What to do – the young adult nat-sci dilemma

Contents & top topics:

Diving the future; 1. Ocean, lake, and river sciences; 2. Atmospheric sciences, meteorology, and engineering defences; 3. Power grids, urban design, social education, and fiscal policy for energy efficiency; 4. Global nutrition and food management; 5. Raw material extractive industries and manufacturing for longevity and safe waste treatment; 6. Natural hazard science; 7. Water resource (warm and cold); 8. Communication of complex natural science issues for economists, planners and policy makers; 9. Materials science and accompanying technologies; 10. The intertwined science of human and natural resource history. Navigating the maze.

Divining the future

I feel for young adults these days – teenagers and young twenty somethings – who are gifted in the sciences. Making life choices about what to do, what to study - when so many things are in flux -it's hard. 

The reality these days is that life-careers with one company are almost non-existent, so picking a field of long-lasting attraction to a pool of many companies takes on greater importance. That said, an important thing is the agility to evolve, as few things stay static with time.

I’ve been having these challenging but fascinating kinds of discussions with my own kids, and it struck me that it would be good to capture some loosely consolidated thoughts on key topics.  Subjects that – especially in natural sciences (and associated engineering) –strike me as having huge growth requirements in coming decades. Things that will grow, sometimes for quite scary reasons, but will need sustained and growing pools of skilled workers.

That is not to suggest a bottomless pit of new work, and we will still have to be the best to compete - natural sciences and engineering aren't for the faint-hearted or work-shy, and not everyone who wants to do such work, gets to do so. Yet if you know natural science/associated engineering of some hue is something you want to do, and are good at, but are having difficultly finding focus - then this article is for you. If you have the spark, but don't know which fire to light, here's some kindling.

I would be interested to hear others' thoughts too, if anybody out there is listening and grappling similar issues within their clan. Don’t feel constrained in the disciplines you mention if you do chip-in. For what it’s worth though, here are some of my top topics, with a focus on natural sciences and the inseparable engineering topics that activate any resource. The list is far, far, far from exhaustive, and some are easier to achieve than others. It is easy to say many of them. Saying them does not guarantee their deliverability, yet a start to obtaining what we need is always to imagine and say what we need. We can't achieve it if we don't first imagine it.

1.      Ocean, lake & river sciences

Though we are often very much focussed on the land and the atmosphere, some of the greatest food chain and ecosystem vulnerabilities we face over coming decades reside in the oceans.  These include:

• The impact of changing polar ice melts and warming seas on ocean circulation, including an ice free Arctic.
• The growing eutrophication and oxygen deprivation of oceans from fertiliser runoffs used in global food production, and the algal blooms they generate.
• The impacts of ocean acidification from atmospheric CO2 content on coral reefs and the carbonate shell capabilities & welfare of small organisms at the very bottom of the food chain - upon which everything in the ocean depends.
• The preservation of fluvial environments including the treatment of chemical and microscopic pollutants such as fertiliser runoffs and microplastics.
• Increased exploration and monitoring of the ocean environment including the deep ocean and sea floor, not least monitoring changes in deep sea geochemistry and carbonate production.
• Ongoing advances in offshore and submarine engineering and robotics, including offshore renewable energy contexts and ecological monitoring.  

2.      Atmospheric sciences & meteorology, and engineering defences

This is already high profile but set to become even more so. Global models of climate and weather patterns are already becoming increasingly sophisticated, and within that framework, more sophisticated modelling of particular regions and nations seems set to become even more widespread - as countries become more and more concerned about their own welfares.  These will become routine in almost every country. Even those like Russia and Canada where at first glance “global warming” might have some attraction, but where the increased frequency of extremes, both warm and cold, plus the implications of unpredictability for crops and food production - will become more apparent as time goes on. Big continental interiors far removed from ocean moderation and precipitation being especially vulnerable. We'll seek:

