challenges of the science in the new decade: What will be new is to come? What the researchers have to say?
Kingfisher in the münsterland region: The global biodiversity photo: Reuters
BERLIN taz | The twenties: a decade in the field of science and technology, some of it will come off is in danger, even if research breakthroughs can’t be exactly timed. Especially under the conditions of intensifying climate change are expected from the researchers urgently solutions for the future sustainable development of the Planet and humanity possible.
The range of scientific expectations for the future has to year, a survey of the journalist project “future reporter” put together, it’s part of the growing media collective “reef reporter” turning.
“The biggest challenge in the 2020s will be a global species extinction to avert,” the evolutionary biologist Matthias trust law, founding Director of the center for natural history (CeNak) at the University of Hamburg and to the point. Also for the African botanist Segenet Kelemu is the Central challenge of the coming years, “how do we create favorable conditions to preserve the biological diversity of insects,” says the Director-General of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) in Kenya. “Because the only way we will improve the health of the Ecosystem, agricultural productivity, feeding the world and sustainable development and the Degradation of natural resources to stop.”
The urban planner Christa Reicher of the RWTH Aachen, the most important task of their craft sees it, “our cities will transform, that they will reduce their emissions and adapt to the climate crisis, to adapt”. Also the marine researcher Antje Boetius from the Alfred-Wegener-Institute in Bremerhaven, it is “the overarching challenge for science and society, how we can reach the global climate target for 2030”.
Other research the “hot topics” in their field more to the center. “The main question for the 2020s is how you can solve the crisis in physics with its two contradictory theories – quantum mechanics and General relativity – with a standard model,” notes the science historian Ernst Peter Fischer. New discoveries such as dark energy and dark matter with the current theories do not explain. “The house of the physics breaks down at the beginning of the 20th century. Century together,“ predicts Fischer. At the time it was rescued by geniuses like Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Fisherman: “Where are those researchers now? That is the main issue.“
But also prepares the change in the people. “The biggest challenge for science and society will be how we deal with the genome-editing technology CRISPR,” says Ecologist Kim Valenta of the University of Florida in the survey of the “future reporter”. The sleep researcher Jan Born of the University of Tübingen, expected by the 2020s, and that “finally the time has come to answer one of the great open questions of our time: Why we need to sleep?”
