Under the Dome-like Thing

Can we make biospheres work? Colonizing the galaxy is going to require some tricky technology. Could we take our environment with us?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
show that looks at the future and says, the sun
is always shining and the air smells like warm rubier
and the towels are also fluffy. I'm Jonathan Strickland and

(00:22):
I'm Joe McCormick. And we don't have Lauren in the
studio today. She's actually taking the day off, but she'll
be back for future episodes, so don't worry about that now, Joe,
I understand that you wanted to talk about a couple
of movies. Um, something about running quietly or silent running.
So that's the way I know. That's the movie about

(00:45):
the Jamaican Bob sled team, right yeah, yeah, Um, a
really jaunty song. It was just lots of fun. They
had a great Jamaican version of Talking Heads Wild Wildlife.
It's great. Oh yeah, uh, no, way that that was
a great movie. A cool running you're thinking of, but um,

(01:06):
silent running. It was a movie from the seventies. Oh yes,
the science fiction environmental horror kind of yeah yeah. Bruce
dern Um and uh one of the things that's featured
in this movie is it's got a bunch of spaceships
that are out in orbit around the planets Saturn, and
they've got forests in them. In fact, they're lists in space.

(01:29):
They're the only place that has forests at that time, because,
as I recall, part of the plot of that movie
is that all the plant life on Earth has died. Yeah,
I think I think part of the plot is that
they're they're going to use these forests that are being
preserved on spaceships to sort of reforest the Earth later. Um,
then later on there's there's a big conflict, but that's

(01:50):
just part of the premise. And so that's a really
interesting concept that you could have a forest that's not
on the Earth. I mean, why not? Yeah, Yeah, like
the idea, what is a forest need? Well, there's quite
a few things. Obviously, you need energy. You have to
have some sort of energy coming into the system to
provide the energy for the plants to grow. You would

(02:11):
need some form of nutrients for the plants you consume,
like carbon dioxide and water basically, yeah, probably some other
probably some kind of soil nutrients, right, some source soil nutrients.
I mean, even if you're going hydroponic, you have to
have something, right, it's not uh, you know, the water
and sunlight or facsimile of sunlight wouldn't be quite enough.

(02:32):
So yeah, you'd have to provide a lot of those
same sort of things that you would find here on Earth.
There's no reason, you know, automatically, why you can't have
a forest somewhere else, assuming that you have access to
these basic resources. So how would we make a forest
in space to to have one like this movie? Well,
I'd say the answer to that movie could be another

(02:53):
great movie, a Polyshore classic known as Biodome. By great movie,
you mean one of the movies that has one of
the lowest ratings from critics ever like it often in
there's critics worst films ever made, lest you see it like,
often paired with with the phrase literally the worst movie
of all time, right right, which is it's up against

(03:15):
some stiff competition. But yeah, I have I have not
seen this film. Well I actually haven't either, but I'm
aware of the concept. Yeah, I've I've certainly heard the
pop culture references to it, and I read the synopsis
and that was enough for me. Yeah. So, but the
idea biodome, so here The story is not about space.

(03:35):
It's about constructing an artificial structure of some sort here
on Earth to house various types of environments or biomas.
The idea that we would have under one sealed roof
where there's no exchange of um of anything other than
energy from the interior to the excellent exchange of matter. Yeah. Yeah. Well,

(04:01):
when I say matter, then I have to also say
that matter in all its forms, right, not just solid matter,
but gases as well, so or and even liquids. You're
not supposed to get water from outside. The idea is
that everything is supposed to be completely self contained and
be sort of a miniature version of what the Earth is,
because if you look at the Earth, it has what

(04:22):
we call closure from at least one aspect, which is
that matter aspect. Yeah, the material aspect. So the Earth
has energy going in and energy coming out. It's got
sunlight coming in um and and that's basically the source
of all the life on Earth is that energy. Maybe
you could make an exception for like hydrothermal like bacteria

(04:43):
that live at the bottom of the ocean, maybe UM.
But but by and large, pretty much all life on
Earth comes from the sun. Um. And then you've got
energy going out also, which is just radiant heat basically,
and maybe you could say like the light that gets
reflected back off of the Earth. So the idea here
being that that energy can come in and out of

(05:03):
the system. But by and large, matter is pretty much
what we have here and it's what we're gonna have
in the future. It's not going anywhere except I mean,
I suppose you could counting meteors and stuff like that,
but that that's an extremely tiny Yeah, it's a minuscule
It's so so tiny that we couldn't even really express
it in a meaningful percentage. Same thing for the matter

(05:24):
that we shoot off into space. If we, for example,
the fact that we landed a lunar lander on the
surface of the Moon and left a lunar rover on there,
or the Mars rovers like we're cross pollinating, that there's
such that. Yeah, that represents such an incredibly tiny amount
of mass compared to the rest of Earth that you

