Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

This is up-and-coming, but so many people are working on making graphics shinier, it's a very crowded space.

Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find everything that requires stable land and predictable weather and put it in a shipping container. Find every infrastructure investment that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it.

Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of copper and fiber optic cables on telephone poles, use solar and satellites. Instead of refrigerated transportation, grow food in your pocket or your stomach. Instead of roads, take to the air.

We won't fix the climate out of kindness. Warren Buffet invested $$ Billions into wind farms because it makes his wallet feel better. Tim Cook just yesterday gave a speech that Apple said "We don't see climate change as risk, but opportunity", that's straight from the world's first trillion dollar company. [1] Elon Musk announced that SpaceX Starship will be pulling its fuel out of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth, and on Mars [2]

We'll need to completely reinvent society. Sustainable transportation, vertical agriculture, solar/wind/nuclear energy, air mining, an all-electric economy.

Topics: Direct Air Capture, making products out of atmospheric carbon dioxide, carbon removal. Check out all the companies in the space here: http://airminers.org

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/22/tim-cook-talks-sustaina...

[2] https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850

Information quality, the nascent field of labeling content with metadata about its veracity. Its dense with hard problems, but a good solution that gains majority consensus is critical for the future of digital communication. Facebook or any private entity ought not be the canonical fact-checker of the 21st century. Ideally IMHO is it delivered as an open protocol.

seconding both of these.

psychedelics as medicine are finally starting to gain the traction and serious research which they will need to be utilized therapeutically. while imperfect, they're potentially curative therapies which are likely a quantum leap ahead of much of what psychopharmacology has had in its roster so far.

the gut/microbiome stuff is also starting to come to a head after about 9 years of intense research activity. clinical applications are right around the corner, and there's an entire universe to explore which we've only scratched the surface of so far.

i'd also like to add cannabinoid (CBD) therapeutics as an addendum to psychedelic medicines. while there's a tremendous amount of hype and folk science surrounding CBD, it appears as though the chemical does in fact have a massive impact in domains ranging from immunology to psychiatry to geriatrics. we're just at the very start of the research process, and there are already a cornucopia of compelling and empirically valid leads which need to be followed.

Let's not forget: - non invasive medical imaging, particularly in terms of new approaches to generating or interpreting CT/MRI/ultrasound scans - more ergonomic surgical robots that don't hold their instruments like a 3 year old toddler - AI/expert systems for rapid triage and assessment of patients - more effective ways of drug delivery (both cell based therapy and developing better oral formulations)