I recently watched a documentary from 2020 called Spaceship Earth about the Biosphere 2 project in Oracle, Arizona. I had picked up bits and pieces about Biosphere 2 over the years, but found the film to be effective in expanding my sense of the endeavor.

Biosphere 2 was an effort motivated by obvious ecological peril together with the crazed space-age notion that we’d be living on other solar system bodies in a few generations. So, we’d better get our butts in gear and learn how to create our own sealed ecosystems. To clear up a point of confusion, Biosphere 2 was not the second attempt at an artificial environment, but was so-named to honor Earth as the original biosphere.

Here, I offer a few reflections spurred by the documentary.

Thespians!

I had no idea that the originators—acting as primary movers and shakers—were theater types. Reminiscent of The Farm story (but predating it by a couple years), these folks departed from San Francisco to settle in a remote area as hippies intent on living off the land. The goal of moving off-Earth might seem similar at first glance—even if the analog is paper-thin.

What was truly impressive to me was that these folks who—based on the footage shown in the documentary—appear to have spent a lot of their time being bodily dramatic were capable of pulling off incredible feats. They decided to build their own three-masted 25-meter boat/ship. A 19-year-old named Margaret Augustine—having no experience building boats—led the project. They sailed this vessel (Heraclitus) around the world—multiple times—visiting different biomes to learn about ecological relationships and gather specimens for their bold ecological experiment.

Augustine also became project lead for the construction of Biosphere 2, which was a $200M facility located in southern Arizona. Under sealed glass domes, it included various habitats like rain forest, marsh, scrub, desert, and coral reef. Lots of sensors and electro-mechanical systems helped run the place. Incidentally, the capital cost per day spread among the eight inhabitants works out to about $35,000, which is about a hundred times less expensive than execution of the far-less-comprehensive camping trips on the International Space Station—but about a hundred times more expensive than a high-end hotel. Apparently, the kind of stay where you must toil and half-starve fetches a premium price.

In any case, these theater people accomplished far more than anyone had any reason to expect, and hats off to them!

Futile

The next impression is that what they were trying to accomplish was utterly futile. There’s no way that our puny brains can foresee all the crazy interactions that will establish between living and non-living elements of a whole—especially in a global hodgepodge of unacquainted species. Only co-evolution over deep time in constant ecological contact can manage such a feat.

Time is a very important factor. Evolution transpires over a wide range of timescales depending on complexity and generational time of organisms. Humans evolve at tortoise-pace, marking an order-of-magnitude timescale of a few-hundred thousand years. On the other end of the spectrum, microbes might evolve on decade timescales (e.g., drug-resistant strains). The geometric mean is a few thousand years. Maybe that’s a little fast as an overall characterization of the speed at which an ecology adjusts, but we’ll run with it for the sake of argument—an argument that only gets stronger when more appropriate timescales are considered..

The Biosphere 2 project ran for two years, but required oxygen injection after 16 months (oxygen levels were down to 70%, producing fatigue and irritability). All pollinators died, as did most vertebrates, and trees did poorly—even in that short flash of time. The point is that it failed in less than one-thousandth the relevant evolutionary timescale. That’s not even close to success. One could even make the case that it failed on the first day, in that the entire enterprise executed a draw-down of the initial stock (albeit slowed by farming), and thus was never sustainable even for a moment. It simply possessed enough “inertia” to remain inhabitable for a while.

Thousands of years might seem an unreasonably long standard, but where is the locus of unreasonableness, really? Impatience has no purchase, here. If the ultimate (misguided) goal is to establish a self-contained alternative to Earth capable of long-term human habitation, are we really satisfied with ecological collapse and human die-off within a few decades or centuries? Would that constitute “mission accomplished?” If unable to achieve the goal of a self-sufficient ecology supporting human habitation that survives long enough for evolutionary adaptation, then we’re left with a roll of the dice to see what small fraction of the initial seeds find a semi-stable operating point—if any at all. Cockroaches and ants did better than most in the short Biosphere 2 run. But even these “winners” may have proven only temporarily so in a longer experiment, over which time the too-narrow ecology continued to collapse and their own dependencies exited, stage left.

