Question: in your opinion what will happen to engineering in the near future

Marcus Johns answered on 17 Jun 2014:

I can’t answer for the whole of engineering but do have a few ideas. Firstly, all engineering will become more efficient trying to make the most of our limited resources and minimising the amount of energy used. There is now a list of materials that are most at risk of global supply collapse. Unsurprisingly rare earth metals that we’ve recently found uses for in medicine and electronics make up most of the list but carbon, which we are increasingly using for batteries, fuel cells and new generations of nuclear reactors is 9th on the list.

There is also a trend towards trying to mimic nature – we’ve only had a few thousand years to develop, whilst nature has had millions of years to perfect certain systems. For example, there’s a building in Zimbabwe that mimics the way a termite nest keeps itself cool, allowing it to use less than 10 % of the energy for cooling compared to a conventional building. There’s also a company that is developing screens for phones and laptops that are based on the wings of a butterfly. This will allow them to use less power and will allow them to be used in bright sunlight without having screen glare. This is also reflected in biomedical and tissue engineering. There’s a move towards using organic materials found in nature rather than the inorganic and synthetic ones that we currently use.

There will always be a demand for engineers. Without them society as we know it would not be the same. Anything found in a supermarket that comes in packaging wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be able to support the number of people that live on this planet and travel and communication would be very limited.