Nathan Wolfe answers a child’s question of “what is left to explore?” with an exposition on how little we know about the most abundant life form of all, the virus.
Opportunities abound for data mining and mapping the results of data mining on viruses.
Protection against the next pandemic is vitally important but I would have answered differently.
In addition to viruses, advances have been made in data structures, graph algorithms, materials science, digital chip design, programming languages, astronomy, just to name a few areas where substantial progress has been made and more is anticipated.
Those just happen to be areas of interest to me. I am sure you could create even longer lists of areas of interest to you where substantial progress has been made.
We need to convey a sense of excitement and discovery in all areas of the sciences and humanities.
Perhaps we should call it: Intellectual Dark Matter? (another name for the unknown?)