What is the most important engineering problem of our future?

[Mark Pierce]

To some extent all engineering "... elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life" (see Herbert Hoover)

My list of major engineering challenges in the coming years:

1. Developing alternative and more efficient energy production
2. Cleaning up our environment and keeping it clean.
3. Improving health care (Drugs, treatments, medical devices, etc)
4. Improving availability of nutritious food and clean water throughout the world.
5. Safer, more efficient transportation systems.

To attack these issues engineers in every field will need to focus on several things in everything they do:

1. Improving efficiency to lower energy demand.
2. Designs using recyclable/reusable materials.
3. Less polluting mining, manufacturing, transportation, and products.
4. Reducing obsolescence/increasing design life of products (Ever notice how few things we buy are designed to last more than 5-10 years?)
5. Consider quality and safety in the design of all products and processes.

I'm sure there others, but the point is that the world needs engineers to make the right choices, rather than the expedient, easier, or initially cheaper way. Even if we are not designing a fusion reactor or water purification device, we are expected to not add to these problems and do what we can to help solve them.

To do this, the engineering student should strive to get a solid, broad engineering education, rather just learning how to hack some code in a particular language or squeak by doing the minimum required for a degree.