(05:46):
can safely say that matter is a closed system. Yeah,
And this is why some people might think about the
Earth as a spaceship, right that it's it's something that's
traveling through space and it's it's materially contained. Well, how
small do you think we could make a materially contained system? So,
in other words, we would have to create some form

(06:08):
of system that would have regenerative life support on it. Yeah,
for life. I left that part out. I mean, obviously
you could just have like an asteroid hurdling through space.
But if we wanted to live somewhere, how small could
that materially contain system be. Could it be smaller than
a planet? Could it be small enough to say, be
something that we could launch? So, in other words, could

(06:29):
we have a ship kind of like the ones that
are in silent running, but ones that derive most of
their life support from the forests that are on board
that ship. As opposed to being a preservation method, this
would actually be a life support system, right, because you
could think about the ecosystems that we have here on
Earth as a sort of life support system for this

(06:50):
spaceship that we live on the planet. Um. We get
all the material energy we need from it, so the
chemical energy we get from food, um, and it recycles
our waste in a way that doesn't just like accumulate
and kill us, right right, which I mean obviously these
are these are intrinsic for life to work. Right. If

(07:11):
you didn't have this kind of um symbiotic relationship between
multiple organisms and ecosystems, then life would not be possible
for any prolonged time. It would eventually it would end
up creating toxins that would kill itself unless it's somehow
adapted to be resistant to those toxins. So it's it's

(07:31):
by studying the Earth where we can learn more about
how these different systems work with each other that allow
us to kind of hypothesize about regenerative life support systems,
which is going to be absolutely necessary if we ever
want to explore space on any meaningful level beyond just
the immediate surroundings. Right. Well, I mean supplies run out,

(07:55):
don't they? Yeah, I mean we're if we're going to
load up a spaceship and travel to a dis don't star. Um.
How much oxygen can you pack to breathe? How much
food can you to take with you? Um? Eventually, if
you're talking about long term exploration, you're going to have
to find a way to make the molecules that you

(08:17):
take with you work more than once. Right, And this
is absolutely important because of course the further away you go,
the more you have to take with you. The more
you take with you, the heavier your ship is. The
heavier your ship is, the more fuel you make or
you need so that you can get to where you're going,
more fuel you need to get where you're going, the
heavier your ship is. It becomes this really cyclical problem.

(08:38):
So it's absolutely imperative to find a solution to it. Okay,
so we're imagining this spaceship that has um bio regenerative
compact capacity. It has an environment that takes care of
its own matter, that feeds itself and recycles its own waste.
Has anybody ever actually done an experiment to see if

(08:58):
we can build something like this, and obviously it would
have to be sort of in a in a sealed,
closed experimental chamber to simulate what it would be like
to be in a spaceship. The answer to that question
is yes, several people have attempted to do this. And
in fact, the fact I already knew that spoiler, well
that's okay, I actually knew that Silent Running wasn't about

(09:19):
the Jamaican Bob's led team, So uh, peak behind the curtain. Um, yeah,
I know the the there are lots of people who
have tried this. In fact, the early stages were well
before we got to a point where we were going
to seal someone into a room and say have fun breathing. Uh.
It was because because we had to prove certain things

(09:40):
were actually possible, For example, the direct relationship between breathing
out carbon dioxide and having plants absorbed that and release oxygen.
No one was really sure if we could create an
artificial environment where that would become a viable possibility. Because
we knew that that was the actual process us of

(10:01):
respiration and um, the relationship between plant life and animal life,
but we weren't sure that we could leverage that, and
so there were a lot of experiments early on before
we got to even this sort of enclosed space that
were necessary, but that led to more extreme experiments. Yeah.
The first I've heard of, the first person I've heard

(10:22):
of to propose this idea is an old friend of ours,
Konstantine Silkovski. Remember that name, sky guy behind the space elevator,
right right. Um, so he was a he was a Russians. Yeah,
he was absolutely a genius idea box. Um, he was

(10:43):
a Russian. Da Vinci and in in nineteen o three,
he had this paper the Exploration of Cosmic Space by
Means of Reaction Devices, So that that's sort of proposed
that you could put humans and plants in a in
a symbiotic relationship to sustain space exploration. And the Soviets,
because at the time that we're talking about where the

(11:05):
space race comes into play, it was the Soviet Union.
The Soviets were very much interested in exploring this in
a very real way, not just they did they build
some kind of crazy bunker, So of course they did.
They built three of them in fact, or really they
built one, and then they kept on expanding the project.
The original one was really to explore a bioregenerative life

(11:29):
support system specifically for cosmonauts, which probably would come into
play for something like a lunar colony or Martian colony
down the line, be really useful for some place like that.
Uh and UH. It was originally a twelve cubic meter
space that could hold one person, hold and support one

(11:49):
person and uh. At that time it was a sealed chamber,
and they had a second chamber that was connected to
it via air ducts that contained a special kind of
algae in it. And that algae would end up generating
the oxygen necessary for the person inside to breathe. They
called this a system that achieved twenty percent closure, meaning

