Everyone talks about their technology that's just around the corner. We want to hear what has been keeping it around that corner for so long!
To do that we want to organize an an interdisciplinary conference to discuss the hardest problems across all fields. To see if there's really enough problems, we're collecting problems first.
Submit the hardest problems from your field, and let people in completely different fields think about it!
What's so difficult about sequencing the human genome? Where's my home fabricator? Why isn't proteomics making progress? Why are we still dying from disease? What's so hard about building AI? Where's my robot? When will I be able to live on Mars? Why is flight search so crappy? What's the challenge in building a molten salt thorium reactor? Can we have net-positive nuclear fusion already? Why can't we have room temperature superconductors? Is it really difficult to build your own country? What's so hard about curing cancer? Why is battery lifetime so sucky? What's so hard about making antibiotics for MRSA? How hard can it be to digitize the human connectome?
From where will the next class of broadly applicable, cheap, and effective antibiotics come?
What policies can we institute, starting now, that will prevent currently effective and future antibiotics from becoming obsolete within one generation?
Are we sowing the seeds for a race of super-infectious microbes to wreak havoc on hospitals and medical facilities, and potentially pose a general threat?
Tristan Ursell, Stanford University Medical Center, http://observenature.tumblr.com/
A conference idea by Paul Bohm
Design by Simon Fletcher.
