Talk:Megascale engineering

message: Perhaps this should be merged with the "megastructure" entry? --Christopher Thomas 14:41, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [Untitled]

message: What about oil pipelines, powerlines, highways? These are structures that stretch for many, many megameters in length.
[26-Jan-2005]
:Good point! But they don't fit the "self-supporting" critera. - Beowulf314159 02:07, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unknown megastructures? 

message: Dyson swarms could be lots of smaller individually build structures. Build over a long time, with population growth along the way, self-replicating machines wouldn't be necessary.(though unlikely that self-replication wouldn't exist in this scenario..) Each individual structure could be anything basically, so could be something within current possibilities.88.159.68.164 (talk) 00:44, 17 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dyson swarms 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This article starts off using macro-engineering as a synonym for megascale engineering, but it links to the separate article on [macro-engineering] which contradicts that:
:Macro-engineering, or mega-engineering, is distinct from megascale engineering which deals with projects on a planetary or stellar scale. Where macro-engineering is currently practical, mega-scale engineering is still within the domain of speculative fiction.
I suspect that what's going on is that both terms are used inconsistently. After all, one is a relatively recent field of study with only a handful of institutions teaching or researching it, and the other isn't even at that stage. But the articles need to actually say that, rather than claiming they're synonyms and then contradictorily explaining why they're completely different things without addressing the contradiction.
I'm not sure how to write this. Something like this:
:Megascale engineering (sometimes called macro-engineering, although that more often refers to [macro-engineering|a less-speculative field of engineering])…
… seems way too verbose for the lead. But removing it from the lead and adding it as a paragraph of its own breaks the guideline that synonyms should appear in bold as early on the page as possible.
Maybe the best solution is to just merge. If people do frequently use "macro-engineering" in a way that includes megascale engineering, even though other people distinguish the two, a single article about both the emerging field studying things like the Panama Canal and more speculative future extensions to things like space elevators and Dyson spheres could make sense, and it would just take a minor variation on the existing paragraph to explain that they're often distinguished as separate fields. --157.131.246.136 (talk) 19:53, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Megascale engineering, macro-engineering, and megastructures