(12:10):
that of the needs of that human being were met
by the actual environment itself. However, that's small potatoes, right
that you still your needs. Yeah, so they still needed
to have food and water brought into the person because
they're just there was no way of recycling the water
necessarily at that point or there, and the algae, while useful,

(12:33):
was not tasty. I was going to say, I'd imagine
that while I'm sure you can sustain human life eating
only algae, that's got to take a psychological toll. Yeah,
I'm not sure how. When you say sustain, I think
maybe you'd stay alive, but you wouldn't want to keep
being alive, Like, I don't know that. I don't know
that health wise it would be a very wise uh

(12:55):
choice over a long term. But at any rate, they
were able to boot set up to between eight and
eight closure, and they did that through creating water recycling systems. Now,
water recycling systems are incredibly important in space exploration today.
In fact, if you read about the water recycling systems
aboard the International Space Station. They are phenomenal. They're capturing

(13:18):
water in just about every way you can imagine and
then recycling it. So that would become something that continues
to be important, and we'll probably chat a little more
about that later. And now, these early stages of the
Soviet bios project, that's what it was called. They were
in the nineteen sixties, right, and so a few years
after the first experiment they decided to expand it a

(13:42):
little bit. They ended up creating a slightly more sophisticated
bios UH system. They added the second chamber, which they
called the phytotron, and this was allowing the the person
inside the main chamber to grow higher levels of plants,
mainly wheat and a few other vegetables were possible, and

(14:04):
the idea was that this way they could get more
of their food from that closed system, as well as
the oxygen that they needed to breathe. And because they're
recycling more of their water, they could didn't need to
replenish water as frequently, So that ended up being a
pretty big advance in the bios approach. But then they

(14:25):
decided to go all out with BIOS three Last three
nineteen seventy two. Right yep, nineteen seventy two cost one
million of roubles, which at that time was about one
million US dollars. Yeah, so, um, it was underground, undergrown bunker,
so already pretty exciting. Uh well, but maybe bunker is

(14:46):
misleading because you don't usually think of a bunker as
being um like sealed stainless steelmatically steal um. So what
they're trying to do here is what we were just
talking about, is to seal off all exchange of gases.
Now you can, it's hard to do this perfectly. In fact,
we we still can't really do it perfectly, but they

(15:07):
were trying to do the best they could to make
sure air wasn't getting in or out. They also wanted
to prevent any sort of pathogens from passing through and
either making the the well the cosmonaut equivalence, because this
really was for the cosmonaut program, although the I don't
think that's necessarily what they called the people who were
inside this buyos. But anyway, they wanted to limit any

(15:30):
pathogen exchange. So they would also hold these experiments chiefly
in the winter, which cut down a lot of it,
and also after the first experiment, they decided to increase
the air pressure slightly on the inside of this. Uh
this this hermetically sealed metal box. You can think of it.
It's a huge box, I mean comparatively speaking, But they

(15:53):
tried to increase the air pressure so that that would
also keep pathogens out by you know, it's kind of
pressing outwards. Yeah, positive, exactly exactly. So that was really
important because they didn't want that to end up compromising
the experiment. It was actually fourteen by nine by two
and a half meters in size, which is about three

(16:14):
fifteen cubic meters of space, and had four compartments. Each
compartment had a doorway that could lead out to the
outside world that could be opened within about twenty seconds
in case of emergency. Although none of those doors, to
my knowledge, where ever needed. No one ever needed to
escape the BIOS three, But I mean it was important
that they had that obviously, in case something did go

(16:36):
castrophically wrong. Um. Each of the doors also had a
seal on it screening of biodome. Uh. Now, the BIOS
three program was fortunately over by the time Biodome came out. Um,
but yeah, they each of the doors also had rubber
gaskets it would seal against the um the doorway. That way,

(16:57):
you could actually seal off one compartment from the other
three compartments, and originally um one compartment was used for
just the crew, that's the crew's work and living quarters. Uh.
The other three compartments were meant for well, two of
them were originally were phytotron's where they could grow food
and the and the third one was for algae. Now

(17:17):
it's important noting something that's a little bit odd about
this environment because using fightertron's they're using artificial light to
sustain the plants they're growing, which makes perfect sense because
if you're going out in space, then you're pretty much
you're going to have to create artificial light. You're just
especially if you're traveling further out of the Solar System

(17:39):
and you're not able to angle your ships that you
can harness the Sun's energy for your to to you know,
feed your plants, to give your plants the energy they
need to grow. So it for the purposes of a
program that could eventually, at least in theory, be poored
it over to space exploration, it made perfect sense that
they had to use artificial lighting. That is something else

(18:01):
that we'll talk about a little bit later to when
we talk about the pros and cons of this approach,
or at least I'll be able to chat about a
little bit. But the other interesting thing I thought was
that after the first experiment, they decided that the third
chamber where they had put the algae uh was really needed.
It needed to be converted over to higher plants. That
in fact, three chambers with higher plants would provide enough

