2 Air and water

Humans cannot exist without air to breath and water to drink. Human health requires clean air and water that is not contaminated with harmful organisms or substances. As large population centers grow and seek to advance their economies, atmospheric pollution becomes a major issue due to industry, automobiles, power needs of dwellings, etc. How can new technologies enable such growth and development while reducing the output of pollutants? What can be done to better monitor air quality, both outdoors and in enclosed spaces. How do we understand and control the needs for proper ventilation and do so with improved energy efficiency? Meanwhile, the lack of secure access to safe drinking water is a critical issue for large populations on earth. What better devices and systems can be used in finding, cleaning, transporting, and distributing water? Even in developed nations, the large-scale use of aquifers and other water sources for agriculture is depleting supplies below levels that could be recovered for long-term sustainable use. How can improved methods of water resource monitoring and irrigation mitigate the impacts while sustaining and even increasing agricultural productivity? Industry uses large quantities of water for all sorts of processes and each of these is an opportunity for advancements in sensing, control, and overall process design to reduce water use and eliminate contamination. At a global scale, we know that changes in composition of the atmosphere, oceans, lakes and rivers is having large and some cases devastating impact on the climate and on living ecosystems: how do we monitor and reverse these impacts? At the level of individuals, what technologies improve the reliability and availability personal air supplies for sick people and for workers in special environments (fire fighters, scuba divers, etc.) How can personal water supplies be improved for use in sports and outdoor activities? Can large scale use of bottled water be replaced with attractive options? Finally, the technologies to provide air and water for human exploration of space and settlement of planets like Mars opens up major new challenges in the provision of resources that we so often take for granted.