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?
Views: 2618
We live in less extreme copies of the biosphere 2 – in our cities.
I can understand this common illusion, but build an impermeable wall around the city and watch it die off within weeks. Not even close to B2, which itself was not even close to an actual biosphere.
Of course, this is what we are talking about (cities, especially large ones, are unviable formations).
But without a wall, this is less extreme isolation than in B2.
There are examples of independence and autonomy in the biosphere: I cited them earlier. These are mainly relict bacteria that obtain energy, electrons for respiratory chains and carbon from inorganic substances by chemosynthesis. But they are representatives of ancient (primary) lines of life.
Genetic biodiversity is impossible without dynamic isolation and coevolution. [Isolation is important to develop new adaptations and differences in genotype (including for humans), so that they can hybridize again]
Perhaps a bit morbid but I remember reading about how in the 19th century the fear of premature burial became a common phobia. Evidently this could happen from time to time, a person may have been in a coma or unconscious, and medical knowledge being what it was may have been mistaken for being deceased, and subsequently buried. Undertakers began to offer a service where a string would be tied to an above-ground bell and run down into the casket so if someone woke up while six feet under they could hypothetically pull on the string and ring the bell, at which point the gravediggers would grab their shovels for a speedy rescue mission. – I'm not sure how often this actually worked out.
On the one hand, being buried alive was an unfortunate turn of events for an individual and a common Victorian-era fear, but perhaps in a reductio ad absurdum kind of way, an underground casket with a person in it could be looked at as an enclosed human-dominated environment bereft of ecological and wholistic relationships. As an untested thought experiment, I believe that the thing that would get a person in this situation, assuming they don't have a heart attack from panic, would be CO2 poisoning rather than oxygen depletion. That is, after one to two cycles of the enclosed air running through the lungs and exchanging gases, assuming sea-level atmospheric concentration, the CO2 concentration would be 5-10%, which would be in the fatal range, while the oxygen concentration would remain at 11-16% of total atmosphere, which should be uncomfortable but survivable. In short, a person in such an environment would choke on their own exhaust gases (and here we are at the planetary level choking the biosphere with our ~220 billion tons per annum of pollution and causing major problems with CO2 pollution in particular).
There seems to be some connection to draw between a person being buried alive, Biosphere 2, a Mars colony, and humans converting the planet into 'Spaceship Earth'. – Arguably, they're all man-made tombs.
Incredible and weird: Steve Bannon, you know, that Steve Bannon, was brought in to manage the ownership company and stayed on for two years. I do not even know what to do with that information.
I think any reputable gardener could have foreseen the ecological failure of Biosphere 2, given how hard it is to get sustainable plant balances correct in a garden that is connected to Biosphere 1.
I've had the pleasure of meeting some of the folks who conceived of Biosphere 2, and even one who lived there. (Had him on my podcast.) I think they'd agree with you that "failure" was inevitable, but also a crucial first step toward success. In that sense, "failure" isn't failure at all — just part of the learning curve. I think the same could be said of evolution. For the process to work, many must fail for every few who "succeed" by reproducing offspring with their particular genetic anomaly. So to the extent that failure is intrinsic to the process, does the concept even make sense?
I would call this working backwards: presupposing ultimate success. We know Life is possible, so can speak of all the failures as necessary steps (which transpired in *working* living systems so the proof of concept was built-in). But failures toward something that will never succeed are not steps toward success: just plain failures. Failure to sit comfortably on a bonfire is not a step toward ultimate success doing so. We can't know with 100% certainty that living in space (or in an artificial/enclosed habitat) is not in the cards, but my (unpopular) perspective is that it's not, in which case failures are just (predictable) failures.
A question regarding oxygen: How much O2 producing biostuff is needed to meet the needs of all the O2 consuming biostuff? And, did the builders of B2 really believe they had enough?
