• Question: How many years is it before someone realistically meets your challenge?

    Asked by to Antibiotics, Dementia, Flight, Food, Paralysis, Water on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Flight Challenge

      Flight Challenge answered on 16 Jun 2014:


      That depends on how creative the engineers are: if somebody comes up with a great new form of propulsion, we might do it in ten years. Often, though, the big advances in engineering come from combining old things in a new way, or adding up lots of small improvements. The aircraft engines we have now are more fuel-efficient (so lower carbon), quieter, and cleaner than we had even twenty years ago, but they are basically the same concept as we had fifty years ago. Engineers have kept making small improvements to different parts of aircraft, and these improvements add up to an enormous improvement to the whole system.

      Combining old things in a new way might also work. There are already electrically-powered aircraft, but they are very small, and quite slow (only about 100 miles per hour). The advantage is that they could land next to your house, and fly autonomously without needing you to be a pilot. Then to fly from London to Edinburgh you don’t take the bus, or tube, to the airport, wait for your flight, fly to Edinburgh, and take a bus or tram there. Instead, you walk to an aircraft parked near your house, tell it where you want to go, and it flies you to the nearest small hub airport and you step from a small aircraft to a big slowish one which gets you near Edinburgh. Then you hop into a local aircraft to get to near your final destination. You save the time by not being stuck in traffic and not having to wait at airports, and if a lot of your flight time is electrically powered, the emissions can be very low.

      (Michael)

    • Photo: Antibiotics Challenge

      Antibiotics Challenge answered on 16 Jun 2014:


      The specific challenge – to make a simple test for bacterial infection that would prevent us using antibiotics where they’re not needed, and reduce resistance – has been chosen to be achievable on a fairly short timescale. Five to seven years sounds plausible (in fact, given how fast other biology and genetics technology has moved recently, five to seven years sounds generous).

      The bigger problem – microbes evolve fast – won’t go away, though. In the long run, antibiotic resistance may turn out to be the kind of problem that we have to manage rather than solve, by being careful with our use of antibiotics (e.g. in the farming industry) as well as by investing in finding new antibiotics and alternatives. Still, meeting this particular challenge – and ensuring we only use antibiotics on patients who’ll actually benefit from them – would be a huge step forward and save lives.

    • Photo: Water Challenge

      Water Challenge answered on 16 Jun 2014:


      As with most challenges, there is no sudden moment when the problem will be solved. It will come in stages and will probably depend on how much people are prepared to pay for their water, and the creativity of the designers/engineers. Where water is very scarce, and where people are willing to pay a high price for their fresh/safe water, expensive technologies which already exist can satisfy some/most or all of that demand. The trick will be in discovering or developing technical solutions that can produce large quantities of potable or fresh water at a reasonable price. If, for instance, an electrical/electronic device can be designed to separate salt from water possibly using electrical fields to act as centrifuges to concentrate the brine in stages, then it seems possible that the same geometric rise in efficiency which we saw in personal computers together with the enormous economy of scale available in global water supplies, may drive development. I think changes impelled by conflict could also have a strong influence. I do not anticipate a total resolution of the problem within 30 to 50 years but lateral thinking could possibly cause quantum changes at relatively short notice.

    • Photo: Dementia Challenge

      Dementia Challenge answered on 17 Jun 2014:


      That’s a tough question for this challenge, for several reasons.

      Dementia is a term which describes a large number of conditions, including Alzheimer’s Disease, and their symptoms are widely varying, and dementia usually progresses, which means that it gets worse over time.

      In addition, there is currently no cure, although there are some treatments which can slow down the progress or reduce some of the symptoms, so the underlying issue of dementia will be with us for the foreseeable future.

      If our challenge is to provide technology to support people with dementia and their carers, we are looking at a wide range of solutions to suit different people. There are some common symptoms, and common day-to-day challenges that we are already meeting (like time orientation and GPS locating), but the awareness of these technologies is not very good – not enough people know about them.

      So, this really is an ongoing challenge rather than one which can be solved in a fixed length of time, but as consumer technology brings down the cost of available technologies (e.g. think about how cheap the components of smart phones are now, because of consumer demand), the further the funding money can stretch and the more people can receive affordable technologies which look and feel like desirable products.

    • Photo: Food Challenge

      Food Challenge answered on 17 Jun 2014:


      Good question – that has already sparked debate in our team.

      It is difficult to imagine a time when everyone will have enough safe, nutritious food and the resources to acquire it. At the same time the food challenge is probably the most urgent of all the six shortlisted. In the UK most of the news stories about food relate to problems from eating too much food, but in other parts of the world people are dying of malnutrition and we need to focus the greatest minds across the world to alleviate this suffering.

      The food challenge is vast and we’ll need different solutions for different places. In terms of how long this will take – we may already have some of the answers. Biofortified crops to help with ‘hidden hunger’ have already been developed by both GM and conventional breeding for example, but public resistance and policies hold back their use. In some parts of the world we just need to scale up the production of certain foods and persuade people that unusual foods e.g. insects taste good, are nutritious and can be an enjoyable part of a healthy diet.

      Another big unknown is how climate change will impact on what we can do in the future. Breeding crops that can produce the food we need, on limited agricultural land, with limited water and less artificial fertilisers is a key part of the global food challenge.

    • Photo: Paralysis Challenge

      Paralysis Challenge answered on 17 Jun 2014:


      Many of the technologies that can help people with paralysis are being developed now and are pretty far along. It’s true that a complete cure for spinal cord injury is still a ways away (it’s always hard to predict in science when something will be figured out because it’s hard to know when that major breakthrough is going to happen). But in terms of technology that can help restore function? It’s here!

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