Macroscope (science concept)

In science, the concept of a macroscope is the antithesis of the microscope, namely a method, technique or system appropriate to the study of very large objects or very complex processes, for example the Earth and its contents,[1][2] or conceptually, the Universe.

"[17] Slightly earlier still, in the area of geography, in a 1957 article entitled "Geographer's Quest" for the Centennial Review of Arts & Science, Lawrence M. Sommers and Clarence L. Vinge wrote: "What do we see?

"[19][a] The term was (re-)presented as new (Odum's prior use was mentioned in a footnote) by the French scientific thinker Joël de Rosnay, who wrote a detailed book explaining his concept in 1975: "We need, then, a new instrument.

[22][23][24][25] For completeness, it should be mentioned that the concept of a "reverse microscope" is not entirely new: around 80 years earlier, the author Lewis Carroll in the second volume of his novel Sylvie and Bruno, published in 1893, described a fictional professor who includes in his lecture an instrument that will shrink an elephant to the size of a mouse, that he termed the "megaloscope".

[26] The Dutch author Kees Boeke also wrote a 1957 book, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps,[27] the first portion of which presents images of aspects of the Earth at ever decreasing scales and parallels the subsequent principle of the hypothetical "macroscope" at a series of zoom levels.

Odum's concept was for the study of ecosystems, by integrating the results of existing methods of surveying, identifying, and classifying their contents, then eliminating fine scale detail to obtain a "big picture" view suitable for analysis and, as needed, simulation.

[28]From around the early 2000s onwards, interest in the "macroscope" concept has steadily increased, both with the vastly improved computing power in organisations and on scientists' desktops, and with access to more extensive sets of both locally acquired and publicly available data such as Earth observations.

To resolve this problem, we need to supplement the ad hoc data currently collected with planned biodiversity monitoring, in order to approximate global stratified random sampling of the planet.

"[38] Such initiatives can perhaps be viewed as the "high end" for ingestion of massive, global scale input datasets and associated computation; at the other end of the scale, the development of cross-platform (open) standards for the exchange of digitized geographic information by the Open Geospatial Consortium since the early 2000s has enabled researchers equipped with minimal software to request, display, overlay and otherwise interact with subsets of remote global data streams via (for example) Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) without a requirement to hold any of the data locally, capable of producing a type of "macroscope" functionality at modest cost (free in the case of open source solutions such as GeoServer, MapServer and more) for displaying information of the user's choice against a range of possible base maps.

[39] Other presently available solutions of a similar nature - where the client "virtual globe" software is installed either on the user's device or runs in a web browser, and can then access either remote, or locally held data layers for display over pre-prepared base maps - include NASA WorldWind and ESRI's ArcGIS Earth.

"[41] Another initiative that has been referred to as a "macroscope" is the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), as described by Vanden Berghe et al. in 2012, who wrote: "Its ambition to become a 'Macroscope' (de Rosnay, 1979) for marine biodiversity will allow us to see past complexities and the idiosyncrasies of individual datasets to see the "big picture" of ocean life more clearly",[42] a key activity for this project being the transformation of data existing previously in disparate, and sometimes inaccessible forms into a single, standardized format for ease of access and the production of summary information as desired.

Since by analogy with the microscope, the macroscope is in essence a method of visualizing subjects too large to be seen completely in a conventional field of view, probably none of these approaches are incorrect, the differences in emphasis being complementary in that each is capable of contributing to the resulting "virtual instrument" that is envisaged by this concept.

One trend that is observable, however, is that of increasing base dataset size and desired sampling density, today's "macroscopes" being built upon arrays of fine scale / high resolution data that would have been discarded as undesirable detail (obscuring the "big picture") in the original concepts of Odum and de Rosnay.

A number of the concepts described above either reappear, or are paralleled, in the alternatively-named "Geoscope" proposal by Buckminster Fuller in 1962, which was suggested to be a giant representation of the Globe upon which "all relevant inventories of world data" could be displayed via a system of computers.

Another use of the term "macroscope", pre-dating Odum's popularization of the science concept, occurs in the novelist Piers Anthony's 1969 science fiction book of the same name, in which his imaginary instrument is a sort of super-telescope, capable of focusing anywhere in space and time at the direction of the user, while in Jill Linz & Cindy Schwarz's 2009 children's novel Adventures in Atomville: The Macroscope, the titular instrument is a new invention by which atoms (which have identities in the book) can visualize the "outside world" for the first time.