• Question: What's one thing you should be invented in the next 100 years? thaks

    Asked by 585nepk47 to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 8 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Yo Yehudi

      Yo Yehudi answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      I’m going to take this as a possible dream of things that might be created rather than something I’m sure will be discovered.
      What I’d like to see, more than anything else, would be a way to effectively feed *everyone* who needed it. Maybe somehow we could introduce a genetic modification that allowed us to photosynthesise food, drawing nutrition from the sun like plants do. I think that ending world hunger would be amazing. I grew up having enough to eat, but many more weren’t as lucky as me.

    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      While I think some of the most important things we need are to help us with climate change – alternative energy sources, for example – lots of these actually exist already and we just need to get better at using them. No, I think the thing we most need to invent in the next few decades is a new set of antibiotics. We’re facing the very real danger of an antibiotic apocalypse, where even simple scratches can kill, because bacteria have become resistant to our current medicines. That they’ve managed to do this is largely because we’ve been really stupid in the way we use them (giving them to farm animals to make them grow faster, for example), but it’s also really hard and expensive to invent new types of medicine, and no big companies want to spend their money on making new antibiotics. So I think we need to urgently find new ones, as well as ways of improving the ones we’ve got. Happily people are already trying to do this, and I really hope they succeed!
      For more on the antibiotic apocalypse, have a read of this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21702647

    • Photo: Kerrianne Harrington

      Kerrianne Harrington answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      I agree with Oli! Antibiotic resistance is going to become bigger and bigger, and so we’d better get ahead of that with new technologies to diagnose better, as well as new antibiotics.

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