Humanity's Top 10 Problems
Richard E. Smalley, Ph.D.
Based on a transcript of a talk given for the MIT Enterprise Forum, Houston TX, January 22, 2003
I’ve been running this audience participation experiment with various groups for the past six months. I have been testing three hypotheses as I do this, and they have been borne out every time.
The first hypothesis is: whenever you gather a group of people together, or whenever three or more are gathered together, and you ask them this question—"What are humanity's top 10 problems for the next 50 years?"—the word "energy" will always appear.
The second hypothesis is: wherever the word "energy" appears on the list, if you move it to the top of the list and you imagine that through some miracle the energy problem of the world has now been solved, then you will find that you have an answer to at least five of the remaining nine problems on the list, where without that you could hardly imagine there could be an answer.
The third hypothesis is: if you take at random any other one of these ten problems on the list and you move it to the top, then you will not find anywhere near the cooperative ability to help solve other problems that energy has. Energy is unique. Not only in being the most important problem to solve, but in its ability to enable solutions to the other problems.
1. Energy
By "solution to the energy problem" I mean one where we now have abundant energy available in the amounts we need, universally around the planet at a low enough cost that we can do the things that we need to do during these 50 years for the billions of people on the planet.
Right now, we have about 6.3 billion people on the planet and the expectation is we will have between 9 and 10 billion by 2050. Our job, with that number of people on that sphere, is to provide the technology base to allow these human beings to live a reasonably fulfilled life. If we don’t do it, we’re going to have hell to pay. That’s the challenge we are facing today.
Let’s just imagine there has been a miracle: we’ve found some new energy source that is vast and can be made available cheaply enough to solve the problem. Then, is it going to be true that this will now enable solutions to the other problems? Well, I’ve listed them here, in order of their relevance to energy and their overall importance.
2. Water
I think most people would agree that if energy is the number one problem, then water is number two. Water is a great example of the importance of energy.
Water is a very brutal problem: either you have it or you don’t. If you haven’t got it then you have to get it. Luckily, we have plenty of water on the planet. But it has salt in it, and it’s often thousands of miles away from where you need it.
We know how to take the salt out of water: you boil it. Alternatively, you could take a nano-membrane and do it with tremendous efficiency and get really snazzy about it. Boiling works okay, but it takes energy to boil water. And for the amount of water we need, it’s a vast amount of energy.
Then you need to transport it thousands of miles away to where it will be used. There’s energy needed to pump it, there’s the energy required to manufacture the materials and so forth to build a pipeline.
If you’ve got the energy, you can solve the water problem. If you haven’t, then you can’t.
3. Food
Clearly with that number of people on the planet, food is a huge problem. For the food problem, my answer is "see Number Two: Water"—literally, sea water. Once again, you’re only going to solve the problem with energy.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that: you need to have good soil, you need to have a reasonable climate to grow those things. If worse comes to worse, we could make greenhouses on a vast scale.
Once again, it’s a vast energy-intensive operation just to build the greenhouses, let alone service them. But if you have the energy, you can do it.
4. Environment
Most of our environmental problems come directly from the kind of energy we use and the way we use it.
5. Poverty
There is no single factor that determines economic well-being of a civilization more than the availability, quality, and cost of its energy.
6. Terrorism and War
A lot of our wars, particularly recently, have been literally fought over energy. That’s the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and the reason that the Germans went to Stalingrad. Energy has a lot to do with the root causes of the terrorism that we’re grappling with today.
7. Disease
Disease is dependent on your food supply, your lifestyle, how clean your water supply is, and your access to modern health care, all of which are determined by your economic well-being.
8. Education
Again, you can’t bother too much with education if you can’t eat and if you can’t take care of yourself. But with prosperity, as civilization develops, you can take time for education.
If you can educate the females and give them free access to jobs, the fertility rate will go down. If you don’t, it won’t. Saudi Arabia is a great example of this.
9. Democracy
Democracy is a much more complicated question; it’s not obvious you will solve a democracy problem with energy alone, but energy-induced prosperity, health, and education will certainly help.
10. Population
If there is an exception to my third hypothesis, it’s population. If you move the population issue to the top and you imagine that somehow this population problem is solved, then most of the other problems will go away.
But how did you imagine solving the population problem? If you can get population down to a level where we have enough energy for a prosperous, fulfilled lifestyle for all, we’d have to ask about five billion people to leave.
In the history of humanity on this planet there’s never been a time, even during the Black Death in Europe, when the world population dropped to even half of its previous level.
To solve the problems on this list using population reduction alone, you’d need a factor of 5 reduction. You’d need an apocalypse, a worldwide disaster of unprecedented proportion.
So if you’re waiting for AIDS, or famine, or even wars the magnitude of World War II to solve this problem, forget it. The problem is vastly bigger than that.
Energy... Our Number One Problem
I am very surprised and struck by the fact that at the end of going through this line of reasoning, all groups seem to agree: energy must be the single most important problem we confront today.
There is great power in this. If we can all agree what the most important problem is, then we are already a long way toward solving it.