Mega machine

It is easy to laugh and regard these dreams as impractical utopianism or engineering hubris. Except that the Earth is encircled by a machine that transmits petabytes of data every second, stores exabytes, and that you are likely using right now (the internet). There is a machine larger than a football field moving faster than a rifle bullet orbiting overhead (a space station). And another machine in Europe is 27km (17 miles) in circumference and converts energy into exotic matter (the Large Hadron Collider). Imagine what Archimedes or Newton would have made of those.In fact, we are living amid megascale structures we hardly notice. Some large-scale engineering of our environment is nearly invisible. The Netherlands, as well as the Fens of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, are land reclaimed from the sea. The Amazonian rainforest is not as pristine as once thought: it was farmed for millennia. The terraces of South East Asia and modern metropolitan cities are engineering that turns into landscapes. Sometimes with a grand plan, often not.--- By Anders Sandberg14th January 2021