At its heart, engineering is about solving
problems.
And for better or worse, the world won’t
have a shortage of those anytime soon.
Throughout this series, we’ve covered many
of the areas where these challenges lie and
how engineers are making their mark.
But we’ve only just skimmed the surface!
While we couldn’t get to them all, one thing is
certain: the future landscape of engineering will
be very different from what we see today.
[Theme Music]
From the tiny to the large, we’ve seen
engineering in action to deliver drugs, build
bridges, and shore up skyscrapers.
In general, the kinds of problems that engineers
solve depend on what we want and need.
Farms, factories, cities, and homes all rely on energy
production, civil infrastructure, and communication
networks for their basic functions.
Society will continue to need those in some
form in the future, which is why a lot of focus
is put into these fields of engineering.
But new engineering specialties are also popping
up all the time.
In the last decade, the demand for smartphones
has driven huge developments in electrical and
computer engineering.
The industry is working on improving the
designs of components like processors and
finding cheaper ways of producing them.
In other words, economic factors can play a big
role in what fields engineers end up working in and
what sorts of jobs are available to them.
But in the 21st century, there are challenges
facing the world that go beyond economics,
with implications for our very existence!
The environment is changing more radically
than ever.
There are entirely new threats to our infrastructure.
Healthcare and sanitation have the potential
to save hundreds of millions of lives.
Although engineering has improved the average
quality of life to the best it’s ever been,
big challenges like these need to be addressed
if humanity is going to keep thriving.
To outline some of these problems, the US
National Academy of Engineering, or NAE,
has consulted with engineers, scientists, and
technologists to create a set of Grand Challenges
for Engineers in the 21st century.
These goals address some of the most essential
global issues in both big and small ways.
Broadly speaking, they focus on sustainability,
security, health and general quality of life.
It all starts with sustainability, or making
sure our planet stays a place where we can live.
To heal the environment and keep humanity
safe, we need to engineer a future that looks
very different from our past.
To prevent further damage from the burning
of fossil fuels, we need to develop cleaner
methods for energy production.
Engineers are already working to make solar
panels more efficient and investigate the possibility
of power plants that use nuclear fusion.
But producing power isn’t the only way we’re
warming the planet.
Modern agriculture uses lots of artificial
fertilizers to increase food production.
Unfortunately, only some gets absorbed into
living things like crops; much of the rest escapes
to the atmosphere as nitrogen oxide.
There, it acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping in
heat and deepening the effects of climate change.
Worse still, some returns to Earth in the
form of acid rain.
To address these problems, engineers need
to find ways of stopping nitrogen from leaking
out of the food production process.
Stopping the release of nitrogen oxide is
essential for managing the nitrogen cycle
that supports the Earth’s ecosystem.
And that may mean designing new methods of
applying fertilizer, or processing organic waste into
more environmentally-friendly alternatives.
But it’s too late to just change what we
do in the future.
To fix the warming planet, we need to reverse
the effects of greenhouse gases.
That’s the goal behind carbon sequestration,
which aims to take carbon dioxide out the
atmosphere and store it safely away.
The good news is, sequestration is already
possible!
There are chemical reactions for capturing
CO2, like the kind used to add fizz to soda.
The huge challenge is to scale up that technology to
remove billions of tonnes of it from the atmosphere
in a way that’s economically viable.
A good start would be capturing carbon dioxide
as it is released from fossil fuel-based energy plants.
The smokestacks in coal-powered plants could
be altered to absorb greenhouse gases at the source.
And once we can prevent its release or take
it out of the atmosphere, we’ll need a way
to store that CO2.
Engineers are working on finding places, like
deep within porous rock formations, where
all that carbon could be put away.
While preventing environmental ruin is a huge
task, there are other risks engineers need to
plan for in the future.
While civil engineering has provided a lot of
infrastructure needed to support our daily lives,
not enough work has gone into maintaining it.
Old structures and outdated transportation
systems are in need of modernization to make
them safer and more reliable.
As part of these efforts, engineers in the UK are
sending electromagnetic waves through the ground
to locate buried objects like pipes and cables
that are part of the current communication
and plumbing networks.
This will allow engineers to map them out
and improve waste treatment facilities and
telephone networks,
making those systems more
resilient against potential catastrophes.
Sadly, the risks posed to infrastructure aren’t
just because of negligence.
As the world becomes more connected, systems
like power grids are increasingly coordinated
using networks of computers.
Unfortunately, that makes them more vulnerable
to attacks from hackers!
In 2015, hackers managed to disrupt the power grid
in Ukraine, temporarily cutting off the supply of
electricity to 230,000 residents for several hours.
If attacks like this continue to escalate
in scale, they could threaten important services
like hospitals and firefighters.
