Dean's speaking about things that, people back in the day never would have thought possible. Flying was impossible back then, so then I got to thinking that maybe the competition is about a new scientific advancement. If we have to build something that isn't thought possible at this moment, then we have the chance to advance it like the Wright brothers.
So I looked up "newest scientific advancements" on google:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/
and one of the articles is creating temporal cloaks in time using light. Maybe we have to make time traveling robots? I skimmed the article and I'm not well versed in quantum physics, so I'm most definitely wrong in my assumptions.