• Understanding the increased variability in weather extremes that a higher energy (i.e. warmer on average) atmosphere entails and its ramifications for human engineering, particularly in coastal and urban environments.
• Increasingly sophisticated national scale scenario modelling for effects of climate change on local food production.
• Heat wave mitigation efforts, especially in warm humid tropical countries where the ability of the human body to cope with both extreme humidity and extreme temperature is likely to be an increasing problem.
• Modelling the aridity of continental interiors in light of changes, with all the big sea-distal continental interiors potentially facing this problem – including Australia, Brazil, Russia & Central Asia, Northern and Southern desert fringing countries of Africa.
• Storm and flood/drought modelling and the engineering required to mitigate against the effects of these.
• Greenhouse gas refrigerant recycling protocols and design, for appliances and increasing use of heat pumps.
• Monitoring and mitigation of permafrost and seafloor hydrate denigration and associated greenhouse gas release.
• Cloud science. One of the most familiar yet least understood (in detail) of all atmospheric phenomena.

3.      Power grids, urban design, social education, and fiscal policy for energy efficiency

The energy changes we observe in play already are barely scratching the surface of what is needed, and to become less emitting involves much greater elimination of waste and unnecessary energy consumption. To do that at scale is far more than changes in individual behaviour. It requires large scale policy implementation and all the social and financial challenges that entails. For change to be effective, it requires the generation of social buy-in to the reasons for doing so. The world’s population is becoming increasingly urban – concentrated in large cities – and city management will become a huge focus.

• Designing cities and infrastructures anew to increasing building energy efficiency and to reduce commutes – pedestrian, cycle, public vehicle and rail options.
• The management of change introduction in cities possessing old infrastructures and needing to migrate to new ones – a huge and costly engineering problem, and an often difficult social one.
• The gradual replacement of old inefficient national grids created piecemeal with old technologies to deal with a vastly different local and national energy supply and new usage patterns. This including new transmission technologies, and the intermittency of some renewables. No one size fits all, but detailed looks at locations, regions, nations, continents. Integrating the ”power of place” when it comes to optimal energy solutions.
• Maximising non-emitting local energy production and energy storage options to minimise the need for energy distribution in the first place, and designing infrastructure and buildings to this end. 
• The increased “architecture” of symbiotic industrial and energy clusters to minimise losses involved in energy distribution and waste. Industries sharing resource and making use of each other's wastes when practical.
• Transportation. The science of reducing how much of it is needed. The science of doing it most energy efficiently when it is.
• Public communication of the real energy and raw material costs to the environment of everything we do. Not with the aim of instilling a guilt trip or despondency, but with the object of gently, gradually, non-shockingly, instilling buy-in to policy changes that will affect and change how we live.
• Continually examining fiscal devices and economic modelling paradigms to ensure the further welfare of global and nation environments is appropriately incorporated.
• Increasing the ties and required obligations between vendor, customer, and wider society welfare without suffocating commercial activity or creating super-state nightmares. 

4.      Global nutrition and food management.

The way we eat is problematic. Some of the issues have already been touched upon. Yet this has to be a huge topic going forward:

• Maintaining soils without overuse of artificial fertilisers and the ocean runoffs and pollutants that are associated with them. Soil erosion management. Rotating crop management.
• Pollinating insect and species diversity protection.
• Addressing the emissions involved in intensive meat and dairy production. Educating as to the effects early on within schools. The stomach is very close to all our hearts and also a very large part of the issue.
• Similarly obesity, sugar intake and related health issues. Increasing understanding that how we eat affects not just our body but our environment.
• Sustainable use of marine fisheries and effective protection of all marine environments including those in international waters.
• Sustaining, protecting, and nurturing natural genetic diversity in food production to ensure protection from disease.
• Encouraging local food production and public tolerance for seasonal changes in supply to minimise the environmental costs of food transportation.
• Loosening the grip of human food chain management by large retail supermarket chains and introducing incentives for these corporations and the public to adhere to methods that encourage sustainable food production at source. Policies which fairly reward those engaged in sustainable, local, genetically diverse, food production. 

