Op-Ed Columnist - What’s Our Sputnik? - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - What’s Our Sputnik? - NYTimes.com: "Well, what is our national project going to be? Racing China, chasing Al Qaeda or parsing Harry? Of course, to a degree, we need to both race China and confront Al Qaeda — but which will define us?

“Our response to Sputnik made us better educated, more productive, more technologically advanced and more ingenious,” said the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. “Our investments in science and education spread throughout American society, producing the Internet, more students studying math and people genuinely wanting to build the nation.”

And what does the war on terror give us? Better drones, body scanners and a lot of desultory T.S.A. security jobs at airports. “Sputnik spurred us to build a highway to the future,” added Mandelbaum. “The war on terror is prompting us to build bridges to nowhere.”"

I think the following are going to prove the most society-altering advancements in the next 20 years.

1) Life suspension
2) Brain/machine interfaces
3) Cloning a human
4) Interactive autonomous robots
5) 10x higher density batteries

Any one of those could be our sputnik.