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1、Future science: the next 10 yearsNew worlds, new life, new bodies: just some of the breakthroughs we may see by 2020, predict our panel of leading Australian scientists.By Abbie ThomasSlideshow: Photo 1 of 8What will the next 10 years hold for science? (Source: iStockphoto)There have been some incre
2、dible leaps forward in science in the past decade. Its difficult to imagine what life was like before Wi-Fi, and hard to believe how much weve discovered about Mars. And its only seven years since the entire human genome was sequenced, yet since then, scientists have cracked the genomes of dozens mo
3、re species.So whats next? How many more amazing scientific discoveries will we see by the end of the next decade? And how will these change our lives? We asked some of Australias most outstanding researchers in astronomy, health, technology and the environment to gaze into the future and predict wha
4、t the world will look like in 2020. to topDeeper into space WHATS NEXT: Bigger, better telescopes sweep the skies scrutinising the atmosphere of planets in other solar systems while plutonium drills dig up alien life from 20 kilometres beneath the ice of Saturns moons.By 2020 I bet well be on the br
5、ink of a breakthrough in finding life out there in space, says Professor Fred Watson from the Anglo-Australian Observatory. Some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have ice 20 kilometres thick floating on liquid oceans: who knows what could be living in them? Titan has lakes of liquid methane instea
6、d of water. Theres a good chance there are microbes living off these hydrocarbons they would be amazing life forms if we could find them. Watson forecasts that a new generation of telescopes twice or even three times as large as todays will make it possible to closely scrutinise the atmosphere of fa
7、r-distant Earth-like planets for indications of life. Well discover many Earth-like planets by 2020, says Dr Charley Lineweaver from the Australian National University.This will inspire humanitys first mission to another star, using a spaceship that can travel many times faster than any previous shi
8、p. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has the potential at any time to unhinge our identities as much or even more than Darwin did says Lineweaver, adding but I suspect it will be another quiet decade for SETI, a project searching for other lifeforms in the universe.Professor Mathew Colles
9、s, director of the Anglo-Australian Observatory is a little more hopeful.Maybe, just maybe this is a real long-shot, we might even learn of other intelligences out there, creatures who, like us, are capable of savouring knowledge about the universe we share. WHATS NEXT: Cracking the mysteries of the
10、 universe.The Large Hadron Collider will find the Higgs Boson or something unexpected - Dr Charley Lineweaver (Source: CERN) We are learning about our universe more rapidly than before and the next decade could herald some exciting discoveries, says Colless.Particularly fascinating new discoveries t
11、o savour in the next ten years may well include where mass comes from if the Large Hadron Collider identifies the Higgs boson; what most of the material in the universe actually is if laboratory experiments detect the subatomic particles of dark matter; what is causing the expansion of the universe
12、to accelerate if astronomical observations reveal the nature of dark energy; and whether there are other Earth-like worlds around other stars.Lineweaver agrees this will be the decade to find the elusive Higgs-boson particle.Our dark matter searches will find a dark matter particle (or particles) or
13、 something unexpected. These results and the Planck cosmic microwave background observations could solve the mystery of dark matter and dark energy, Lineweaver says. to topThe meaning of life WHATS NEXT: A grand unifying theory of biology.While discovering the Higgs-boson particle may help us unders
14、tand how our universe works, a new science called interactomics may help us understand the meaning of life on Earth.Once upon a time, we thought genes could explain everything we observe in biology. Then epigenetics came along, revealing that our appearance and function are the result not just of ou
15、r genes but also their interaction with their environment. Interactomics a grand unifying theory of biology could help us predict how a system will behave based on information about the individual components that make up that system, says Professor Stephen Simpson from the University of Sydney.A fra
16、mework like this could help us predict how genes interact to produce an organism, how neurones in the brain create consciousness; how thousands of people might behave if a fire broke out in a football stadium; and even what the stock market might do in the future. Achieving such a synthesis is one of the greatest challenges in modern biology, with immense practical implications, Si
