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,de Rosnay, J. (1975). Le macroscope, vers une vision globale [The macroscope, towards a global vision]. Editions du Seuil, Paris. English translation (as "The macroscope: a new world scientific system") available online at http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/macroscope/default.htmlJerome E. Dobson: "Through the Macroscope: Geography's View of the World". ArcNews, Winter 2011/2012. www.esri.com, accessed 9 June 2020. or conceptually, the Universe. Obviously, a single system or instrument does not presently exist that could fulfil this function, however its concept may be approached by some current or future combination of existing observational systems.Brown, J. H. (1995). Macroecology. University of Chicago Press.http://www.research.ibm.com: Macroscopes will help us understand Earth's complexity in infinite detail. Accessed 8 June 2020 The term "macroscope" has also been applied to a method or compendium which can view some more specific aspect of global scientific phenomena in its entirety, such as all plant life, specific ecological processes, or all life on earth.Encyclopedia of Life, February 2008: "Scientists to explore life's mysteries through encyclopedic 'macroscope'." AAAS EurekaAlert, accessed 06 June 2020. The term has also been used in the humanities, as a generic label for tools which permit an overview of various other forms of "big data". As discussed here, the concept of a "macroscope" differs in essence from that of the macroscopic scale, which simply takes over from where the microscopic scale leaves off, covering all objects large enough to be visible to the unaided eye, as well as from macro photography, which is the imaging of specimens at magnifications greater than their original size, and for which a specialised microscope-related instrument known as a "Macroscope" has previously been marketed. For some workers, one or more (planetary scale) "macroscopes" can already be constructed, to access the sum of relevant existing observations, while for others, deficiencies in current sampling regimes and/or data availability point to additional sampling effort and deployment of new methodologies being required before a true "macroscope" view of Earth can be obtained.
History of the concept The term "macroscope" is generally credited as being introduced into scientific usage by the ecologist Howard T. Odum in 1971,The Emergy Society: "Through the Macroscope: the legacy of H.T. Odum". Online article, available at https://www.emergysociety.com/through-the-macroscope/Ariel E. Lugo, 2016. "A glimpse of the tropics through Odum's macroscope". In Michael R. Willig, Lawrence R. Walker (eds): Long-Term Ecological Research: Changing the Nature of Scientists. Oxford University Press. who employed it, in contrast to the microscope (which shows small objects in great detail), to represent a kind of "detail eliminator" which thus permits a better overview of ecological systems for simplified modelling and, potentially, management (Odum, 1971, figure 10).Howard T. Odum, 1971. Environment, Power, and Society. Wiley, New York, 331 pp. Ecologist James Brown equated the field of Macroecology as the process of looking "at the living world through a macroscope rather than through a microscope, and as a result it sees different things than are revealed by most ecological studies ... As I began to look through the macroscope, however, I found that it gave me a view of the ecological world that neither my experiments at one study site nor my nonmanipulative comparative studies at a necessarily limited number of field sites could provide."
Some authors, such as Hidefumi Imura, continue to use the term as more-or-less synonymous with an overview or large scale pattern analysis of data in their field.Imura, H., 2013. Environmental Systems Studies: A Macroscope for Understanding and Operating Spaceship Earth. Springer, 151 pp. (original in Japanese, published 2009)de Magny, G.C., Renaud, F., Durand, P. & Guégan, J.-F., 2008. Health ecology: a new tool, the macroscope. Chapter 8 (pp. 129-148) in Thomas, F., Guégan, J.-F. & Renaud, F. (editors): Ecology and Evolution of Parasitism: Hosts to Ecosystems. Oxford University Press, 240 pp. Other prominent authors and speakers who have utilized "macroscope" terminology for "big picture" views in their particular areas of interest include Jesse H. AusubelJesse Ausubel, 2007. "Telescopes, microscopes, macroscopes and DNA barcodes". Opening Talk for the conference "Using Barcode Data in Studies of Molecular and Evolutionary Dynamics", The Banbury Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 28–31 October 2007. Available at http://antephase.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Ausubel-Macroscope-and-Barcodes.pdf and John Thackara.
In actuality, the term (in the present sense of a "larger view" of a subject than can be obtained by any single conventional action) pre-dates its use in Odum's work, being found for example in a book by Philip Bagby entitled "Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations" published in 1959, who wrote, "[Someone should] invent a 'macroscope', an instrument which would ensure that the historian sees only the larger aspects of history and blind him to the individual details",Bagby, Philip, 1959. Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations. University of California Press, 244 pp. and also by W.H. Hargreaves and K.H. Blacker, who wrote in 1966 in the journal Psychiatric Services: "The advent of the electronic digital computer is causing a revolution in the behavioral sciences comparable to the impact the microscope had on biology. Like the microscope, the computer provides a view that is beyond the capability of the naked eye. The computer is being used as a "macroscope," which enables us to perceive relationships based on larger patterns of information than we are otherwise able to integrate." 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? What are the inter-relationships that exist among the observed features? The near-views can, by means of mapping, be resolved with over-the-horizon views, and the map becomes a "macroscope" to help us understand the spatial organization of the Earth's phenomena.", while in a 1951 United States Department of Agriculture Appropriation Bill, discussing a recently passed Forestry Management Act, Perry H. Merrill, State Forester of Vermont, is reported as saying: "Through [this Act] I feel that we have made a great headway ... instead of looking through a microscope, maybe we can look through a "macroscope", if you want to call it such."
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. The microscope and the telescope have been valuable in gathering the scientific knowledge of the universe. Now a new tool is needed by all those who would try to understand and direct effectively their action in this world, whether they are responsible for major decisions in politics, in science, and in industry or are ordinary people as we are. I shall call this instrument the macroscope (from macro, great, and skopein, to observe)." In de Rosnay's view, the macroscope could be turned not only on the natural and physical worlds but also on human-related systems such as the growth of cities, economics, and the behaviour of humans in society.
More recent workers have tended to use the term synonymously with a whole-of-Earth observational system, or portion thereof, underpinned particularly by satellite imagery derived from remote sensing, and/or by in situ observations obtained via sensor networks (see below).
As an extension of its science context, the term "macroscope" has also been applied in the humanities, as a generic term for any tool permitting an overview of, and insight into "big data" collections in that or related areas.Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan and Scott Weingart, 2015. Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope. World Scientific Publishing Company, 308 pp. 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". The Dutch author Kees Boeke also wrote a 1957 book, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps,Kees Boeke, 1957: Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps. John Day Company, New York. . 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.
Interpretation and practical implementations
The more practical aspect of exactly what constitutes a macroscope has varied through time and according to the interests, requirements, and field of activity of the workers concerned. Sommers and Vinge viewed the "macroscope" as an extended system of mapping to visualize the spatial relationships between items on the surface of the Earth, thus notionally prefiguring the concept of subsequently developed "seamless" geographic display systems via CD-ROMs and the world wide web along the lines of the "Atlas" facility of Microsoft Encarta, and Google Maps/Google Earth. 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. De Rosnay viewed his "macroscope" as a systems-based viewpoint for the study of (among other things) the nature of human society, and understanding of the rationale for human actions. He wrote:
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. For some recent workers such as Dornelas et al. as referenced below, the macroscope is the envisaged set of the observational tools that collectively will deliver the desired synoptic suite of observations over the relevant field of study (in their case for the marine realm, itemised as satellites, drones, camera traps, passive acoustic samplers, biologgers, environmental DNA and human observations), Writing in 2019, these authors stated: