STRUCTURES: The techonomic infrastructure
Structures is a category that encompasses our most complex cooperative efforts to design and build large-scale infrastructures. It is all about the way we use advanced, highly focused social organizations of all types to design and build the infrastructure of transportation, energy distribution, food processing and distribution, water and sanitation systems, military and government projects and international mega-projects of enormous scale.
Think of this as the various “grids” that facilitate industry and institutional techonomic activity. Increasingly structures are becoming international in scope, but they also include national efforts like space exploration and arms development. Structures support and allow an advancing civilization and provide better living conditions and economic opportunities for a growing population. Many also provide competitive advantages for particular countries and cultures. And because of their sheer size and complexity they are often overlooked as drivers of techonomic progress, even though without them, there would be no modern techonomy.
Structures Techonomic Multipliers:
- Hydropower for milling and early manufacturing
- Steam power for manufacturing and transportation
- Emergence of the electrical infrastructure
- The internal combustion engine and subsequent large-scale oil extraction and refining
- Airplanes
- Nuclear energy and weapons
Industries: Power Generation and Distribution, Water, Sanitation, Transportation, Urban and Building Design, Healthcare, Military and Government Mega-projects, and Cooperation in International Science. These large-scale techonomic activities have begun to create a planetary infrastructure that is accelerating economic development.