5.      Raw material extractive industries and manufacturing for longevity and safe waste treatment.

Everything we manufacture requires raw materials. That always involves environmental costs of the extraction, refinement, production, and transportation of raw materials to the point of manufacture. Once manufactured, usage of the item manufactured can also have further extensive environmental costs during it's use. There are no manufacture options which do not have these costs. Assessing those which have the least, and which still remain practical for the intended end-use will be a growing science. So too will asking the question as to whether our expectation of certain end-uses is reasonable in a global environmental context. Some things we do which are nice to have are not reasonable in that context. The science of quantifying that will grow. So too, educating ourselves and our society on those aspects. 

• Routine secondary school education and public information drives on the life cycle costs of everything we do in modern society.
• The science of technology efficiency. Using the minimum technology required to achieve what we need to do, recognising that overuse of technology introduces large environment costs.
• Managing social expectations of technology, and why higher tech. isn’t always better when environmental costs are factored in.
• Manufacturing things to last and introducing fiscal incentives that reward corporations which do so. Investigating how to replace 2-year warrantees with 20 year warrantees.
• The science of recycling – though recycling can never be perfect, the science and the economies of recycling what we can, and designing production with this in mind from the start.
• Mining. The science of reducing impact of mineral mining, and its waste treatment. Exploration and excavation technologies to increase effectiveness of non-opencast subterranean options. Effective isolation and full utilisation of waste products. 
• Nuclear fuel extraction and nuclear waste treatment, reprocessing, and disposal. This for existing fission options and any emerging fusion options involving shorter lived but far more mobile radioactive materials.
• Robotic technologies to deal with hazardous materials across all resource and manufacturing sectors.
• Numerical modelling approaches of life cycle analysis and associated metrics to facilitate this.
• The science of digital electronic and geochemical tracers to confirm and monitor sustainably sourced materials.
• Appropriate land use and wherever possible hybrid land usage for energy, food production, environmental protection, and leisure. A tall order, but necessary to pose the question – can it be done? 

6.      Natural hazard science

Even without the added stresses of climate change, the increasing concentration of human populations in cities, and populations which interact internationally more than ever in the past - raises engineering and management questions that are unique. COVID-19 has also brought home how vulnerable society systems are to global extreme events. There is a possibility our increased population, its concentration in large cities, the mobility of populations, and use of intensive agriculture and low species diversity will increase the regularity of such events.

• Pandemic defence strategies. Little needs to be said given our experience of the last eighteen months.
• Sea defences of cities in the face of increased storm event frequency and rising sea levels.
• Forest fire hazard and natural forest floor vegetation management.
• Fluvial flood and landslide defence.
• Earthquake engineering.
• Understanding induced seismicity associated with artificial stimulations of subsurface permeability, and other groundwater pressure, temperature, and geochemical changes.
• Low probability high impact event science. including:
• Oceanic scale tsunami from mega-earthquakes, subterranean landslides, bolides, and oceanic volcanic island collapse.
• Solar storm and electronic circuitry damage.
• Extremely large and/or long-lived volcanic events.
• Bolide impact.
• Unexpected large seismic events in areas where design for this is not routinely in place. 

7.      Water resource (warm and cold)

The water we all depend on is subject to environmental changes and growing population demand. Some issues have been already discussed but they include:

• Pollutant management and the effect on human and aquatic health, particularly microplastics and fertiliser, pesticide runoffs.
• The geopolitics and resource/conflict management of large hydroelectric projects.
• The depletion of major onshore aquifers, particularly in arid countries.
• The salt-water invasion of major coastal aquifers on rising sea-levels and increased draw-off.
• Desalination technology options.
• Pumped-hydro energy storage at scale, perhaps in marine settings.
• The greater use of water, ground, and geothermal resource sourced heat pumps for renewable baseload heat energy.
• Underground thermal energy storage.
• The scene of municipal district heating networks and infrastructure installation and maintenance.
• The denigration of mountain-sourced seasonal snow and ice cap sourced water supplies, and general changes in recharge area precipitation patterns.
• Increased summer season aridity including the “Mediterreanisation” of some temperature countries.  
• The detailed interaction of deep and shallow groundwater resources and the relationship to precipitation replenishment.
• Greater understanding of natural subterranean water and heat flow variations. 