Most atmospheric oxygen per my understanding has been accrued over millions of years starting about 600 million years ago. It's fluctuated between 10-35% concentration during that time and is about 21% today. There are complex interactions between earth weathering processes and plant and animal evolution for accruals/reductions in atmospheric oxygen, but these are slow processes stretching millions of years. Most of what we're breathing is oxygen banked over millions of years. Plants also consume oxygen for respiration and dead decaying plants will host oxygen eating bacteria. Forests, including the Amazon, are not really producing that much net oxygen because there are processes within the forests that consume virtually all the oxygen produced.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/why-amazon-doesnt-produce-20-percent-worlds-oxygen
Probably having a bunch of plants in an enclosed environment and expecting this will enable one to breathe is just not really how it works.
Algae in the ocean generally produces over half of the global oxygen in our atmosphere. A Biosphere that is an accurate representation of Earth would have a substantial (>70%?) volume dedicated to marine systems!
Phytoplankton have produced at least half of the oxygen in the atmosphere, yes, but over geologic timespans.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/OxygenLevel-1000ma.svg
I still find it amusing that people are amazed and express grudging respect when they find out us "dirty hippie commie pinkos" could actually DO something.
Tom – I am a silent observer of yours, and actually a big fan.
Have you ever considered going on Joe Rogan to discuss your analysis of all the various aspects of the confluence of human planetary limits, "sustainability", and our energy and other needs?
I realize Joe Rogan is probably the last forum that you may like to disseminate your views… but it would make for a GREAT conversation in my opinion – and your analysis and findings would at least reach a much bigger audience.
I mean, why not? At the very least – I would watch it – and I think it would be a really interesting conversation.
Your thoughts?
Thank you!
Joe Rogan? As outreach, possibly yes. As elucidating conversation, definitely not. In person Rogan is surprisingly deferential to established scholars, and easily swayed by rhetorical arguments. He is a very good conversationalist, but not a particular adept thinker.
Thank you for the response!
I haven't watched a lot of Rogan – I just know he's like one of the most popular podcasts for the "average American dude"
I fully agree that you probably will be talking at him – and it will be like trying to convince a devout flat-earther that the earth is a sphere – not flat.
But you don't need to convince the "Democratic" side of US politics about the concerns over climate change. It's the average American that could at least hear that conversation – even though I fully agree for most of them – it won't change any minds about what we collectively should do.
Even absent the concerns over rising temperatures, sea level rise, lose of biodiversity etc etc etc – which are obviously all BIG important things too – there is the simple truth that our entire modern civilization is powered and manufactured by fossil fuels – which we are burning through and can't make more of.
That issue : of a potential almost *inevitable* decline in modernity – will certainly be a "pessimistic" conversation for any "techno optimist" – but I guarantee – it would be a great conversation to spell out in plain terms on Joe Rogan
A lot of "blue collar" type guys intuitively understand how things are made and where they come from – so a discussion around "What happens when there simply is no more oil, coal, or natural gas for humans to use?" – will be a conversation even the most thick headed Neanderthal Trump lover would appreciate listening to.
Will remaining humans have to go back to living like we did ~5,000 years ago as hunter-gatherer tribes? Could we live more like the Amish do – in agricultural societies – but with fewer powered amenities?
It'd be a great conversation! One I would listen to, as would a lot of other people who normally only hear stuff from crazy people and other right-wing nutzos.
It needs to be ingrained in all of us that the biggest “part” of every “individual” is actually the whole Earth. The removal of this “part” is just as lethal as having our heart or brain removed, but for the whole lot of us all at once.
The “failure” of the Biosphere 2 experiments might have been be re-framed as a spectacular success if it had actually convinced more people that the Earth is a critical, irreplaceable part of us.
Many of us don’t think one iota about where all the stuff that supports our existence comes from. It’s “just there”. Even oxygen is “just there”.
It would probably be a good thing for our awareness if more of us got to experience a few weeks or months in something like Biosphere 2 and watch things collapse at a faster rate… Without the “Earth part” of ourselves we are dead. This fact needs to become second nature again.
