November 11, 2014 • 44 mins
Enter Biosphere 2 with Robert and Julie and tour a technological wonder of the early 90s -- a 7,200,000 cubic foot Earth-in-miniature. Find out about this "Eden on top of an aircraft" and what went awry when eight people sealed themselves inside a biosphere for two years.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas,
and we are sealed inside the Stuff to Blow Your
Mind podcasting chamber right now, and we are going after
(00:23):
a really fascinating topic and one that that really meshes
well with our our sealed environment here. Yes, that's right.
We're doing a little armchair traveling today and we're going
to travel back to or ninety two or so. But
before we do that, let's talk about this concept of
a utopia, a garden of Eden. This is this thing
that we aspire to. Oh yes, I mean, this is
(00:46):
an idea that has been with this rageous right that
there perhaps was a primordial time, an untouched time, where
everything was was perfect, and that we could maybe recreate
that through some system, because it seems it seems like
we have all of these flaws right in in in
human culture and human society. The way we do things,
the way we interact with the world. It's it's inherently flawed.
(01:08):
We're on this doom trajectory and there's got to be
something we could do to change at some order. We
could put on ourselves, some technology we could we could
aspire to something that would turn things around and save
us from ourselves and maybe, depending on what your worldview
is and you and and how you view your mythic history,
(01:28):
return us to some uh, some previous mode of living
that was pristine, yeah, replete with waterfalls, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
we could do that. We are of course talking about
biosphere too, which how do you explain this? I think
about it as like this burning man fever dream, like
(01:52):
let's put up an arc in the desert and create
a utopia. But it's not, in fact a fever dream,
or may be it was, uh one of the founders
of this idea's fever dream. It actually came into reality
in the early nineties and it served as this kind
of mini earth. Yeah, I mean, it was, in a
(02:13):
sense kind of a scientific burning Man because because the
you can certainly make comparisons between the the energy that
that started each of these endeavors, and while one was
what one was based in, uh in art and expression
and have just having a big old party out in
the middle of nowhere, the oh, there is a scientific endeavor. Yeah,
and we're talking about this miniature air tight world that
(02:35):
sprang up in the desert, and we're gonna take a
look at this in two episodes. Today's episode is going
to focus more on the architecture and what happened during
this experiment, um so. And we do want to mention
that there have been other biospheres built before, mainly in
the sixties and seventies by Russian and American scientists, but
(02:56):
those really pale in comparison to the grand er that
is biosphere too. Yeah, the grandeur is key here because
this was I mean, it was really a realization of
ideas that had previously mostly been the domain of conjecture
and even science fiction. Like I instantly think back to
n film Silent Running, where you had h all of
(03:17):
the forest on Earth had been decimated, and you had
and you had all the ecosystems of the Earth sealed
off and self contained hemispheres in space looked after by
Bruce dern in some Robots and and that is a
really beautiful film with a strong ecological message, but it
was very much science fiction. But fast forward a couple
of decades and you see it actually take shape on
(03:39):
the Earth, and it is an amazing endeavor. It is.
The project was originally conceived and executed by a group
of adventurers, artists, and philosophers known as the Centergists, and
they have the financial backing of Texas billionaire Ed Bass
and oil magnet, and with that financing, they were actually
(04:01):
able to bring this this idea to life. Yes. First
of all, Ed Bass is one of two really key
individuals for this whole project, because of course he had
the funds to make it happen. Uh, And he's really
is one of these characters that also makes you rethink
the term Texas oil billionaire because this is a guy
you know that that was and is remains very active
(04:22):
and environmentalist and philanthropic endeavors. But the other key individual, uh,
the other guy that this could not have happened without,
is one John Allen. And we could really just devote
a whole podcast that who wanted to to just analyzing
John Allen because with this guy, you have a Colorado
School of Minds trained metal orgist in Harvard NBA. All right,
(04:43):
no big deal, uh, nineteen sixty three, he's uh, he's
in a Manhattan office building. And the story goes that
this was following two hallucinogenic experiences with peyote. He looks
out the window at this uh, this the sprawling metropolis,
and in sees the air out there, and he realizes
that he can't open the window to get to that air.
He has this epiphany. Uh. So he quits his job,
(05:06):
heads out and begins seeking wisdom around the world. Um.
By ninety seven he's become a self styled esoteric teacher
in San Francisco, and his students go to New York
and they set up a theater company. From there, they
go to New Mexico where they start a commune near
Santa Fe. And eventually he Eat meets add Bass, and
add Bass starts listening to some of his ideas, and uh,
(05:30):
and his ideas are really impressive. Yeah. I should also
mention to you that that this group also has an
oceanic research vessel. And all this time there they are
trying in earnest to be rigorous about a scientific approach
to the environment. And at this time Alan really comes
(05:51):
up with the basis of this idea of the biosphere.