(18:23):
oxygen for the entire crew, but more importantly, would also
provide enough food because they found out that just with
two compartments and the algae there, there wasn't enough food
being produced, enough edible material being produced for the crew
to just you know, sustain themselves on that. And there
were still some there's still some issues with the food
as I as I understand Joe, well, I mean, there

(18:46):
are a lot of issues with food when you're talking
about trying to create a system that's closed to outside
material interference. For one thing, Um, we don't always think
about this, but when you're growing food, not all all
of the material that grows is edible. I mean, what
do you so let's say you're trying to grow wheat,
I mean a huge part of the wheat plant is

(19:08):
not the grain that's delicious, it's this stalk junk. But
what are you going to do with that? Um? So
that that presents a problem. UM. So you could try
to say, like breed wheat that has a shorter stalk
or something like that, but you're still going to be
left with. Um these problems of materials that are hard

(19:30):
to deal with in this environment because you can't eat them,
and you don't want to just throw them away, you know,
because they're part of your material wealth. Uh. And and
so that's one problem. Another problem, not really a problem,
but in this particular experiment, you know, they didn't achieve
perfect closure from the outside because they had to import,

(19:50):
as I'm to understand, some canned meat because they were
participants would not go without their their canned meat, good
old cane meat. Uh. They had sixty they had sixty
three square meters where that for a growing space. That
that's how much space there was aside for growing, which

(20:11):
is about si square feet. And they found that that
was enough to supply them with all the oxygen they
would need for the three crew members. There there was
only enough room for three people. UM. And they did
this experiment three times, and so it's not like this
was an enormous space. But then typically your spacecraft tend
to have fairly small cruise as well, so again it's

(20:34):
not like it's that um that far off from the
way the space exploration race went, So it made sense
from that perspective. Now, granted, this does mean that you
would have to dedicate a certain amount of space in
your spacecraft for growing things, and that alone is you know,
that's a huge consideration obviously, right, I mean spaces is

(20:56):
the space within a spacecraft is at a premium space.
Outside of a spacecraft not so much. There's a lot
of it, but inside of spacecraft not some there's there's
quite a little bit of it. Yes, thank you Joe
for backing me up on that line. It is Grinn
and Ammy. So I was just thinking about space and
how it's inherently funny. It's well's always funny when you're

(21:18):
talking about because we are using the same word for
to describe the the amount of area around you within
a spacecraft as well as the region that's outside the spacecraft.
So there it gets to be a little bit of
confusion of terms. But anyway, what was interesting at least
according to a paper that we both read. Yeah, we
want to give a shout out to this. It's an
older paper. We're using it for historical information. So it

(21:41):
was from the journal Bioscience. It's called BIOS three Siberian
Experiments and Bioregenerative Life Support, and that's by Salisbury, Gittlson,
and Lissowski. Uh and so that's where a lot of
our history on this is coming from. Yeah, the according
to that paper, the outcome was pretty interesting. The crew
reportedly suffered no ill effects, at least not physically, due

(22:03):
to being put up in this little chamber for extended periods.
You know, they held up, They held up all right,
and they did see that the micro flora on the skin,
mucous membranes, and the intestines of the people who were
inside the cruise that were inside these the bios experiments

(22:24):
they changed significantly. However, there were no pathological effects, meaning
that no one got sick from it. However, it's just
one of the things that you look at the skin,
you're like, well, things have definitely changed. One of the
qualifiers there is yet um. One of the things that
we don't really know is what the long term effects
of having changes to the the flora, you know, flora

(22:49):
that inhabit our bodies, so like microflora on the skin,
but also say, like gut flora. What happens when, um,
a long term environmental change, say a trip on a
spacecraft fundamentally changes your gut flora. Is that going to
cause you illness or or damage in the long run
in digestion? Right, Because these these guys and women there

(23:10):
were there was at least one woman in this experiment
and one of the three experiments. UM, they were in
the this isolation for like months at a time, but
a true space exploration mission could last last several months,
up to several years, up to even longer, depending on
how far out we're talking and how fast we're going.

(23:31):
So it's that's definitely something that we still don't know
the answers too, because you know, we've only got limited
amount of data. The other interesting outcome that I saw
in the experiment was that they said the quality of
the air, food, and water remained unchanged during the entire experiment,
So you didn't have any deterioration of the quality of
water or food or air. Uh, despite the fact that

(23:53):
it remains sealed for months at a time. So that's
kind of interesting. But that's not the only experiment we've
ever scene with trying to seal people away and recreate
in ecological environments on Earth, right. No. In fact, there
was an extremely high profile experiment um that was known

(24:14):
as the biosphere two. Hold on, Hold on, Joe, what
happened to biosphere one? Uh that's a little joke. Uh well,
actually it's not a joke. It's deadly serious. Biosphere one
is this old planet Earth because the concept of the biosphere,
we haven't always had this, you know, it's a more
recent idea actually that oh yeah, everything that we have

(24:36):
on Earth. It's a closed, contained system that self sustaining
based on feedback loops of energy and material use. So
Earth is our biosphere one. Can we reproduce an Earth
that's sealed materially to the outside environment. They sort of
tried to do that with with the bios experiments in Russia,

(24:58):
but as we said, they had like um energy coming
in you know, uh, they had the artificial lighting, and
they had they had potted meat well and then then
you know, the intent on that was to create this
regenerative life support system, but not to mimic actual environments
you would discover on Earth. Right. So the one The

(25:21):
Biosphere Too, was a project that was based in Oracle, Arizona,
and on the desert. If you see it, it's gigantoid.
It's um. It's like a couple of football fields, big um.
And it encompassed I think it was seven different Yeah.