Our (left) brains need to collectively undergo a “Great Relaxing” or “Great Surrendering” or “Great Giving Up”. There is a much wiser, complex and “larger part” of ourselves that we should be leaving in charge of things: the evolving Earth/Nature. Believing that our brains can work out how to recreate a sustainable Whole is madness, especially given that our modern thinking has thus far only been shown to be capable of transforming a sustainable system into an unsustainable one.
The name itself is absurdly grandiose. Something like " Experimental Survival House " would be more appropriate . More hyperbolic headlines, I guess.
Has anyone here read the paper "Our Hunter Gatherer Future" by John Gowdy?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507
We will have to return to being hunter-gatherers if the climate becomes too unstable to support sedentary agriculture. The problem is that our current population is far too large to be supported by hunting and gathering and we have exterminated most of the large animals that hunter gatherers would hunt. Human extinction is a possibility. I don't think near-term human extinction is particularly likely, but the chance of it is non-zero.
I have a nagging question about your "back to hunther-gatherers" proposal. If we indeed somehow manage to do that in an orderly and non-apochalyptical way, what would prevent us from going back to the old bad habits just as soon as earth had recovered a little bit? Human conscience + instincts created a extremelly lethal form of life. Wouldn't be better to turn off the lights on the failed experiment of humanoids, once and for all by collective agreement? I am not saying I support that idea – for me, we are just as much part of nature as algae are – but what in your philosophy justifies such special place for humans? I mean, whatever we do, it is nature that is doing it as well. Or are we outside it? Isn't it, in the end a very anthropocentric view of reality?
Lots of bits here. First, having exhausted the low-hanging fruit in terms of non-renewable resources, modernity 2.0 likely can't happen. No repeat of iron age, bronze age, fossil fuel age, for instance. Might we return to agriculture and destroy ecology more slowly? Perhaps. Is it fundamental to humans? Possibly, although the vast majority of our time on the planet has been in a more benign and ecologically integrated mode. Will we get to decide whether to turn off the lights? No more so than we decided to end up here. Some will likely make it through the bottleneck, and if humans are around in 10,000 years it will very likely be in an ecologically sustainable mode, or else we probably can't remain here.
Nothing in the universe is unnatural, including the possibility of total nuclear annihilation. So, that logic (all is nature) has little bite. Values come into it. Humans are absolutely not outside of nature, yet are absolutely unique on the planet in terms of causing a sixth mass extinction (and cities, global transportation, etc.). Humans could potentially destroy a large swath of life on Earth (including large, complex animals like humans), or could live as part of an ecological community as in (most) times past. Whatever happens, it will be nature's doing. The question is: would we rather live *within* it or imagine ourselves to be above it and in so conceiving, destroy it and ourselves? It's not actually a choice: to survive is to live within nature, as part of it.
This perspective is not anthropocentric in the sense that it asserts no supremacy (quite the opposite) and values the community of life (the more-than-human world) tremendously, but it does acknowledge a pivotal role humans are playing ecologically, as pretending otherwise runs counter to the facts.
If words are to have meanings, it may be necessary to distinguish between technical terms and common usage. For instance, it's been observed that there is nothing civilized about civilization. Similarly, meme has a very different meaning within information theory than its use in pop culture on the Internet. To discard unnatural and manmade by putting up an umbrella so universal around the term natural scores points for rhetoric but is more confounding than helpful.
There is no "better" in nature. "Better" is subjective.
Sure, humans could rediscover civilisation if conditions allow. Civilisations arose without all the minerals and fossil fuels, so some form of civilisation could arise again, if the climate ever cooled down to a more stable condition.
The species that are here were preceded by very different species. There is no special place for any of them and ecosystems are constantly changing (just not, currently, at a speed that humans would notice – at least until a couple of centuries ago). Humans will do what humans can do, just like other species. No need to take a decision to rid the planet of our species but that doesn't mean we won't (like we didn't choose to get rid of many other species).