Engineering at Scale – IEEE Spectrum

Engineers are masters of scale. They harness energy from the sun, wind, rivers, atoms, and ores. They manipulate electrons, photons, and crystals to compute and communicate. They devise instruments that detect perturbations in the fabric of space-time. And they grapple with challenges—anticipated or not—that are presented by the scale of the problem they are trying to solve.

The articles in this issue describe engineers who think about, interact with, and create things at very precise and often mind-boggling scales. They took the point-contact transistor and scaled it over the course of decades into a product manufactured in almost unimaginably large quantities (13 sextillion, or 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, between 1947 and 2018, by one estimate) and involving one of the most complex, yet crazily efficient workflows on the planet. They’re sequencing the genomes of 1.8 million species. They’re modeling and mitigating a potential catastrophe—the Kessler syndrome—that threatens to decimate satellites in low Earth orbit [p. 58]. Everywhere you look, engineering ingenuity is pushing against the limits of scale.

That ingenuity extends to creating scales for what has yet to be measured. How will we know when AI has achieved human-level general intelligence? How do we precisely measure the absence of matter in a vacuum? Then there are the complexities of scaling a technology for mass adoption. Why, for example, have some humanoid robot makers announced overly optimistic deployment targets and boosted production capacity well ahead of specific humanoid robot safety standards, high reliability, decent battery life, or demand for hordes of humanoids? And how can onshore wind turbines continue to scale up unless there’s a proven way to transport them?

“Infographics let readers grasp at a glance what would take paragraphs of explanation.” —Eliza Strickland

In this issue, our editors and artists flex their data-visualization powers through compelling infographics, to help readers appreciate the scale of hundreds of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and the immense interstellar distances we could traverse with a swarm of tiny, laser-powered space kites.

“While we wanted every article to include some visual element, a few topics called for special treatment. You could tell the story of carbon capture or interstellar travel in words, but the real impact comes when you see the gaps, the scales, the leaps involved,” says Senior Editor Eliza Strickland, who curated this issue. “Infographics let readers grasp at a glance what would take paragraphs of explanation, whether it’s the ballooning demand for AI or the long journey from raw quartz to finished computer chips.” Several of these infographics, as well as the cover, were created by renowned graphic designer Carl De Torres, owner of Optics Lab.

We also commissioned an essay by the nature writer Paul Bogard, who approached his topic from the human scale. Who among us has not gazed at the stars and marveled at how our eyes are absorbing light that traveled thousands of years to reach us? Bogard ventured to Chile to see how light pollution is encroaching on astronomy and changing our sense of place in the universe, perhaps irrevocably.

We hope this issue sparks wonder, and conveys our appreciation for the people who measure the unmeasurable, build the unbuildable, and solve the unsolvable.