(25:41):
So it had had savannah, UM, it had desert. It
was actually it was like a fog desert, which is
like the Atacama Desert in South America. So that's a
desert with that's not necessarily a hot desert, but like
it's it's defined it's defined by its level of dryness
really the fact that there's not you know, you know,

(26:02):
it's precipitation that defines a desert, not the temperature. Um.
So there was the fog desert um. And then had
an ocean with a coral reef. It had fresh water
and saltwater marshes um. And then it had just like
intensive agriculture sections. And one thing that was interesting was
that these little micro farms and there apparently were very productive. Uh.

(26:24):
And then it had tropical rainforest. And then of course
they just said like the human habitats the people live,
and there were eight people well, so there were a
couple of experiments. Um. So the project in a lot
of ways has been regarded as a failure, and one

(26:45):
of the reasons is that it cost two hundred million
dollars and there were a lot of controversies once the
project was underway. What was the actual purpose of this project,
because I mean, obviously the bias one was about creating
a life suppose, so this was not as narrowly focused
on space exploration as the Russian bios experiments, where a

(27:10):
lot of this was about getting a better understanding of
the ecosystems on Earth. And so whereas the BIOS system
was very stripped down. It was like, you know what,
what's the bare minimum we can put in here and
keep people healthy. You know, we can grow like these
eight plants or whatever, um and and and we can

(27:32):
survive on that. Here they were trying to create sort
of rich closed systems. So it was still open to energy,
closed to matter, but they brought in all kinds of plants,
all different kinds of animals, species in total um and
so obviously there that's not as practical in the near

(27:55):
term in terms of space exploration. Maybe maybe in the
far future you could have a really rich, you know,
forest and all in deserts and stuff on a spaceship,
but that's not very practical in the near term. Sure,
I like the idea of a science fiction series where
there are seven ships carrying the various ecosystems and the

(28:17):
story follows the poor jerks who drew the desert chip
or who drew the Antarctic a ship which would be desert.
That's that's true. Yeah, that would be one of the
desert ones. Okay, Yeah, so I mean these guys like
the drew the bottom of the ocean hip. Yeah, exactly,
just just constantly wearing scuba gear. But but anyway, I'm sorry,

(28:38):
getting back to the biosphere, to actual projects. You said
that a lot of people viewed it as a failure.
What do you mean by that. Yeah, So there were
a couple of experiments. The first experiment went from until
nine and this was in a lot of ways a
really impressive undertaking because their goal was to seal eight

(29:00):
human beings into the biosphere too for this long period
of time and and see if they could sustain life
and keep these ecosystems healthy and learn what we could
from them. So they were farming, they were you know,
studying what was happening in the ecosystems in terms of
the chemistry, the atmosphere and all this stuff like that.

(29:22):
That one of the things is that apparently during this
first experiment, the CEO two levels would just go up
and down wildly, and they could just watch, well, you know,
the feedback on what was happening. So I'm sure that
was a little bit scary. Sure, yeah, I mean carbon
dioxide levels go up too high, of course that becomes toxic. UM.
And of course they didn't have it as bad as

(29:42):
you might if you were in a spaceship like this.
I think they can leave exactly if the worst case scenario,
they could open up the door. And part of the
controversy about what was going on is that UM apparently, uh,
there was some suspicion that uh, at least one member
had been like let out of the experiment and then
let back in for medical reasons, UM, and and you

(30:05):
weren't supposed to do that. Another an issue was that
apparently there were factional disputes between the people who were
living in the biosphere, that there there were some political issues.
Lord of the flies. No no, no, no, there were
no murders, but apparently not everyone got along, and they

(30:25):
had disagreements over the management and and the way research
was done within the facility, and these became very pronounced,
and that there were people who were like not on
speaking terms. It's odd you would think that they the
the methodology would have been agreed upon before you had
actually set foot inside the biosphere. Well, I mean, it's

(30:47):
a long experiment as part of the problem. But one
of the things that's interesting is that research is coming
back now and well we can actually look at the
way these people were behaving within the biosphere bostphere two uh,
to study what might happen to astronauts on a long mission,
because they're going to be in the same circumstances. I mean,

(31:08):
it's it's probably easy to get along something with somebody
for a month or something because well, you know, you're
a professional and you you know, but after a certain
period of time, you know, just feelings creep in. Well,
especially like when you talk about the astronauts and the
space exploration missions. Even going on a prolonged stay aboard

