Question: what is the most important advancement in scientist needed to progress humanity to another lever of living? For example advancements in fusion technology or the singularity. also what areas of science are the newest?

Philip Moriarty answered on 13 Mar 2015:

It’s very, very interesting that you mention the singularity. This, I assume, is the technological singularity that Ray Kurzweil has proposed? A lot of scientists are extremely sceptical about the idea of the singularity.

Kurzweil sees nanotech – my research area – as being a major contribution to the singularity he proposes. And yet he wrote ten years ago that by 2030 we would be able to inject nanobots into our bodies which could act as “experience beamers” — i.e. effectively make telepathy possible. This, I’m afraid, is utter fantasy. Much of the other suggestions Kurzweil has made are similarly nonsensical.

I hate to sound so negative. I’m a huge fan of science fiction and we can get an awful lot out of thinking about and trying to predict the future (for example, Arthur C Clarke not only proposed geosynchronous satellites but he predicted iPods all the way back in the sixties). But we have to temper those aspirations with the reality of just how difficult it is to do science and engineering which can revolutionise the world.

To answer your question (at last!), I would say that nanoscience – particularly at the level of manipulating matter at the atomic level – will play an exceptionally important role in changing our world.