Textbook Revolution

Taking the Bite Out of Books

Macro-Engineers' Dreams

Richard B. Cathcart, et al.

Richard Cathcart of the Candida Oancea Institute (Bucharest, Romania), sends in this book on futurology and macro-engineering. The book was a series of word files that we stitched together and exported to PDF using OpenOffice. As a result, the PDF is very basic, but it’s fine for reading and printing.

Excerpt:

Macro-engineering planners design “macroprojects” (or, synonymously, “megaprojects”) that represent, symbolize and cause a fundamental change in humanity’s planetary outlook. It is the sociological impression on groups of like-minded people—someday, perhaps soon, like-minded machines—that is fundamentally important to our globalized civilization endeavoring to practice Macro-engineering, regionally and worldwide. Some macroprojects are beneficial or essential infrastructures, as portrayed by B. Hayes’s Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape (2005); other megaprojects are harmful or conceits.1 Even so, some leading academic Macro-engineering authorities prefer to define this new profession and discipline in purely geographical and economic terminology: “Macro-engineering refers to the process marshalling money, materials, personnel, technology, logistics and opinion on a huge scale to carry out complex projects, often international (or “multi-national”) in nature, that last over along period of time. A macro-engineering project requires massive funding, significant manpower, large-scale equipment and tons of material. Macro-engineering projects extend the state-of-the-art of technology, may take place in difficult and sometimes hostile environments, and require sophisticated project management techniques.”

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