(31:29):
the International Space Station, everyone has very specific duties and
they've undergone years of training so that they are able
to carry those duties out under what most of us,
I think would consider to be really harsh circumstances. And
I imagine that sort of discipline helps a lot because
you can focus on that sort of thing. If we're
talking about eventually getting to a point where we're looking

(31:52):
at colonizing other planets, then we we've moved beyond the
people who are aboard the spacecraft have undergone years of
training and have very specific duties to any Porsche club
who gets put aboard this ship, and eventually, you know,
if you don't have that discipline, then I would imagine
that also complicates things. Yeah, another problem with the first

(32:13):
mission is just lots of the animals died, you know,
like pollinating insight, Like the bees died. Uh. Yeah, that's
a huge problem. That's a huge problem. They had some
stowaways too. They had like an invasive ant species that
I think wasn't supposed to be in there, but they
ended up sort of taking over that insect niche and so,

(32:36):
but all of these things are interesting because we're learning
to what to watch out for if we were to
actually launch something like this in the future, right, and
and clearly the the biosphere too was not designed ever
to be a kind of space uh colony, and not
designed to be launched in the space right or or
even erected, say on a on a place like the

(32:57):
Moon or on Mars, because it wasn't designed to withstand
that kind of harsh environment. No, though a lot of
things about its design are super smart. Um. One of
the things is, so, like you had heating and cooling
throughout the day because of the sunlight, the variable sunlight,
and that would cause expansion of the gases inside. So
what do you do about that in the bubble right?

(33:18):
So I they had some kind of really complex system
of of like tanks, Yeah, tanks that would absorb the
expanding gas, and so you could vent it. You could
vent it into the tanks so that you maintain the
same pressure inside the dome, and then when it starts
to cool down, you could start to pull gas back
in from that. You haven't exchanged gases, it hasn't gone

(33:40):
to the external atmosphere, but you're able to maintain a
level pressure within the dome itself. Yeah. Um. Another problem
with the first mission is that there was a little
bit of an oxygen. Oh. Yeah, they turned out that
the oxygen levels were decreasing. Yeah, they had unexpected decreases

(34:01):
in oxygen concentration. If you're if you're bioexchangers, your plants
and your animals are just not balanced right, and you're
producing too much carbon dioxide, you should see those numbers
going up as your oxygen comes down. But they weren't
really seeing that. So it turned out what the problem
was was they had like concrete structural features inside the

(34:23):
building that we're just sequestering gases, and so that was
causing major problems for the atmospheric composition inside the dome
and uh, and there were there were stories about they
you know, they couldn't concentrate having well. And so the
thing is that sleeping trouble. You you would think if

(34:44):
you see oxygen levels going down and carbon dioxide levels
are not also going up. He was the first thing
you would think is that, oh, we've got a leak.
Something is leaking out for some reason. Carbon dioxide is
not you know, increasing. But if it's leak, why is
the oxygen not going down further way? Is it why?
I don't know how you'd explain it. I don't know
that I'd just be confused. Well, I would definitely be

(35:06):
confused due to the lack of oxygen, but I would
hope that someone would have figured it out. And of course,
like you pointed out, like it was the actual structure
itself absorbing carbon um, which you know, you could argue, hey,
maybe we could figure out a way of doing that
as a carbon sink that. Yeah. But despite all of
the controversies and all the things that did go wrong,

(35:29):
they did stay in there for two years. UM. They
lost a good bit of weight. They went on a
low calorie diet while they were in there to live
on the food that they farmed. UM. Though I read
that there apparently some health benefits of that, like you know,
they had good blood pressure and interesting. But there actually
was a second mission, ok, yeah, second mission UM in nine,

(35:54):
another group went in there to try it again, but
that mission was cut short basically because of management disputes
and the control of the facility changing hands basically, And
so the Biosphere two left a bad taste in everybody's
mouth that it kind of tainted this area of research

(36:16):
because of all the controversies and things that went wrong, UM,
and and the disputes and especially I think the the
people the people aspect the drama, right, it had it
had nothing to necessarily to do with the science. It
had more to do with some of the I mean,
there was I'm sure there was some scientific concerns as well,
but the majority of the concerns arose because humans are

(36:39):
human and and sometimes we get a little wacky um.
And so it's weird that it's this thing that mainly
is remembered as something that just went really wrong, like
we you know, it was a failed experiment, and in
some ways that's correct, but we also learned a lot
from it. Sure, yeah. And and that's the thing is
that we're using that kind of information to try and

(37:01):
design new types of technologies, new systems, not only to
study the you know, the various ecosystems, but also with
this in mind, just like the Soviets, did you know,
half a century ago the idea of using this as
some sort of regenerative life support system and it you know,

