Millennium Project
Global Challenges Facing Humanity
14. Science and Technology
How can scientific and technological breakthroughs be accelerated to improve the human condition?

The extraordinary impacts of S&T over the past 25 years will seem slight compared with the next 25 years. The factors that accelerated the rate of innovation are themselves changing at accelerating rates. Intel has created the first programmable 1 teraflop chip able to perform more than 1 trillion floating point operations per second. The brain-computer interface now lets thoughts move software; nanoparticles and fibers stimulate neural growth; and mini-biocomputers help treat specific individual cells. Photons have been slowed and accelerated; adult stem cells have been regressed to repair damaged tissue; faint magnetic signals from a single electron buried inside a solid sample have been detected; organic transistors with a single-molecule channel length are now visible; and microbial fuel cells have been demonstrated.

Accelerating S&T advances make far more things possible than most people are willing to believe; hence opportunities to apply scientific breakthroughs to improve the human condition are continually missed. Just as lines of code were written to create software, genetic code is being written to create new life forms. Artificial organs may be constructed in a manner similar to 3-D prototyping; surgical robots are now MRI-compatible; and the cellular and genetic abnormalities responsible for medical problems are being identified and treatments designed. Ten-gigabyte hard drives for cell phones are coming soon. Genetically modified viruses can coat themselves with electrically conducting metals to form nano-wires that self-assemble into battery components. Millions volunteer their computer’s excess capacity to help find cures for cancer. The future synergies among nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science will change the prospects for civilization. We need a global information system to track advances so that politicians and the public can understand potential consequences of new S&T. The risks from acceleration and globalization of S&T are enormous (see CD Chapter 3.5 for global 2025 S&T scenarios) and give rise to future ethical issues. For example, do we have the right to clone ourselves, to create thousands of new life forms, and to claim scientific sovereignty in basic research? (See CD Chapter 4, Science and Technology Management Issues.)

In 2006, according to Lux, $12.4 billion was invested in nanotech R&D, over $50 billion of nano-enabled products were sold, international patent filings grew 31%, and the private sectors in the U.S. and Japan outspent government in R&D. However, nanotech environmental health impact studies are proliferating that will lead to standards that will change unregulated production. A science roadmap is being produced for new atomically precise nanoscale building blocks, components, and devices. Nanobots the size of blood cells may one day enter the body to diagnose and provide therapies and internal VR imagery. For the longer range, quantum phenomena and entanglement are being probed. Quantum physicists are experimenting with teleporting individual photons and demonstrating a method that may ultimately teleport two near-identical copies of the original. Astronomers are probing the possibilities of dark energy, a cosmological force in opposition to gravity.

Challenge 14 will be addressed seriously when the funding of R&D for societal needs reaches parity with funding for other purposes and when an international science and technology organization is established that routinely connects world S&T knowledge for use in R&D priority setting and legislation. Such a system could make political and media decisionmakers more S&T-savvy by bringing together the world’s knowledge in a more user-friendly fashion to illustrate risks, opportunities, and a range of speculation on items on a cumulative basis. It could facilitate transparent international scientific assessments of controversial areas such as bionanotech and, wherever they are found feasible and desirable, make it clear how these would improve the human condition. Currently the InterAcademy Panel, a worldwide network of 90 science academies, is increasing access to S&T information and cooperation around the world; all should support basic R&D of new theoretical principles to provide the growing pool of knowledge from which applied science draws its insights to improve the human condition.

Regional Considerations

Africa: S&T funding in Africa is still lower than 1% of GDP. Results from the African S&T policy leaders’ meeting in Egypt in October 2007 should feed NEPAD’s policy and work on science, technology, and innovation indicators for national decisionmaking. ICSU has opened an office in Africa to focus on health and human well-being, hazards such as pollution and deforestation, sustainable energy, and global climate change.

Asia and Oceania: China is now the second largest R&D system in the world, surpassing Japan, and could account for 23% of world R&D expenditures by 2010. After the U.S., China is the second largest producer of articles on nanotech, with Japan in third place. China designed and launched a satellite for Nigeria and plans another for Venezuela. There are more IT engineers in Bangalore than in Silicon Valley. Japan launched the first test Furoshiki satellite as an experimental method to make and maintain space solar satellites.

Europe: Advances in medical-, bio-, and neurotechnology could reduce many European problems with aging societies. Many research institutes in Europe, especially in Germany, are working on Artificial Vision Systems, computer-guided prosthesis, and brain-computer interfaces. By 2010, the EU plans to increase R&D expenditures to 3% of GDP and to attract an additional 700,000 researchers. More than 500,000 scientists have left Russia over the past 15 years; it is now making large investments into nanotech R&D. The Slovenian government is making its research program publicly available for comment to improve transparency and public understanding.

Latin America: The region averages 0.4% of GDP for S&T development but hopes to increase that to 3% by 2010 and should improve its public-private R&D long-term cooperation, regional research networks, national strategic R&D planning, basic research, S&T literacy of benefits and risks, and incentives for private investment in local R&D.


North America: MIT offers free online S&T courses. The U.S. now imports more high-technology products than it exports, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Clean energy tech innovations are accelerating—there were more than 4,000 U.S. related patents in 2006. The U.S. Patent Office plans to place patent applications online for public comment. Falling numbers of students in S&T, religious fundamentalist politics, and the imposition of other political points of view are threats to the continued excellence of U.S. science. Prizes can speed the distribution of technology that benefits humanity, such as the Tech Awards from the Tech Museum in San Jose, California, or Richard Branson’s prize to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, as can tech sports like MIT’s robot competitions.

Graph: Estimated R&D Expenditures (percentage of GDP)
in OECD and Cooperating Non-member Countries

Source: OECD Factbook 2007 - Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics

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