Abstract :
Recently, I had been invited to a Frontiers of Engineering Symposium jointly organized by the Humboldt Foundation and the National Academy of Engineering. The discussion of the prevailing challenges in engineering covered a broad variety of topics ranging from supply of vaccine, water, and sustainable energy to the entire population over laser technologies to new mobility concepts. The need to provide new solutions to these and other issues becomes apparent when looking at the growth of the world population and its access to individual motorized transportation systems. I am grateful to my colleague Ilya Kolmanovsky from the University of Michigan for providing the following graphs illustrating this point. The trend towards urbanization may be seen at the vast increase of cities that host more than 10.000.000 inhabitants as depicted in the following graph. Living in a little town of 30.000 inhabitants at the edge of the black forest myself, such population is difficult to imagine.
