7 DARPA Challenges We Want to See

1.Mars
2.Bionics/RegenMed
3.quantumPCs
4.FusionReactor
5.advanced AI

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(Type 0.72) = We are still just cleaver monkeys!

While I agree almost all of those are worthy, the Alchemy Challenge would reduce the value of all gold....but my new golden furniture would look cool...lol..;)

Lemurs. So, if we can just breed a bunch of animals to follow us into battle, then why not just breed people?

Alchemy would cause an economy crash. GM lemurs could grow out of control. Otherwise, these ideas are quite nifty. As long as no one makes gold, we're fine with making actually practical metals like titanium or palladium.

well not sure why you would want lemurs following you into battle; a gorilla or panther maybe;
using robots would be far more effective, they could be like drones & controlled from a distance,
would be far easier & quicker to develop, rather than robots requiring human type brains;
transmitting electricity over 200miles, is rather easy, transmitting around planet, that's more of a challenge;
teleporting; teleporting inanimate objects to your enemies could be very effective, especially explosive devices or drones;
wouldn't want to get co-ordinates wrong though; could get very embarrassing;
transmuting rocks into gold; is just lame; apart from destroying value of gold; i can think of more important elements than just gold (rare earth elements come to mind );
roboawareness isn't necessary, we don't require a new species taking up valuable resources ; unless you use for space exploration, having totally aware robots is trouble in the making;
uploading your brain to the cloud, can just imagine the identity thief that could happen, nets not very secure now, stuxnet worm anybody;
as far as putting humans on other planets, now your talking; improving on space station, so it can build & fuel spaceships for inter-solar flights would be first priority ;
if the human race wants to continue past the next 50 years, then we need to establish colonies on other planets.
our technologies & civilizations histories need to be backed up in other places than just earth, other worlds or space faring civilization would be ideal;

To those that asserted that the alchemy challenge would completely devalue gold: you're thinking of this from the wrong perspective.
Yes, gold is economically valuable because of its scarcity. Except that's completely false; gold is much more common than what is popularly assumed. The economic value of gold has a shaky foundation; the so-called scarcity is due in part to environmentally-protective restrictions on mining. China has little regard for enacting such regulations, and thereby attack this already weak foundation.

The real value of gold comes in its physical properties.

But even more valuable than gold is platinum, which is even more useful in terms of its electrochemical properties than gold. Unlike gold, there actually is a scarcity of platinum, and there will continue to be until we begin mining for it on the moon.