More than anything, they should be studying math, including statistics and probability, and programming. No matter what the subject, we will have huge amounts of data about it, and will need these tools to get meaning from the data. The areas I’m thinking of include medicine, genetics, nutrition, and neuroscience; human behavior; energy management and consumption; materials science (so that we can use our personal 3D printers more effectively); aerospace and cosmology (so we can find asteroids, whether to deflect them from an earth-bound path, to mine them of valuable minerals or terraform them for human habitation); and of course biology, so that we can enjoy the company of animals, grow food, and ultimately create human-friendly living conditions on other planets and asteroids. It would also be great to get better at modeling and managing economic fluctuations!
But in the meantime, don’t forget to read world literature so you can understand your place in history and know how to be a human being.
Author: Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson is an angel investor, focusing on the Internet, commercial space and health, mostly in the US and emerging markets. She recently (October 2008 to March 2009) spent most of six months training as a backup cosmonaut in Star City outside Moscow Russia. While there she had the pleasure of spending time not only with the cosmonauts, but also with some of the US’s finest astronauts. She has chronicled some of her EDventures on Flickr and on Huffington Post.
Apart from this brief sabbatical, she is an active board member for a variety of startups, including 23andMe, Airship Ventures, Boxbe, Eventful, Evernote, IBS Group (advisory board), Meetup, NewspaperDirect, Voxiva, WPP Group (not a start-up!) and Yandex. Her past investments have included Medstory (sold to Microsoft), Flickr and del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), Brightmail (sold to Symantec). Her current investments include Icon Aircraft (light sport aircraft), Space Adventures (which organizes programs such as hers for space tourists), and XCOR Aerospace. She also sits on the boards of several nonprofits, including the the Eurasia Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, the Personal Genome Foundation and StopBadware.org.
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