I recently finished re-reading Dune 1. One of the appendices has this quote from the original planetologist of Arrakis, a desert planet in the Dune universe. The planetologist has a plan to convert the desert planet into one that has life and a thriving ecosystem; one where the desert is restricted to a part of the planet instead of covering it all. The plan is to plant trees, extract water where possible, limit the desert by making the land fertile and planting vegetation there. While building this ecosystem from scratch (“terraforming”, in its literal sense), there is this observation about ecosystems:
“The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem,” Kynes said, “is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”
– p.565, Dune (The Dune Sequence) (Herbert, Frank)
This might as well be true about infrastructure.
- When planning a city, the public transport system has to be put up before the demand arises for it. Once demand arises, people start living in the place where the public transport system needs to be built; it becomes impossible to build. This is the difference between a “planned city” and a city which comes up organically, out of need and experience; sprawling out from a dense center, as the city amasses more people. In the latter kind of city, the dense center remains the “nexus” with high land value.
- When maintaining a technological system (such as the servers for a web service), it is important to notice that the system is on the verge of collapse. Once identified, the upcoming collapse may be avoided through one strategy or the other. However, once the system collapses, a lot of time will be spent on figuring out why it collapsed, bringing it back up, monitoring it to ensure future collapse.