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Letcs see how long this one lasts....

What is the single plausible technological or or scientific breahthru that the world needs most in your opinion, any why do you believe it is?

Now please be plausible in this. Certain things are nice, but highly implausible. Anti gravity, FTL travel, etc.

Fusion power is plausible, we've been working on it forever and making advances along several theoretical possibilities.

Some new level of large scale molecular engineering and creation that lets us basically mass produce complex molecules cheaply. At this point most medicines become dirt cheap along with all sorts of things that are expensive and hard to make today. New fuels could be mass produced, and also breakthrus in mass molecular manipulation could make recycling things far more viable. Possibky some new type of nanotech could facilitate this.

AI? Maybe. Could it benefit us? I don't know.

Those are some plausible breakthrus in science and technology that could benefit the word greatly. What breakthru do you think we need the most, what would you want it to do and why do you think it's the most important one?

Cure for cancer.

Clean, renewable electricity on a global scale.

There’s so much that would help in terms of poverty and inequality etc. With no one resource particularly coveted to Power our civilisation, many Cassus Belli fall by the way side.

Numpties like ISIS would have nowhere convenient to seize in order to fund their horrors.

That’s what we need right now. And we’re tantalisingly close.

I would say energy storage. We just don't have a good way of storing lots of electricity. Batteries have lots of issues with scarce materials, inefficiency etc, and water storage solutions take up loads of space (like an entire mountain) and are also pretty inefficient.

If we can figure out an energy-dense way of storing electricity using commonly available materials, all kinds of tech gets more viable. Renewable power becomes more reliable, electric vehicles get better, personal tech gear will become more useful.

Yea good electricity storage is a good one.

What about carbon capture technology and/ or biodegradable plastic alternatives?

Cheap clean energy,

something that's easy to generate locally (wind and solar are nearly there for some parts of the world) and you can store (where the real problems are much as i'd love batteries to be the answer they're not both in terms of efficiency and worse in terms of environmental damage to manufacture),

or functional fusion technology that gives you a clean reliable big powerplant source that you can grid up for places with an existing power infrastructure


or if i'm not copying the two posters above some sort of affordable carbon capture tech because we're going to need it as the world isn't going to reduce CO2 emissions fast enough

Actually, yes. Electrical storage is a better idea!

Electrical storage for sure and also cheap efficient and clean ways to collect it for poorer nations, like smaller but way more powerful solar panels or something like that. And taken a step further, panels that could be easily mounted on your home or roof, so you don't need to be on a power grid.. instead the grid would be more like a backup.

Or, what about building huge solar power farms in the middle of the desert regions like the sahara?

As we discussed in the electric car thread, electrical power without a plug is still not a suitable technology, so a magic solution to say...double capacity and halve the weight would be massive. Right now it's simply not a "solution" to 90% of problems.

Another one would be better, more cost-effective water desalinization though I haven't looked into that for 4-5 years so maybe we're making progress there. For a world covered in non-potable water, you'd imagine this would be higher up the priority list.

PS: I'll also throw a hail mary in here. A magic pill to fight obesity (regardless of the cause, which is admittedly heavily biased toward the persons involved). As a medical breakthrough it would be huge (no pun intended).

I still think a system that detects and flags lies on mass media would be the most important thing.

What good does it do to cure cancer, or generate/store vast amounts of power cleanly,or do anything else the world might need, if someone can discredit it to the world with a lie?

You have to stick to the 15/85 rule. If you hear or read something in a non-specialist media platform, it's 15% true and 85% conjecture/bs/opinion/nonsense etc.

Something to break apart plastic on a massive scale. We recently found a fungus that can do that, so it is plausible

Better personal watercraft for sub-aquatic urban travel.

 Haighus wrote:
I would say energy storage. We just don't have a good way of storing lots of electricity. Batteries have lots of issues with scarce materials, inefficiency etc, and water storage solutions take up loads of space (like an entire mountain) and are also pretty inefficient.

If we can figure out an energy-dense way of storing electricity using commonly available materials, all kinds of tech gets more viable. Renewable power becomes more reliable, electric vehicles get better, personal tech gear will become more useful.

I came here to post this only to find it already put into better words!

Frazzled wrote:Cure for cancer.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Clean, renewable electricity on a global scale.

