
History of Biosphere 2 - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/sunday-review/biosphere-2-climate-change.html
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pram
I took a tour of Biosphere 2 when I was young. I remember the guide talking
about two specific problems they didn't anticipate that dramatically altered
the outcome of the experiment:

The 'domes' are supported by a metal lattice framework. That structure
actually blocked too much sun and created extra shade which affected the plant
growth.

The concrete used in the construction was sucking up carbon dioxide and
changing the environment unexpectedly. That also reduced plant growth.

I really don't believe the entire thing was useless. It wasn't successful, but
it failed in many interesting ways ;P

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maxxxxx
This just shows that we have to do a lot of tedious testing before there is a
chance to go to Mars. Even pretty innocent looking things can cause huge
problems that can’t be anticipated beforehand

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jasonwatkinspdx
I always get downvoted to oblivion for pointing this out, but the Elon Musk
hype squad is just not being realistic about how far we are from establishing
a permanent colony on mars. Severe issues remain.

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gryfft
A Mars colony is something humanity should start thinking seriously about once
we successfully run a production-grade lunar colony for about a decade-- long
enough to recognize and tackle the worst bugs.

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asark
I understand a Martian colony as a kind of romantic dream. I understand a
longish-term Martian outpost for scientific purposes. I don't get a Martian
colony as a serious proposal for pretty much any reason. It's like 1000x more
expensive, dangerous, and inconvenient than colonizing any number of very-
inhospitable places on Earth.

To survive planetary disaster? Well 1) Mars is _already_ worse than most
imaginable post-disaster Earths would likely be, and 2) you could build a
couple highly-survivable emergency bunker-habitats and pay people to live in
them (in shifts, say, so there are always enough inside to ensure survival but
they're not stuck in there full time) for, surely, less money than Martian
colony establishment & maintenance would cost. You might still screw it up and
they might not succeed if things really got that bad, but I'd bet their odds
are better than any Martian colony we're likely to manage to put up in the
next 100 years.

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merlincorey
> 2) you could build a couple highly-survivable emergency bunker-habitats and
> pay people to live in them (in shifts, say, so there are always enough
> inside to ensure survival but they're not stuck in there full time) for,
> surely, less money than Martian colony establishment & maintenance would
> cost.

We could call these bunker-habitats "vaults", maybe. Then proceed to raise
some capital for our startup and eventually call it "Vault-Tec"[0].

> You might still screw it up and they might not succeed if things really got
> that bad, but I'd bet their odds are better than any Martian colony we're
> likely to manage to put up in the next 100 years.

We could further fund it by conducting various sociological experiments. What
could go wrong?[1]

[0] [https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault-
Tec_Corporation](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault-Tec_Corporation)

[1]
[https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault)

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nobody_nowhere
I toured the facility around 2005-6 (iirc). Looks like you still can.

It had a futuristic and lightly post-apocalyptic vibe. The jungle plants were
growing out of control, pressing up against the glass panes of one of the
habitats. Ants streamed in and out from the desert outside through a crack in
a glass panel.

If you check it out ([http://biosphere2.org/visit/tour-schedule-
hours](http://biosphere2.org/visit/tour-schedule-hours)), you can have a full
post-apocalypse vacation by adding a tour of the ICBM museum south of Tucson,
the AMARC plane graveyard, Cosanti in Scottsdale and Arcosanti (where you can
stay) north of Phoenix.

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jayess
I highly recommend the ICBM museum in Tuscon. They go through the entire
launch process for the tour. It takes less than a minute. It's quite something
to imagine that within that short period, the end of civilization would be
guaranteed.

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t3hprofit
Did the ICBM tour w/ a dad a few years back. It's definitely fascinating. 100%
agreed worth the time

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cowmix
My company provided the first Internet connection for Biosphere 2 in the 1995
timeframe. This was right after the bust, they were taken over by Columbia
University. At the time I took a tour of most of the complex and it had a very
weird, abandoned feel to it. FWIW, most of the systems that monitored /
controlled everything there (like Jurassic Park) were ran on HPUX.

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themodelplumber
Neat! Did those HPUX machines happen to run CDE? The perfect mood-desktop for
cool Jurassic Park stuff IMO.

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cowmix
They were pre-CDE.. Motif based.

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NelsonMinar
I spent a week at the Biosphere during the transition, after the old crew had
been fired and they were trying to figure out how to salvage something useful
out of the project. It was a big a mess as every article written about it,
including this one, said. One fact that stuck with me was all the sensor data
was useless because no one had calibrated any of the sensors on installation.
The other was that everyone universally agreed banana wine was disgusting.

The sensors were a dumb mistake. But some of the other mistakes, like trying
to get the gas balances right. Those seem like useful learning lessons. Ed
Bass sure didn't get his money's worth out of the project and I'm not sure any
of us did. But some useful stuff came out of it.

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stcredzero
I remember seeing a documentary, where the documentary film maker who was
hired by the Biospherians was talking about his experiences there. He
remembers when the hummingbirds were dying, and how the Biospherians didn't
want to let him photograph and film that. He also talked about how one night
at dinner, they all took out these animal masks and started making animal
noises. (Something about getting in touch with the spirits of nature or some
such.)

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Theodores
I think that the article is missing the point of what it was about and what
was learned from it, maybe 'Steve Bannon' isn't what was needed.

A better primer on the BBC news website:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/magazine-41151951/building-
a-n...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/magazine-41151951/building-a-new-world-
inside-a-giant-greenhouse)

An interview with one of the participants, clearly she learned a new
perspective concerning her place in the world.

