0191-9067/83 $3.00 + .00 Copyright ' 1983 SUNSAT Energy Council MACRO-ENGINEERING: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE FRANK P. DAVIDSON System Dynamics Steering Committee Massachusetts Institute of Technology Building E40 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA When the Congress of Vienna drew up guidelines for a European peace that was to last for generations, international technical cooperation was hardly a major concern: the Concert of Europe could still assume a fundamental continuity in the material conditions of life that underpin social and diplomatic arrangements. Today, meeting in this beautiful city which still echoes the intimate tones of post-Napoleonic negotiations, we know that technology is bringing about rapid changes in the pace and scope of human relationships. Social and political structures that fail to adapt to the new realities will find themselves at a serious disadvantage. The great and unanswered question is whether the common interests of the world community can prevail or whether parochial and divisive perspectives are to guide mankind as we approach a new millenium. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that the new science of macro-engineering can contribute to the understanding and the resolution of such portentous issues. Large-scale construction has been a characteristic of human activity even before written records were kept. The complex and formidable walls of Jericho were put in place six thousand years before Joshua arrived with his trumpet. And ancient civilizations were not lacking in the “coup d'oeil” to establish transcontinental systems such as the Roman roads, the Grand Canal of China or the highways of the Persians and the Incas. What is novel in today's situation is not the desire or the ability to “think big" but the capacity to apply advanced technology to engineering enterprises of substantial scope. A result is the dramatic increase in the range, rapidity and impact of those applications of knowledge and experience which form the subject-matter of macro-engineering studies. How shall we define this burgeoning field? Essentially, macro-engineering is nothing more than the study, preparation, and execution of the largest engineering works which mankind can accomplish at any particular period of time. Thus, the remarkable towns built on stilts in the lakes of prehistoric Europe must rank as macroengineering; in our own epoch, one might cite the new capital of Nigeria or the huge urban-industrial complex of Jubail in Saudi Arabia. Contemporary examples are abundant precisely because we have witnessed, since World War II, a veritable explosion in the size and numbers of large-scale engineering projects and programs. The surprising statistics of this seminal development have been reported, with respect to Third World countries, by the McKinsey & Co. team led by Kathleen Murphy, and will be published in Technology in Society and Technology Review later this year. For those of us gathered together under the aegis of UNISPACE, it is
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