Vulcan wrote:I still think a system that detects and flags lies on mass media

All excellent suggestions!

1. Cure for uncurable diseases, contageous or not.
2. efficient fusion reactor (and even ones that could switch to fission reaction )
3. room temperature solid state superconductor.

"One world one nation."
Why?
Less "us vs them".
Why?
More togetherness / empathy / camaraderie.
Why?
Better efficiencies of resources with no particular "border" to tax / constrain.
Why?
Promote progress and not divert resources to war or general security measures.
Why?
To address all those "details" of finding efficiencies in energy and medical research rather than compartmentalization and gains made in isolation.

It may however require a world encompassing dictatorship to achieve this however.

 Talizvar wrote:
"One world one nation."
Why?
Less "us vs them".
Why?
More togetherness / empathy / camaraderie.
Why?
Better efficiencies of resources with no particular "border" to tax / constrain.
Why?
Promote progress and not divert resources to war or general security measures.
Why?
To address all those "details" of finding efficiencies in energy and medical research rather than compartmentalization and gains made in isolation.

It may however require a world encompassing dictatorship to achieve this however.

You could call it The Imperium of Man...

A magic button that removes religion, anti-scientific nonsense, rejection of critical thinking, short-sighted capitalist greed, etc. Once obstacles to progress are removed getting the rest done becomes a lot easier, and IMO addressing the root cause of our struggles is more productive in the long run than getting a single invention sooner. Having fusion power doesn't help much if half the world thinks that Jesus hates it and the other half thinks that it's a plot by Big Nuclear to give kids autism.

 Peregrine wrote:
A magic button that removes religion, anti-scientific nonsense, rejection of critical thinking, short-sighted capitalist greed, etc. Once obstacles to progress are removed getting the rest done becomes a lot easier, and IMO addressing the root cause of our struggles is more productive in the long run than getting a single invention sooner. Having fusion power doesn't help much if half the world thinks that Jesus hates it and the other half thinks that it's a plot by Big Nuclear to give kids autism.

OP asked for a plausible breaktrough.

 Vulcan wrote:
I still think a system that detects and flags lies on mass media would be the most important thing.

What good does it do to cure cancer, or generate/store vast amounts of power cleanly,or do anything else the world might need, if someone can discredit it to the world with a lie?

I started this long lengthy post this morning, and then decide that it was gibberish because I was so exhausted. But I think I am fundamentally in the direction you are, but more broadly. I think we don't have tech issues, really, or at least that's not our biggest concern.

I don't think that what we need right now is a technological breakthrough. Our technology is already very, very good. Sure, new gizmos are always amazing. But (this is American-centric, sorry) I think right now there is something fundamentally broken with our way of life. Our society seems to no longer be able to go forward in a workable way and land on a consensus for self-determination and shared governance, and it seems to be getting worse, not better. The technological parts of our culture only get weaponized and used toi further that weird, self-destructive descent we seem to be on. The system you think of to detect lies in mass media would in my opinion not be that useful because right now we have an enormous percentage of the population who will readily believe things they know to be lies as long as it helps them screw the other side. Functionally, it's the same as when we used to think that police body cams would help fix bad policing, and then it turns out when you have body cams, it kind of didn't make a difference because even when you have footage of cops doing clearly horrific things, they get a huge degree of deference from the legal system and almost always skate. I'm not trying to threadjack into this arena but use that example to say that "revealing lies" is only useful if you have an engaged public to know knowing they are lies would then act on them in a manner we think is appropriate, and I don't think that's true anymore.

So the "big break" we need the most, again as an American, is so philosophical or... I don't know the exact right word I want here, but something that helps bring us together more, because cheap electricity and cures for disease are actually not the biggest problems I think we are hurtling towards.


Anyway I typed something like that but longer and then remember that at one point my country was actually so divided that the entire country split in half and went to war with each other, so maybe I'm just lacking perspective and things have always been pretty bad and at times dramatically worse.

Ok, a lot of people are talking about changing how people think, accept lies, deny facts, etc. and how that really needs to be changed.

And these are damn good points.

So i'm going to skirt the edge of my rules here and say that the world could sure uses stiff dose of Nexialism.

