While CS theorists pursue the beauty and unity of their mathematical theories, their results can have a practical and industrial impact.As we know, P versus NP is often talked about with its relation to public crypto. systems. Moreover, streaming algorithms often directly lead to industrial benefits. Is there any possible research direction that would satisfy the following conditions? (1)Solving problems in this area of TCS would lead to a fundamental change in our society.(2)It would be required to understand other academic subjects (such as physics or electronics) to solve problems related to this TCS field. I am afraid that this question is not appropriate for this stack exchange, but please forgive me if it is.  
TCS Research Frontier with Huge Practical and Industrial Impact on our Society
soft question
Just like quantum-computing, I suppose DNA-computing throws in a significantly different physical model of computing (ability to self-replicate). In principle that should stimulate significant cross research between theory and practice.Another potential area is Goemetric Complexity Theory. At this point, of course it is probably the most abstruse area, and no one knows how the final shape will look like. But as Ketan Mulmuley had pointed out in one of his talks (I'll update the reference if I can find it) - that any success of GCT (or any P/NP separation work for that matter) will actually result in establishing the significant largeness of the class P - i.e., to successfully show complexity class separation and avoid Razborov-Rudich-type (or Aaronson-Wigderson-type ) barriers at the same time, one needs algorithms to solve problems for which at present only doubly or triply exponential solutions are known at best. If polynomial time algorithms are discovered, that could be a potential game-changer in many applied areas as well. 