The most unsatisfying but realistic answer is probably that you're best off working on whatever sparks your passion, because making dent in the universe seldoml

The most unsatisfying but realistic answer is probably that you're best off working on whatever sparks your passion, because making dent in the universe seldomly happens intentionally, and if you don't succeed hugely at least you had fun and learned a lot on the way. If we're talking about basic tech such as networking, the time for foundational work has probably passed, or it has at least become exponentially more unlikely that you'll contribute another bedrock protocol or mechanism. It's also worth noting that you never hear from the many thousands of technologies that either failed to reach critical mass or became obsolete a long time ago. Just like founding a startup, this will be the most likely outcome. If you're looking to be the first to do something, my advice is: try to do it in space. Seriously. Finally things are happening again there, and you can probably make your mark inventing basic necessities and/or being one of the first people to colonize a new place. If you're looking for something in software, opinions on what's needed differ a lot. As an old person, my perspective is that we're going to need a way to deal with complexity and brittleness. Our software stacks have become bloated, unreliable, and a nightmare to debug. Things are getting slower and more buggy year by year, because we have not yet hit the right balance between using low-level primitives and high-level abstractions. We're now using huge frameworks regularly for very simple things, both because it's what we're used to and because these frameworks help paper over design defects lower down the stack. This needs to be solved, we can't keep stacking things on top forever. There is a real, concrete danger to our society here.