(37:22):
we've seen this kind of fuel a lot of research
in various fields, things like genetic modification, where you start
to look at ways where you can genetically modify plants
so that more of the plant is edible, or that
you start looking at the in a relationship between plants
and animals where maybe you know you have animals included

(37:43):
in your in whatever biosphere type thing you would have,
let's say for space exploration, you include certain animals not
because you plan on using them as a food source,
but because of their in a relationship with some of
the other stuff you're that's in the dome. So, for example,
the food that you're growing, maybe there's a lot of
it that you can't eat, but this other animal can eat,
and then that animal might be a food source for

(38:04):
yet another animal that you could then that humans are
eating you. Right. That leads to UM one of the
questions I want to talk about, So like, what are
the questions that are involved in designing a regenerative biological
system to keep life alive if we're traveling in space
or colonizing another planet. Um. One of the important questions is,

(38:25):
well do you go for simplicity or complexity? Um? So simplicity,
what are the advantages there? Well, when you have simplicity
in a system, you have a lot of control. So
if you want to send people to Mars and all
they have with them is algae, you can do that.
You can survive on algae Clorella vulgarist that's what they

(38:48):
used in the early bios experiments. Um, and that'll that'll
give you air. You can eat it, and you can
you're ready to go. But it doesn't have all of
these benefits that complexity would provide. So you know, not
only just the psychological benefits, but if you're telling you
long term you need you need a lot more complex

(39:08):
materials than what one food source is going to give you. Yeah. Um,
But then again, when you have all that complexity, you
encounter some of the problems that we saw with like
the interaction between different species in Biosphere two, where you
had lots of things just dying. And it's harder, harder
to manage a complex ecosystem and to anticipate how it's

(39:31):
going to behave it's more unpredictable, and only that, but
it requires more energy to support. So, for example, if
you've got if you've got a fairly diverse amount of
life forms on whatever you know, vessel you are in,
so that you have this kind of luxury of choice,
and the complexity is is the supportive ecosystem, even if

(39:52):
you've figured it all out where everything's playing along nicely
and you don't have to worry about well, chucks, this
one life form that we brought on board that we
thought was going to be really beneficial turns out to
be destructive to this other one that we didn't even know.
We didn't even understand the relationship that would happen when
these two things came aboard the same in the into
the same system. Even if you were able to avoid

(40:13):
all of that, you would still have to pour energy
into the system to have it continue to work. Right. So, uh,
you know, there's an energy sink here too that you
have to consider, like where is that energy coming from,
how do you generate it, how do you regenerate energy?
Are you able to harness things like solar energy? You know,
and other other considerations. That's a big one. There's something

(40:34):
I wonder also, I mean, I wonder if a complex
enough ecosystem just displays emergent behavior, meaning that even if
you put all the same numbers of the same species
and a test module and ran it a bunch of times,
you still wouldn't be able to predict what would happen
the next time. And on top of that, you know,
we have this other problem, which is right now, we
can't we can't really simulate gravity on a on a

(40:57):
large scale. Yes, that's a big one. Yeah, there's there
are a lot of species that may not do so
well in a micro gravity environment. So like the pigmy
goats you're using to get the goat cheese that you're
going to use to make the you know, pizza that
it takes you eight months to put together. Yeah, I
just have this image them now. Every time I milk

(41:18):
the goat, I fly across to the other side of
the biosphere. Yeah, gowered in craft propulsions. That isn't that
deleted scene from gravity? But uh yeah, the I mean
these are we're laughing about. But these are actual problems obviously,
Like if you wanted to pursue this, even if you
were able to solve all these other issues that we

(41:40):
still don't fully understand that, you know, we could work
a lot of this stuff out on Earth, right, We
could do some more experiments akin to biosphere too, with
very strict controls, and in fact, there are people who
are working on things like that. We could do more
of those and learn more about how these systems interact
with one another. Before we were to incorporate into any

(42:01):
kind of space faring model. But even then there are
other things we have to worry about that we can't
recreate here on Earth. Yeah, and another interesting question I
think is what do you do with these uh so
called deadlock substances? You know, that's when you're producing molecules
that you I just don't know how to use this.

(42:21):
You know, I can't reclaim this easily. Um So in
the bios experiments, you know, they'd say like, well, okay,
so what do you do with like wheat stalks? Maybe
at some point you're just gonna have to like burn things.
And then what do you do with the ashes? Here's
what I say. You use use a high intensity plasma

(42:42):
to break them down to their constituent atoms, and then
you do plasma gasification, elasma gasification, plasma gasification, and then
you can at least create a sin gas fuel that
you might be able to run generators on that will
provide the light for everything else. Jonathan, you should email
NASA about this. Yeah, I'm serious. That's a good idea. Well,

(43:04):
the only problem is that, of course you do eventually
run out of matter, like you have to, you would
have to restock you. It's note like matter is magically
making itself over and over and over again. Every time
you would do that, you'd be like, well, if I'm
just using this a sin gas and then I'm venting
off anything that is toxic, and I can't you know,
use that anywhere. Eventually I am using this as a

