National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge – Sustainability
Building sustainable societies using nature as a model is one of humanities great challenges and is a key to our future according to the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge which produced the following video. Following are some of its highlights:
- Nature is the best engineer there is; nature has a 4 billion year track record
- Nature knows how to extract energy from the environment better than any human engineer knows how to do
- What’s more important than sustainability?
- Preparing for the post “fossil fuel” world
- Synthetic biology – taking nature and building organisms to generate biofuels.
- Re-engineering kitchen yeast that make ethanol to make “drop in” fuels
- Creating better energy storage facilities
- Building more efficient and cheaper solar cells
- Engineers moving society forward
