Macro-Engineers' Dreams, Richard Cathcart
Chapter 1, references
  1. Max Dublin, Futurehype: the tyranny of prophesy, p. 44. See also: Douglas Davis, Mad Ideas: An Encyclopedia of Outlandish Solutions (1994); Ronald D. Rotstein, The Future: Trends and Developments Through the4 21st Century (1990) and Walter J. Karplus, The Heavens Are Falling: The Scientific Prediction of Catastrophe in Our Time (1993).

  2. William K. Hartmann and Ron Miller, The History of Earth: An Illustrated Chronicle of an Evolving Planet (1991).

  3. B.L. Turner (ed.), Earth As Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere Over teh Past 300 Years (1990).

  4. Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science: Why Science Does Not Make (Common) Sense (1993), p. 2.

  5. A.W. Stewart, "Think Tanks: Their Role in Our Society, a Checklist," Vance Bibliographies P-2091 (January 1987), pp 1-10.

  6. Marina Vaizey, Christo (1990). Whatever its merit as art, Christo's works are construction jobs! The Oxford Dictionary of Art (1988) at page 105 credits Christo with inventing "Packing Art." Packaging Art is carried, perhaps to its planetary ultimate, by a terraformer presently working in Japan. He proposes to "wrap" Mars with a plastic membrane installed by nan-robots over a period of less than 10 years! See: Charles R. Morgan, "Terraforming with Nanotechnology," Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 47, 311-318 (August 1994). Morgan's installation would resemble a facility proposed to cover the Earth's Sahara in Chapter Eight of this author's text.

  7. See: Richard Clar, "Space Flight Dolphin: An Art-and-Technology Payload for the Space Shuttle," Leonardo, 26, 293-296 (1993) and Pamela Huouk, "Sky Art's Lofty Ambitions," Sculpture, 10, 44-49 (May-June 1991). During April 1993, Space Marketing Inc. of Roswell, Georgia (USA) proposed launching a "space billboard" into Earth orbit for the 1996 Summer Olympics. A company logo would be visible for two weeks until the reflective flag-shaped Mylar fabric satellite was destroyed by neutral orbital degradation. Greg Miller, "It's a Bird! A Plane! It's an Ad? Billboard Idea Launches Fight," Los Angeles Times, CXII, A5 (4 August 1993).

  8. Homo sapiens sapiens is only one of our Earth-biosphere's 3-30 million species. See: Robert M. May, "How Many Species Inhabit the Earth?", Scientific American, 267, 42 (October 1992). "Species" has been legislatively defined (example: the USA's Endangered Species Act of 1973), putting an esoteric scientific debate into the national and international arena. Wild hybrids cast considerable doubt on the applicability of "species," as currently defined by American law-makers! See: Kevin D. Hill, "The Endangered Species Act: What Do We Mean by Species?", Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, 20, 239-264 (Winter 1993).

  9. Anon., "Get Out the Lifeboats! Antarctica is Melting," Time, 140, 26-27 ( November 1992) and Michael D. Lemonick, "The Ice Age Cometh?", Time, 143, 79-81 (31 January 1994). A movie starring Kevin Costner, Waterworld (1995), folows Time's 1992 script! Modelings confirm a predicted coming of large changes. See: Syukuro Manabe and R.J.Stouffer, "Century-scale effects of increased atmospheric CO2 on the ocean-atmosphere system," Nature, 364, 215-218 (15 July 1993).

  10. M.R. Rampino and K. Caldeira, "Major episodes of geologic change: correlations, time structure and possible causes," Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 114, 215-227 (January 1993). For cuurent scientific depictions of Earth as it probably looked before the start of the natural reshaping over 200 million years ago, see J.E. Kutzbach, "Simulated Circulation of an Idealized Ocean for Pangaean Time," Paleogeography, 5, 299-317 (June 1990) and J.T. Parrish, "Climate of the Supercontinent Pangea," The Journal of Geology, 101, 215-233 (March 1993). The causes of Pangea's breakup is a matter of speculation. Since great scars can still be seen on Earth's landscape-see, John W. Norman, "Tectonic Effects of Old Very Large Meteoritic Impacts on Earth Shown on Satellite Imagery: A Review and Speculations," Journal of Structural Geology, 6, 737-747 (1984)-it might be supposed that Pangea was broken into continental-sized pieces by asteroidal impacts, especially on our planet's southern hemisphere. See: C.D. Perrine, "The Origin of the Earth's Land Formations," Science, 92, 210-212 (6 September 1940) and David W. Hughes, "Meteorite Incidence Angles," Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 103, 123-126 (June 1993).

