<p>Do you think industrial engineering will be around forever? Or nuclear? Or environmental? Certainly EE/CompE, CE, and ME ain't going away anytime soon. Not as long as there are electrical devices, computers, roads, bridges, dams, and machines with moving parts.</p>
<p>But do you see any particular engineering disciplines being phased out by the dictates of the market?</p>
<p>And what new engineering disciplines do you expect to pop up? Could a degree in quantum engineering be a reality in ten years? What about FTL astronautical engineering? How much longer will welding engineering or aquatic engineering be around?</p>
<p>Just wanted to start a discussion. No protective flaming please.</p>
<p>Quantum engineering doesn’t even make sense. Quantum mechanics is already used extensively in many engineering disciplines from EE to ME to ChemE.</p>
<p>Astronautical engineering already exists. It is usually but not always grouped in with aeronautical engineering to form a combined degree of aerospace engineering.</p>
<p>Welding engineering, while in my opinion not truly engineering, will always be needed as long as we make things out of metals.</p>
<p>As far as I can tell, you just made up the concept of aquatic engineering.</p>
<p>I don’t know how any engineering can just… die off. I mean… do you really need all these specialized names for engineers anyway? Most engineers fall into chemical, mechanical, civil, or electrical at the moment, the rest is just details.</p>
<p>^ What about the nanotechnology and nanoscience majors or the quantum computation majors. Or the urban engineering or financial engineering majors. They will never ever be replaced.</p>
<p>Aquatic engineering is not the same thing as ocean engineering, and I really doubt you would find many ocean engineers who have heard of anyone refer to anything as aquatic engineering. The closest thing that I can find in a brief search is that some environmental engineers consider themselves aquatic engineers, as there seems to be a couple water resources firms using that terminology.</p>
<p>Hmm, I think in parts of the world it is called Aquatic Engineering. Must have been a mistranslation that I read.</p>
<p>Speaking of reading, how about rereading my post to see that I never actually said quantum physics isn’t already a part of engineering disciplines? I’m asking, does anybody think that in ten years or so there will be a major specifically for quantum engineering? I.e., quantum computing and other quantum systems. Such a major would bypass a lot of material covered in current EE and CompE majors.</p>
<p>And I wrote FTL astronautical engineering. Faster-than-light, it’s pure speculation on my part. I was trying to stimulate discussion, not snarkiness.</p>
<p>No, it still doesn’t make sense because enigneering, being an applications-based set of fields, will adapt to new techniques. All those examples fall under the umbrella of engineering disciplines that already exist. They will likely start out in the minds of physicists and then be made practical by engineers in their respective fields (e.g. EE’s will make Quantum Computing a reality).</p>
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<p>Perhaps you should refrain from acronyms that pretty much no one will immediately recognize then. If anything, people will assume FTL means “for the loss” before they will associate it with “faster than light”… at least on “teh interwebz.”</p>
<p>Faster than light travel is not physically possible. Relativity tells us that. If someone devises a way to create a wormhole at will, that would be the only way to travel faster than light, and that would only be as measured in the current spacetime dimensions that we perceive, not if you were measuring speed going through the hole itself (as they are most commonly theorized anyway). The energy required to accelerate to light speed asymptotically approaches infinity. Once you cross light speed, the function tells us the only way to slow back down is to actually gain MORE energy.</p>
<p>Perhaps I should have worded it as, “He meant Ocean Engineering.” I thought you got the point, the wording was pretty clear - this is known as Ocean Engineering, i.e. it is not known as Aquatic Engineering.</p>
<p>What is the point of this thread exactly? It must make you feel a bit awkward but really after a page of posts I still fail to see its real purpose.</p>
<p>^ Yeah I found this thread quite silly. That is why I haven’t posted much here. But I guess people wanted to know which engineering fields have faded away over time and which ones have emerged. I don’t think a Engineering field can disappear unless every problem in the field has been solved. </p>
<p>Engineering is about developing solutions to solve human needs. It is not a “vocation” that can be mechanized. Engineering is not like entering numbers in punchcards or something else that can be easily automated. As long as Strong AI does not get into the hands of employers, engineers will be at work.</p>
<p>Obviously, by talking about changing eng majors we’re talking about changing technology and market demand. Frankly I’m stunned nobody has brought up petroleum engineering. It’s not that different from other threads worried about future demand for this or that eng major.</p>