>Not trying to be inflammatory. I was thinking what if our next Einstein joined a startup to build a mobile app instead of working to further his field.
You're not the first to think of this at all. Thiel's quote "We were promised flying cars, and instead what we got was 140 characters." immediately comes to mind. Similarly I've read something like "The brightest minds of our generation are working on click-fraud prevention"
It is easy to fall into this trap, but often the really good ideas now started as something else. Google was yet another search engine, called Backrub. It makes me wonder what another to-do list or whatever else will turn in to something great.
Then besides that, I am pretty optimistic. I'm seeing a lot of the cool things suddenly present itself themselves in the last 10 years. Tesla and SpaceX come to mind. My local grocery store has a bank of sci-fi looking superchargers. Now, that isn't a flying car, but it is a lot closer to the Back to the Future vision of the future. (Also in that vision, the TVs were still CRTs in 2015)
Lastly, if your MIT trained aerospace engineer really has that background and doesn't want to do aerospace engineering, they probably shouldn't, you know? They'll be more productive at something they want to build. If they are interested, there are drone startups, and full-aircraft startups they could join.