To prevent hackers from attacking critical infrastructure,
computer engineers are developing solutions
to ensure that only trusted operators can access
the systems that control them.
That involves developing more secure software,
and even implementing new hardware like
fingerprint scanners to make sure only a few
designated people can make changes.
They can also organize vulnerable computer
systems to operate on networks that are entirely
disconnected from the internet,
so hackers have a harder time accessing
them in the first place.
But big threats to infrastructure aren’t
just restricted to cyberspace!
Although nuclear weapons haven’t been used
in warfare since World War II,
there’s always the chance that a malicious
group could turn stolen nuclear material into
an improvised bomb.
To prevent this, engineers are developing ways to monitor and track the radioactive elements used in places like energy plants, hospitals, and research facilities.
For example, devices could be designed that
measure the radioactivity near nuclear reactors,
giving an indication of the amount of material inside.
If that level drops suddenly and without explanation,
it could alert investigators that a theft has occurred.
Now, this all kinda sounds like the future
of engineering is just preventing terrible
things from happening.
But the good news is that engineering is also
an active, positive force for improving lives.
Because of the incredible pace at which technology
has advanced, engineering can make huge strides
in the fields of health and sanitation.
We saw a way to provide better access to clean water
in the context of engineering design, which is vital for
sanitation and preventing the outbreak of disease.
But there are lots of ways engineers could
help treat diseases, too.
The tools of genetic engineering, for example, give us new ways to create medicine, such as specially-designed enzymes that produce cancer drugs more efficiently.
Some recent advances like CRISPR might even
allow doctors to treat patients based on their DNA
and eliminate certain diseases entirely.
And as we saw with biodevices, new hardware
is being developed to work within the body for
medical diagnoses and monitoring.
The data that those devices collect, like blood
pressure and heart rate, could be used to alert doctors
immediately when something goes wrong.
Grouped across many patients, this data could
also be used to investigate and predict healthcare
trends, a field called health informatics.
Engineers will play an enormous role in designing
the systems that collect, transmit, and even
analyze that data.
As well as personalizing healthcare, engineering
can develop other kinds of tools that are tailored
to individuals, like those used in education.
Many current resources, including videos like
this one, are aimed at a broad audience.
In the future, though, resources could be designed to change the style and depth of information they provide based on an individual student’s strengths and preferences.
Imagine an online textbook that could automatically
elaborate on topics you didn’t get the first time around,
or digital flashcards that adapt to test you
on the things you forget most often.
New hardware, like virtual or augmented reality
headsets, could even provide simulated environments
for students to learn and experiment in.
Software engineers will be key to bringing
these sorts of tools into classrooms and homes.
Of course, similar technologies could be applied to
every aspect of our lives to allow our thoughts and
personalities to influence our environments.
But to do that, we’d need to understand
the brain a lot better than we do now.
Understanding the human brain is one of the
biggest scientific challenges there is.
Doing so would allow us to develop new medical
and psychiatric treatments.
Modeling computer systems on the design of
the human brain could also give us entirely
new ways of solving problems.
You’ve probably heard of the progress being
made in fields like artificial intelligence.
The goal is to construct systems with problem-solving
capabilities similar to the kind humans have,
such as driving cars or recognizing tumours
in X-ray scans.
So far, we can only crudely mimic how brain
cells are connected.
Understanding how the brain works more completely
could help us replicate some of its remarkable abilities.
On this front, engineers are developing new
hardware to assist in making scientific discoveries,
like infrared sensors that measure brain activity.
This helps us to understand how physical changes
like blood flow and electrical impulses correspond
to the act of thinking.
And determining that could help us better
model individual parts of the brain and improve
our efforts at artificial intelligence.
From brains to biofuels, it’s clear that
engineers have lots of ways to impact the future.
Despite the challenges laid out by the NAE, the truth
is that engineering rarely goes the way we predict.
Few people would have thought that less than
70 years would separate the flight of the first
airplane from our first steps on the Moon.
The development of technology, and the challenges
that come with it, are still big questions on the horizon.
But what we can say is that whatever the future holds,
the problem solving skills and fundamental
ideas provided by engineering will put you in a
good spot to take a crack at them yourself.
Because that’s really what engineering is
all about – using bright ideas to tackle
big challenges!
And we hope this series has put you on the
path to do just that.
Crash Course Engineering is produced in association
with PBS Digital Studios.
Wanna keep getting smarter with us?
Check out Space Time, which explores the outer
reaches of space, the depths of astrophysics,
the possibilities of sci-fi, and anything
else you can think of beyond Planet Earth.
Subscribe at the link in the description.
Crash Course is a Complexly production and this
episode was filmed in the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney
Studio with the help of these wonderful people.
And our amazing graphics team is Thought Cafe.
