Desert recovery - a permutation of the above. At the very least, if we can report 'recovering desert reliably costs $$$/hectare,' that becomes an available, rational choice, and perhaps people will then optimize it further.
Low-water agriculture - if we use a lot less water on agriculture, we can spend it on other things instead. This would be good.
Improved water reclamation / desalination - so long as cities are heat islands, we'll be drying microclimates as we put people into them. Being able to reclaim water more cheaply would make the world a lot better, both in cities and out; a lot of the water cost of climate change is that we're finding ourselves wanting to pump water from lower and lower quality water sources.
Biodiesel - this is getting a *lot* of attention at the moment, it's part of the generalized 'fossil petrochemicals are a very poor energy strategy over time, let's do something better' problem. There are better ways to do this (algae that can grow in hydroponic beds in the desert to produce biodiesel) and worse ways (refining biodiesel from corn - yeesh, at least use palm instead, please?!) to do this, but getting really good at it could improve the world dramatically.
High efficiency / low-cost solar power - this is one of the short list of ways out of our coal problem. Although it's getting a lot of attention, which is good.
High-efficiency / low-toxicity batteries - this is *huge.* It's what could free us from the catch-22 that the only ways to avoid coal involve scary amounts of toxics. Also getting a lot of attention, because small consumer devices have even more demanding battery requirements than transportation, so they're driving the costs down. Which is good.
Further out there...
Very high tensile strength carbon fibers - this way lies cheap access to space, and much lighter laptops, cars, industrial machinery, ships... This would be good.
Ironically, *none* of these improvements are in industries that I touch directly. Interesting things are happening in computing, but we've basically got the core communications and computing infrastructure we need to do a lot of interesting things, and the most compelling problems in front of us are not going to succeed or fail on the back of the next high-power processor or high-density memory core. Although I really want a bunch of the flexible screen / electric paper people to be really successful, because that would *personally* improve my life.
Notes:
[1]: The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed - William Gibson. People are working on many of these projects, which is a very good thing. The next hard part (which is the current hard part for some of them, I suspect) will be making them sufficiently inexpensive/accessible/available that they can become broadly distributed, and finding business models that can work well enough that it's possible for people to make money distributing them.
[2]: A standard caveat across all of these: When I say 'I'd like high-density, low-toxicity batteries,' I intend to imply that these are manufacturable in industrially significant volumes, at relatively low cost, using manufacturing methods that are not themselves hopelessly toxic, and that can be improved over time so that they eventually become absolutely low cost as well.
no subject
Greening cities - there's been a lot of work done on this over the twentieth century. For references, look into the work of Jane Jacobs, the EcoCity Berkeley (http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/) folks, and the Rocky Mountain Institute (http://www.rmi.org). Also, the Permaculture folks have done some work on that subject;
One Econ question I'd like some grad student somewhere to spend some time thinking about: Where does low-price housing come from? Current thinking is 'compel developers to build and offer some minimum number of lower-priced units within each development plan;' I'd like to see some good data showing how successful that thinking is actually being, and evaluating enough alternatives that we have some idea at least of how badly the different options we have so far actually work, relative to each other. And if some of them actually work well, then lets adopt them more broadly and start spending more time talking about the fact that they work. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs) ()