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Asked by Hatty to Cristiane, Nicki, Nikolai, Richard, Samuel on 10 Mar 2015.
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Richard Simons answered on 10 Mar 2015:
There are so many problems that scientists are working on right now: energy security, food production stability, access to water, climate change, disease epidemics. I think that all of these problems are linked in some way; they’ll improve incrementally, but not on their own.
I’d love to see renewable power generation cracked as a comparable option to fossil fuels (or even nuclear fusion!), once we have cheap and easily accessible electricity we can start building infrastructure which will make peoples’ lives easier, making them healthier and with better access to higher standards of living. I think this will happen within our lifetimes, but we need new scientists to come through and keep driving development (that’s you guys!)
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Samuel Ellis answered on 10 Mar 2015:
One problem that we are hopefully improving on is preventable child mortality. Data for 2013 says 6.3 million children under the age of five died, over half of which were due to conditions which could be simply prevented or treated.
Fortunately, we have made good progress, as the rate of deaths per birth has halved since 1990. Improvements in nutrition, access to medicine and vaccines, and awareness of health issues have really helped so far, but there is lots more to do. Especially in neonatal care (babies under a month old), who sadly account for nearly half of those preventable deaths.
Hopefully as science and education help the poor areas at most risk, we will see a big fall in child mortality in the next decade or so 🙂
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Nikolai Adamski answered on 10 Mar 2015:
As a scientist I am a bit of an idealist (I wager most scientists are). Looking back through history, science has solved many, many problems. Sometimes science had to solve problems that science had created in the first place (it can happen). Based on our “track-record” I’d say we can overcome any problem using science.
How soon will it happen? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in 50 years. Science and innovation do not follow timetables 🙂
Science is the continual advancement of knowledge. At certain times, enough knowledge from different fields has been acquired to allow a surge of innovations to happen (industrial revolution in 18th century; green revolution in the 20th century).
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