Now, nexialism comes from an outstanding early SF novel called "Voyage of the space beagle" (don't laugh, the original SS Beagle was the ship Darwin developed his theory of evolution on.) by A. E. Van Voght.

Basically nexialism was a school of thought that tackled human failing at the fundamental level, it used neural science and psychology to deal with negative elements of human nature.

You should try to read VotSB if yiu can get it. Yes the language is outdated the the scie ce is even more so but the ideas of nexialism vs negative human behavior was fascinating.

There is a nexial Institute based on some of Voght's ideas, it has little effect unfortunately. http://nexial.org/tmp/nexialism.htm

Nexialism was essentially rational skeptical thought with an understanding of the structure of the human brain and ways to counter the destructive urges of the hindbrain, in a nutshell.

I am another vote for electrical storage. For all our other advancements in power and technology the ability to effectively store energy has either lagged behind or traded an advancement in one arena for high cost or rarer materials in another.

A cure for these might be a good thing too:

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/scientists-earth-endangered-by-new-strain-of-fact-resistant-humans

The article is somewhat satirical but has a valid point.

Well, we have A.I.

The next big break through we need is something that we will benefit from for a long time to come.
Getting astronauts to the moon has given us so much in ways of tech invented to complete that task.
A big project, like landing on the moon, would be ideal.

 Haighus wrote:
I would say energy storage. We just don't have a good way of storing lots of electricity. Batteries have lots of issues with scarce materials, inefficiency etc, and water storage solutions take up loads of space (like an entire mountain) and are also pretty inefficient.

If we can figure out an energy-dense way of storing electricity using commonly available materials, all kinds of tech gets more viable. Renewable power becomes more reliable, electric vehicles get better, personal tech gear will become more useful.

This.

We already have very acceptable long term power generation tech in the form of Thorium based nuclear power plants, which will eventually become Fusion plants if we try. Thorium power would give us millennia of power before we ran out of fuel, plenty of time to either find more Thorium or a completely different energy source. The real hurdle is storing that power efficiently in all our devices that use it. For that we need tiny energy dense batteries at least similar to gasoline in terms of weight to power.

This would enable all vehicles and equipment to be powered by electricity while also being cordless for practical lengths of time. Cars and trucks that can be recharged in seconds while only needing to charge once a week or so. Power tools that can be used for weeks in between charges.

Population Control.

If you have that, then pretty much every other problem can be fixed simply by scaling the size of our numbers.

 admironheart wrote:
Population Control.

If you have that, then pretty much every other problem can be fixed simply by scaling the size of our numbers.

Overpopulation is a myth, at least in terms of right now or even in the foreseeable future. Certainly it won't actually occur till we are able to begin making viable colonies in orbital cities or on other celestial objects. Earth can support many many times people than we have right now, even if we ceased to convert more of the earth's surface into farmland and only used what we currently have.

People confuse Overpopulation with unequal distribution of resources. They see massive amounts of people starving around the world and incorrectly assume we are running out of resources due to overpopulation, when the real problem is that the resources we have are not distributed 'fairly' across the world.

Population control of course could solve this problem. But that would necessitate the mass culling of the populations of pretty much all 3rd world countries. Definitely not an ethical solution.

Even in the short start to the thread, you can see the subcurrent of a future conflict/issue which calls all of this into question.

Anti-religious types (I do not practice religion, personally) generally agree that cold-hard-logic is the answer to a lot of the world's problems. However, you have some people who are so (ironically) zealous about science...they're nearly as cult-mad as some of the crazy religious types they're complaining about. Then...consider in the future we develop enough science to determine that X, Y or Z shouldn't be born, or yada yada...science can only go so far before it actually becomes the root cause of religion sprouting up again. This is just an endless cycle. The colder and more logical the world becomes the more desperate people will become to find "a greater meaning", or something non-scientific to rally behind to justify their existence or usefulness, etc.

A scientist knocking at your door informing you that your usefulness quotient isn't inline with your caloric intake and thus you've been selected for discontinuation....is about as tragic as people wanting to burn you because they think you're a witch. There are extremes to every angle.

The old military adage of "no plan survives contact with the enemy"...we could easily argue that no government or world solution survives contact with humans. Whether that's a good thing or not...who knows.

A political system that doesn't quickly devolve into self serving beuocracy and almost hilarious corruption?