Niraj Dubey
Throughout human history, engineering has driven the advance of civilization. In the modern era, the industrial revolution brought engineering’s influence to every niche of life, as machines supplemented and replaced human labour for countless tasks, improved systems for sanitation enhanced health, and the steam engine facilitated mining, powered trains and ships, and provided energy for factories. In the century just ended, engineering recorded its grandest accomplishments. The widespread development and distribution of electricity and clean water, automobiles and airplanes, radio and television, spacecraft and lasers, antibiotics and medical imaging, and computers and the internet are just some of the highlights from a century in which engineering revolutionized and improved virtually every aspect of human life. 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 advancement, 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. Foremost among the challenges are those that must be met to ensure the future itself. 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 in a year. But capturing that power, converting it into useful forms, and especially storing it for a rainy day, poses provocative engineering challenges. A further but less publicized environmental concern involves the atmosphere’s dominant component, chief among concerns in this regard is the quality and quantity of water, which is in seriously short supply in many 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 available and sustainably provided to maintain quality of life. New technologies for desalinating sea water may be helpful, but small-scale technologies for local water purification may be even more effective for personal needs. Naturally, water quality and many other environmental concerns are closely related to questions of human health. Advanced computer intelligence, in turn, should enable automated diagnosis and prescriptions for treatment. Another reason to develop new medicines is the growing danger of attacks from novel disease-causing agents. 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. 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. 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. Most obviously, engineering solutions must always be designed with economic considerations in mind – for instance, despite environmental regulations, cheaper polluting technologies often remain preferred over more expensive, clean technologies. A prime example where such a barrier exists is in the challenge of reducing 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 have to be rigorously observed don’t work, because people find them inconvenient.
As they have throughout history, engineers will have to integrate their methods and solutions with the goals and desires of all society’s members. In the world today, many of engineering’s gifts to civilization are distributed unevenly. 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, exploration, communication, and entertainment – these are goals for all of the world’s people. So in pursuing the century’s great challenges, engineers must frame their work with the ultimate goal of universal accessibility in mind. Through the engineering accomplishments of the past, the world has become smaller, more inclusive, and 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 – in other words, better – place.
The author is Sr. Faculty & Warden – GCET, Jammu(J&K)
feedbackexcelsior@gmail.com
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