  11. Charles Babbage (1791-1871), today considered one of the inventors of the computer, wrote one of the first mostly-correct theoretical interpretations of the greenhouse effect. (See: Duncan Steel, "Charles Babbage . . . and the greenhouse effect," Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 102, 246-247, October 1992). Until 1957, when oceanographer Roger Revelle (1919-1991) fostered worldwide interest in a potentially real greenhouse effect, scientists had not anticipated an atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide gas generated by our industrial and agricultural activities causing significant changes to the Earth-biosphere. "Greenhouse effect" became a vogue term by 1963 and is still a topic of major international scientific and geopolitical debate. See: Patrick J. Michaels, "The Greenhouse Effect and Global Change: Review and Reappraisal," International Journal of Environmental Studies, 36, 55-71 (1990).

  12. So far, Homo sapiens has not discovered living things during our extra-Earth explorations of the Universe. Mankind is unlikely ever to feel confident that we know all the forms of life. Future nanotechnologies are to become Amphions via their likely creation of artificial life. The first four international interdisciplinary conferences (1987, 1990, 1992 and 1994) that focused on the ways and means for the creation of artificial life have foreseen humans ordering the imminent efforts of unlimited labor utilizing infinite resources!See: Christopher G. Langton (ed.), Artificial Life (1989), Artificial Life II (1991), Artificial Life III (1994), and Faye Flam, "Artificial-Life Researchers Try to Create Social Reality," Sience, 265, 868-869 (12 August 1994). The next international conference on artificial life will convene in Kyoto, Japan, in 1996. In the meantime, the Third European Conference on Artificial Life will be held in Granada, Spain, in the summer of 1995. The first issues (Fall/Winter) of Volume 1 of a new quarterly journal, Artificial Life, was published by MIT Press in March 1993.

  13. Fred Hapgood, "The Really Little Engines That Might," Technology Review, 96, 30 (February-March 1993).

  14. R. S. Eisenberg, "Patents and the Progress of Science: Exclusive Rights and Exerimental Use," The University of Chicago Law Review, 56, 1086 (Summer 1989).

  15. Leonard M. Adelman, "Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems," Science, 266, 1021-1024 (11 November 1994).

  16. David F. Channell, The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life (1991), p. 135. ee also: Johndale C. Solem, "The Motility of Microbots," pp. 359-380 in Christopher G. Langton (ed.), Artificial Life III (1994).

  17. "Biology" was first coined by Karl Friedrich Burdach (1776-1847), who used it to denote a study of Homo sapiens from the combined viewpoints of physiology and psychology. But in 1802 the term was given a much wider definition and increased prominence in science's literature by Lamarck and Gottfried R. Treviranus (1776-1837). Treviranus's Biologie oder die Philosophie der lebenden Natur (1802-1822) simply defined the term as "... the science of life." The first full-blown expression that humans are machines came in 1748, when J. de La Mattrie (1709-1751) wrote L'homme Machine. Lamarcks definition seems to be elastic enough to include artificial life as well as cybernetic organisms!

  18. J. William Schopf (ed.) Earth's Earliest Biosphere (1983) and The Proterozoic Biosphere: A Multidisciplinary Study (1992).

  19. Ian K. Bradbury, The Biosphere (1991).

  20. If the reader can see a "face" staring at mankind in our Earth's present-day distributions of land and ocean, then the author must admit failing the Swiss psychiatrist's famous test! Would Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) have found a "face" on Earth?

  21. Lawrence W. Swan, "The Aeolian Biome," BioScience, 42, 262-270 (April 1992).




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