8.      Distilling of complex natural science issues for communication to economists, planners and policy makers

The natural science issues confronting the world today are complex and hard enough for professionals to understand. The science of communicating these issues to policy makers and planners who are not necessarily trained in these fields will become increasingly important.

• Geospatial workflows for communicating local, regional, and national issues effectively.
• Standard global methods for resource and risk assessment and associated metrics to assist this analysis.
• Enhancing political awareness of the dangers of scientific naivety – the importance of knowing what we don’t know and routine protocols for science-based policy formation.
• The embedding of wider societal needs in vendor-customer transactions. Satisfying the two latter is no longer sufficient. To ensure sustainable methods requires society input and safeguards, without suffocating commercial transactions.  Easier said than done. A growing field.  

9.      Materials science and accompanying technologies

The ongoing development of materials to deal with new technologies will continue to absorb much effort.

• Materials design for increased life and embedded recycling ease.
• Sustainable materials for renewables and electronic industries.
• Design of naturally decomposing materials.
• Alternative battery mineral, solar, water filtration, and engine materials.
• Alternatives to plastics.
• Sustainable plant and timber-based options for parts and construction.
• Extreme materials for use in increasingly extreme environments, including:
• Deep marine corrosion and pressure resistant materials
• Deep high temperature high pressure drilling.
• Robotic space exploration.
• Nuclear reactor materials.
• Superconducting materials.

10.      The intertwined science of human and natural resource history

The evolution of humanity in step with the natural resources it accesses, and the limitations involved - is something that evolves on timescales much larger than individual memory. This is related to virtually all of the topics mentioned above. 

Examples can be drawn from history where things went wrong, and why. Wars, invasions, and genocidal colonisations almost always start based in economic and resource constraints. Yes they can be rooted in deeper seated things that are harder to address, but the triggers and catalysts to the worst case scenarios are so often resource related. 

No one alive today is truly familiar with an existence that is not hugely reliant on fossil fuels. We need to re-teach ourselves how the history of the world has evolved in tandem with resource supplies, and on long time scales – longer than our own lifetimes and that of our immediate generations - to understand what is possible and what is not.

Navigating the maze

Choosing what to do with one's life in an age where careers are for ever more specialized and seemingly requiring early path commitment, can be daunting. This especially so for those who genuinely don't know what they want to do. The restrictions placed by university educations on entry requirements for various options can feel stressful - deciding what you want to do with your life at 26. 36 and 46, from the perspective of 16 is not easy.

Amidst all this educational angst, young adults should also rest assured that qualifications are in many ways just a ticket to the door - whatever you choose to do, do it well, earnestly, and with perseverance, and doors will open. Maybe not always immediately, or exactly in the area you wanted, but with persistence and a willingness to much in at lower ends of the ladder at the start, things can happen.

Once in a job, that is when the training really begins. Demonstrate to your employer that you use the training given to you well, and they will likely not hesitate to provide you with more. If they do hesitate, there will be others who will - shop around. Few doors close absolutely on subjects left behind, where there lies resolute determination to re-open them.

Just a few caveats I guess - listing the things that seem likely to be big growth industries in coming years is never any guarantee of a smooth ride, or continuous employment in any one location. In any generation the arrival of new and unexpected technologies can change employment landscapes quickly. Nor is engagement in these fields a guarantee of a highly paid position. We live in a 21st century employment matrix where there are few long-lived employment guarantees if any, and so it's not about certainty, it's about increasing the chances. Probabilities. There are more people wanting to do natural sciences roles than there are jobs, so you have to have the spark and the talent for it.

If that is you, but you are having difficult choosing which precise way to go, one of the best ways of addressing that is to embrace the big questions facing the world today, for which answers are needed.

This is an attempt to offer some of those questions and to stimulate your own imaginations as to some of the big ticket items on that ever expanding list - topics that coincide with your own interests. If you are gifted in the natural sciences or engineering, whatever your precise skills or your precise role may evolve to be, you will be put to good use. Trust and build, and train to be agile in subjects that are versatile, and which excite you.