Systems Engineering

It is not required that a single organization do all the Systems Engineering tasks. Some very large systems, that have been deliberately engineered, such as the US Interstate highway system, the Internet, and the US program to land humans on the Moon, involved many entities working together. A national system of government, human civilization, or the Earth's biosphere can be considered as very large systems in terms of having inputs and outputs, a system boundary, and an external environment. There is a growing understanding that such large entities are systems composed of many smaller systems, whether designed or not. Analyzing such large entities as systems can help with understanding how they function and determining if corrective action is needed. Although some attempts at designing governments have been made, they have yet to be done based on scientific and engineering principles. Climate Engineering, which is the concept of deliberately affecting the Earth's climate, is an example of biosphere level engineering projects. Doing them deliberately, as opposed to the inadvertent side effect of civilization, is still in the conceptual stage. More work has been done in the field of Economics in analyzing economic systems, and sometimes attempting to design or influence them.