The point is that such a quest could not have really worked, and the effort did us a real service by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to provide a vivid example. By the way, building and maintaining a comparable structure on Mars (i.e., barely keeping 8 humans alive in a fake ecosystem) would likely be more like hundreds of trillions of dollars. Besides highlighting that anything on Mars is roughly a million times more expensive than on Earth—this is a way of saying that it’s far beyond our means to realize (even if technically feasible, which itself strains credibility).

It Took Dreamers

Biosphere 2 ran its original 2-year “closed” test, then less than a year later did another 6-month closed run under new management. After that, it was handed off to Columbia University and later the University of Arizona. Once scientists were involved, the theatrics of closed testing was over. It’s not terribly surprising, given the inherent futility. The new “owners” likely knew better than to try, using it instead as a means to test a few targeted research questions. It is now open to the public as a hybrid research site and tourist attraction.

I suspect that the project would never have happened had a panel of sufficiently-funded expert scientists been charged with the experiment. They’d probably be too conservative and pessimistic, predicting failure and envisioning alternate approaches to spending the considerable pile of money that would advance understanding further than a closed grand-scale experiment could have. Call it incrementalism rather than going for the (fool’s) gold. They would have likely concluded that we weren’t nearly ready for a moonshot, if indeed we ever would be.

Depending on your perspective, the hypothetical scientists might be either wise or lacking the stuff of dreams. The theater group definitely had that dreamer spark, and sometimes that’s necessary to move past barriers of conservative convention. The truth is, though: most dreams are only that. Biosphere 2 was a rare example of dreamers establishing the means and gusto to carry out something outrageously ambitious. Again, hats off to the impressive feat.

The fact that an already-built infrastructure has not been used for its original aim for three decades after landing in the laps of scientists says something about the mismatch between dreamers and scientists. Make of that what you will. Even so, fantasy-thinking is not at all absent among scientists when discussing what might be possible some day. The myth of progress and unlimited technological innovation runs incredibly strong in our culture.

Failure is no Fault

In an odd sense, I think the Biosphere 2 people failed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. By that, I mean that while the project inevitably failed, it turned out far better than any outsider might have expected. Since my baseline is that failure of the overall aim was guaranteed, I don’t hold the folks responsible for that outcome. They could not have contrived it any other way.

What I’m left with is an admiration for the tremendous amount of planning and effort that went into the system, and that it “got off the ground” at all. Extending that analogy, what if a bunch of artistic-types set out to build a rocket to carry humans to another star system (obviously, far beyond our means). We would of course expect failure, but would you even expect their behemoth rocket to clear the launch pad? Yet in the case of Biosphere 2, it did! You try!

Given that I would not expect success even on the 50th attempt, failing on the first is not really failure as much as it is an example of striving for the impossible. If I try to jump to the moon using nothing but a trampoline and do not achieve my goal, did I fail in my attempt or did I just pursue a totally unrealistic outcome? Is the fault in flubbed implementation or unrealistic foundational vision? In a sense, Biosphere 2 brilliantly executed a doomed project.

Insight

Biosphere 2 is not something I would have touched myself—not seeing the point (guaranteed not to work)—yet it was not a wasted effort. I’m glad somebody did it, for two main reasons. First, it demonstrates how intractably impossible the job is. Sometimes people have to learn the hard way: by demonstrating failure.

But perhaps more profoundly, those who lived the experience quickly came to understand their surroundings as integral to themselves. It blurred the boundaries—almost as if the occupants had “done” mushrooms. They deeply appreciated that the respirating plants were part of their own respiration. They were breathing together, sharing and cooperating, interdependent on each other. They shared molecules like water and nutrients with the living and non-living alike. The sun—conveniently and safely situated outside the “closed” system—was a part of it as well, as was the “inanimate” pile of rock and associated gravity beneath their feet.

If only this insight of profound connectedness—every bit as valid for Biosphere 1 (Earth)—were more firmly implanted in our collective understanding, we’d be much better off. In fact, if rooted deeply enough, not only would we drop space fantasies and compulsion to build Biosphere 2 in the first place, but we’d ditch most aspects of modernity as obvious ecological dead-ends. In the case of biosphere replicas, how could any artificial environment possibly compete with the infinitely-superior and time-tested home we already enjoy on the planet to which we are both adapted and permanently grounded?

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