(43:24):
fuel source, not just a regenerative life support system. It's
actually that kind of that kind of defeats the purpose
of the biosphere, right, which is to be just to
be matter closed. Right, you would you would be you
wouldn't You would not have a hundred percent closure because
you would actually have matter being reduced over time, right,
so in the sense that you would no longer be

(43:45):
able to use that. It's obviously you can't really create
or destroy matter or all you can do is you know,
maybe converted into energy, um, but or you're venting it
off into space. So so yeah, it would not it
would not work in a true, really long term. Let's
talk about like we were shooting for another star system

(44:05):
somewhere in the Milky Way. I mean that would be
you know, you would eventually run out of fuel. Yeah. Um,
We've talked about the psychological effects of having these plants around. Uh,
mostly in terms of eating. You know, like it's just
got to be psychologically better for you to be able
to eat carrots and potatoes and stuff like that than

(44:25):
just allergy. Um. But I imagine there's a psychological effect
to having a certain kind of environment to right, I
would imagine something just from personal experience. I mean, if
I haven't seen a tree in a long time, I
get kind of depressed. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm the same way.
If I haven't seen a humpback whale in a long time,

(44:46):
I start thinking I need to go to either Alaska
or Hawaii, depending upon the season. But a lot of
tree deficiency can be made up for with pygmy goats. Yes,
if you stack three pygmy goats end to end and
then just tell one of them to just kind of
sway a little bit, as if there were a breeze,
everything's cool. Actually, you know what, videos of piggy goats

(45:08):
definitely do help me with my tension. So maybe there
is something to what you're saying. But if one of
those fainting goats falls in a spaceship, no one's there
to hear, it doesn't make a sound. I think if
I think it just floats, right, just because we still
have we don't have artificial gravity yet, so it would
just be one of them floats. But that wouldn't make
it would just be you've destroyed the oldest riddle on Earth.

(45:28):
It would just be a stiff goat flying by not moving. Okay,
we're obviously getting a little loopie here, but no, this
was a cool thing to talk about because you know,
we have direct evidence of you know, we have the
experiments that people have conducted to varying degrees of success.
There's also the Mars one initiative where they're talking about

(45:50):
having a Mars colony. By was it like or something,
we are not done with biosphere research. I mean, there's
going to be a lot more of this research on
Earth before we can really instantiate this kind of system
in space. And that's that's part of what the Mars
one Colony would be doing. Like they they talked about
putting people in uh, you know, kind of a sequestered

(46:10):
environment not only to simulate what it would be like
on Mars, but two as a proof of concept that
in fact, these habitats they plan on making under the
surface of Mars would actually support life. They're planning on
using hydroponics, right, Yeah, they're using mainly hydroponics, and that
would be the source of the oxygen the ongoing regenerative

(46:31):
life support system for the people there. So that's another
good question, is do you go hydroponics or do eco soil?
Obviously hydroponics is a lot easier, but the question is
whether or not it actually will produce the right amounts
of not just oxygen but food. Well, yeah, and the
questions about I think there are questions about whether the

(46:52):
kind of soil we have on Earth helps produce healthy
gut flora. And it's also another good question because again,
these are questions that we out of answers too, because
it takes so relieve Earth. We've got to figure out
why Earth is good well, and it's just stuff that
takes so much time to answer, right, It's not like
it's not like you could run an experiment in a
week and have a definitive answer. These are things that

(47:14):
we're talking long term effects on people, and that requires
a level of commitment that's difficult to do. So maybe
this Mars one thing I'm still very skeptical about whether
or not they'll reach their goal But my hope is
that even if they never launch off of Earth, that
if they're very much sincere in going forward with their plan,

(47:38):
they will at least do some experiments here on Earth
that could end up being really beneficial down the line.
So that's my hope. I mean, really, I hope that
I'm just proven totally wrong and that they've got everything
together and they actually managed to do what they say
they're going to do. That would astound me and delight me.
But you know what, that's a good thing. We should

(48:00):
actually mention that we do plan on doing an episode
about terraforming, and some terraforming being a sort of larger
scale version of what we're talking about. Instead of taking
a small bit of Earth and closing it up on
the surface of the Moon or Mars or space station,
why not just turn Mars into another Earth. Yeah, because
we've done so well with this one. So, uh, that's
just a little snark. I'm actually an optimist. Yeah, guys, Well,

(48:24):
this has been a fun conversation about this topic, and
we're going to end up obviously revisiting this in other
episodes where anything where we're talking about long term space
exploration or terraforming it'll come back into play. But we
really wanted to tackle this one mostly to uh to
kind of dare one another to actually endure the poly
Shore movie. Well, we'll get back to you on whether

(48:46):
either of us actually um does that or maybe Lauren
What's the Future of Biodome sequels? Yeah, not good as
it turns out, um, but yeah, maybe we can convince
Lauren to watch it while while she's away. So guys,
remember go to f W Thinking dot com. That's the
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(49:08):
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(49:31):
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