In the early 1990s, a small team tried to survive in a hermetically sealed space containing replicas of Earth’s ecosystems. Their trials and discoveries still have repercussions today.
Glittering in the vast expanses of the Arizona desert lies a structure that seems torn straight out of the pages of science fiction.
Inside a massive complex of glass pyramids, domes and towers, spread across three acres (1.2 hectares), stands a tropical rainforest topped by a 25ft (7.6m) waterfall, a savannah and a fog desert. They sit alongside a mangrove-studded wetland and an ocean larger than an Olympic swimming pool which includes its own living coral reef.
It’s seemingly a little capsule of Earth, which is why the structure is called Biosphere 2 – named after our own planet, Biosphere 1.
The desolate landscape forms the perfect backdrop for the futuristic experiment that once took place here. In the early 1990s, eight people locked themselves inside, sealed off from the outside world for two years, to explore the challenges of living in a self-contained system – a prerequisite for building colonies in outer space. They fed themselves from the crops they grew, they recycled their own wastewater and they tended to the plants that produced their oxygen. In terms of sustaining human life, the experiment did not go well. As one commentator put it in the 2020 documentary Spaceship Earth, “everything that could go wrong went wrong”. Oxygen levels plummeted, making the inhabitants sick, while carbon dioxide (CO2) levels increased. Countless animals died, including the pollinators the plants needed to reproduce. And although the “biospherians” did survive on their homegrown food, they lost weight to the point where they became a case study for calorie restriction. When supplementary oxygen needed to be brought in, commentators decried the project as a failure, calling it a “flop” and “new-age drivel masquerading as science”. (Hear more about the “Biospherians” and why the Biosphere 2 experiement was one of the most controversial human experiments of the 20th Century in this BBC podcast.)
In recent years, however, many experts have come to see the Biosphere 2 experiment in a new light, with valuable lessons about ecology, atmospheric science and importantly, the irreplaceability of our own planet.
Lisa Rand, a historian of science at the California Institute of Technology, argues that these lessons are especially worth revisiting today as billionaires advance private space programmes and float the idea of space colonies while our own planet is increasingly suffering from climate change and other man-made problems. And to environmental scientists, the Biosphere 2 experiment also demonstrates the value of bold experiments to better understand how the natural world works.
In fact, today, the facility is bustling with scientists testing the effects of climate change on its living ecosystems. Far from helping humans escape Earth, Biosphere 2 seems to have become one of our best tools to understand Biosphere 1.
Though the Biosphere 2 experiment is often described as a test run of a future space colony on the Moon or Mars, the project in fact had deep environmental roots, says Mark Nelson, one of the eight biospherians and a founding director of the non-profit Institute of Ecotechnics. The idea for Biosphere 2 came from a group of people – including Nelson – living in an ecovillage on a New Mexico ranch who spent their time organic farming and doing performance art and carpentry. The group’s founder, John Allen, dreamed of building a self-contained system to better understand Earth’s complexities and find ways of using technology to more peacefully exist with the natural world, Nelson says.
(BBC)
How Biosphere 2 changed earth understanding