Originally it was told by the media as a project for a prototype space colony.
There are those with ambitions to get humans living on Mars and beyond, but it
is not going to be as easy as sci-fi ideas of the 1950's would lead us to
believe.

I would say Biosphere-2 was actually a really good experiment even though it
is mocked for the lack of any good science. We learn a lot through follies,
the delusions of grandeur that others have and how naive we once were.

What I would like to see is some original press from 1991 with the likes of
BBC's Tomorrow's World or Horizon presenting the thing seriously, particularly
when it comes to 'Space Colony'.

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ggm
I may be mis-remembering, but I thought Martin Gardiner or one of the other
bogus science writers did a take-down on how truly awful the science was,
going into and coming out of Biosphere 2. is there really a lot of new
information here?

I don't think retrospectively, you can fix opening the airlock and bringing
things in and out, without fundamentally questioning the "sealed world
experiment" problem

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spot
The news was that the sensor data was lost. This was in the headline and
mentioned near the end, most of the article was indeed a survey.

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jedberg
I remember when this was big news. Mars colonization was big in the late
80s/early 90s, as it was "the next step" now that we had the Space Shuttle.
This experiment was supposed to show us the way.

I think it's failure actually helped a lot, showing us that we just weren't
ready to colonize Mars yet.

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dpatrick86
Interestingly, the legacy of Biosphere 2 includes the recently emerging
fasting and fasting-mimicking science demonstrating some interesting
healthspan promoting properties. Dr. Roy Walford of Biosphere 2 helped kick
off the caloric restriction field thanks to his experiences.

Valter Longo explains that his tenure in Walford's lab as one of the preludes
to some of his great work demonstrating that some of the benefits of CR are
achievable by using discrete periods of fasting as opposed to long-term
restriction, which has obvious challenges of practicality and undesirable
effects like emaciation just to name a few.

He talks about Dr. Walford's time in biosphere 2 and how it impacted both
Walford's work and, ultimately, his own.

Starts around here around 00:01:45...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6PyyatqJSE&t=00h01m43s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6PyyatqJSE&t=00h01m43s)

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akhilcacharya
The fact that Steve Bannon inadvertently caused the creation of the movie
"Bio-Dome" is a seriously underreported fact.

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stcredzero
Here's an experiment which could be started relatively inexpensively, but
which would yield significant results: Start with just recycling water. Build
a similar facility, or build a new one, but at first, just try to completely
recycle the water. This could be done through greenhouses completely enclosing
an artificial wetlands, which would be used to recycle human wastes. Pure
water could be recovered by running dehumidifiers.

Such a facility could be built in the desert, much smaller, but incorporating
the lessons of Biosphere 2. (For example, that conventional glass blocks too
much sunlight, and that curing concrete releases CO2.)

Next, just completely recycle the air.

Only after that, see if the ecosystem could be expanded and food grown for the
inhabitants. That should also be staged, with the 1st part involving just
supplying enough calories, the next parts working towards complete nutrition.

Instead of sealing the system from the get-go, first build it "leaky," then
prevent the leaks.

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XaspR8d
Lots of people sharing their tour anecdotes, but I wanted to add: my favorite
part of the experience is when they take you inside the "lungs".

Due to the immense amount of atmosphere inside, they needed a way to handle
the expansion and contraction over the course of the day, so they built a
giant diaphragm roof that can raise and lower on top of an auxiliary dome.
During the tour they take you inside to see it inflated, then take you into
the outer shell and crack a door so you can watch the whole thing collapse.

Super simple mechanism, but it really hit home the complexity of the problem
space.

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weisser
Interesting timing, I just tweeted a Biosphere 2 brochure I found in a used
book yesterday.

[https://twitter.com/julianweisser/status/1111686000248410112...](https://twitter.com/julianweisser/status/1111686000248410112?s=21)

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doctorRetro
The second photograph - the candidates standing awkwardly at pseudo-attention
- would make an excellent album cover.

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t3hprofit
Yay Biosphere 2! I love this place. Been a few times. I'm glad to see they are
doing useful science here.

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ajay-d
Where'd the cockroaches come from? Presumably from the outside?

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awakeasleep
Hell i’d read an article analyzing exactly what role they played in the
biospheres ecosystem.

The article implies they’re bad, prima facie. If you want to be “scientific”
then lets address exactly what they were contributing and hurting.

Was biosphere 2 designed to account for an insect food chain? Was it designed
to account for all the types of waste cockroaches eat?

The more I think about it the less i feel like the cockroaches were the result
of a “failure” and the more I think they're actually the data that should be
considered a result of the experiment!

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stcredzero
_The more I think about it the less i feel like the cockroaches were the
result of a “failure” and the more I think they 're actually the data that
should be considered a result of the experiment!_

I for one welcome...

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RickJWagner
It would make for a great sci-fi movie plot. Or another round of similar
experiments. Or both.

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bluedino
Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin did a comedy called 'Bio-Dome' in 1996. The
two slackers get trapped in there or something, I can't remember the little
bit of plot that there was.

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jedberg
That was the whole plot. Two slackers get trapped inside with a bunch of
scientists, so they have to make food for the slackers who just want to screw
around, and in the end the slackers teach the scientists a thing or two about
life. One of Pauly Shore's best works. Also it gave us this amazing video of
the Safety Dance:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVdP8bQ94XY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVdP8bQ94XY)

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dekhn
Nothing about this is a 'scientific experiment'. It was a badly conceived
stunt.

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nullwiz
I cant read because of the paywall. Sometimes inspecting and removing works,
but not now.

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MayeulC
I typically block javascript on that site, as it forbids browsing in private
mode. I am not against ads, but I dislike trackers.