He says, quote, there is a crisis of misalignment between
the biosphere and the technosphere. These seem to be out
of balance a catastrophe. Biosphere too, instead creates a balance
between biosphere and technosphere. In other words, he's going to
try to use the technology and and the money here
(06:13):
that to create something of an artificial utopia. There's a
great deal of interest with the synergists, who later redub
themselves the Institute for Eco Technics, with not only understanding
the environment but essentially bottling it up in the same
way that you have, uh, the idea of a bottled terrarium. Uh.
(06:35):
And and this is of course, is is looking into
the future, thinking about the long term survival of the
human rights, thinking about space exploration, thinking about how do
we take not just a little of our environment with us,
How do we not just take uh, you know, a
portion of it that we consume and it has to
be replenished. How do we take a self sustaining portion
of our world with us and and even see other
(06:56):
worlds with it. Yeah, this really was one of the
missions of this project. And according to The New York
Times in and they reported on it, the structure was
builed as the first large habitat for humans that would
live and breathe on its own as cut off from
the Earth. As a spaceship. And again the idea was
to to have this many atmosphere that could be portable eventually,
(07:18):
but also to better understand Earth's biosphere or as the
biosphere Ian called it, biosphere one. Yes. Yeah, I also
want to point out that at a at a conference
in oracle In, Allan announced his plan to build a
prototype Mars calling on Earth before the decade was out.
And he and he he said that the destiny of
(07:39):
human beings was to see Earth's life into space. In
the first stop would be a working colony on Mars.
So these are some of the far reaching, ambitious ideas
that were that were in the heads of John Allen
and ultimately in the heads of those who, for lack
of a better word, followed him and and and just
bought into his vision. Now, let's talk about really where
(07:59):
the rubber meets the road here when we're talking about
this building. Okay, because so far we've been talking about
all these sort of like esoteric ideas of utopia and
biosphere and balancing. But what do you need in order
to do that? You need an incredibly huge structure. And
from nineteen eighty seven to ninete this structure was built
(08:22):
in the snore and desert about thirty miles north of Tucson,
and we were talking about a seven million, two hundred
thousand cubic foot sealed glass and space frame structure spread
over three point one five acres massive. Yeah, and I
should also add that the original idea is they built
this thing to laugh. The idea was that rotating crews
(08:42):
would work here for a century. So one crew comes in,
then the next crew comes in, and the experiment keeps
going and going. Uh. You know, in all this, I
keep thinking that like one of the other only other
minds that comes that comes to my mind when I
when I think of vision, like this is Walt Disney,
and we know we've talked about his plans for for uh,
for Walt Disney World and especially for Apcot Center, and
(09:05):
how ambitious, crazy ambitious those ideas were, and those ideas
had to be rolled back to meet the realities of business.
And with Biosphere too, you see a bit of that.
But they actually they actually got more of that vision
somewhat accomplished, initially accomplished well, and we'll talk at a
little bit about this more later, but there had to
(09:26):
be an immense amount of excitement here because that's you know,
initially the plan was thirty million dollars to build this,
but it took two hundred million dollars. With that kind
of wallet open, you can see how a lot of
people would be interested in jumping on this and contributing
to it, because you are, in a sense, making history
(09:46):
with this building and with this plan. And one of
the things, one of the reasons why it was so
expensive is because it had to emulate a closed system
that was energetically open, much like Earth. Right, So in
other words, it's a materially closed system. So plants, for instance,
(10:06):
biomass can't leave the system, but energy can, right, because
whether or not it's heated or if it's absorbed um
in other ways, it can move around in an energetic way.
And that takes a lot of engineering, a lot of
know how, and a lot of technology to pull that off.
And it didn't skimp on bringing in great minds to
(10:28):
work on this. It wasn't one of these situations where
it's like a crazy guy building a pyramid out in
the desert. No, that they brought in some of the
finest minds to help construct not only the structure itself,
but then ultimately the environments within it. Indeed, I mean
it really became this unprecedented research tool, a mini Earth
as much as you could make. All Right, we're gonna
(10:48):
take a quick break, and when we come back, we're
gonna continue talking about the structure itself and the creation
of the environments with it. We're back, all right, um
I I really love the architecture of Biosphere too. Yes,
it's very beautiful. And if you haven't seen it, or
(11:10):
haven't seen it recently, go visit our website. I'm going
to make sure that we have a gallery there some
really stunning images of this place, because yeah, it's it's
a beautiful building. It's absolute retro futurist. It's got, um
you know, the geodesic structures, those domes that are inspired
by Buckminster Fuller. It's got even sort of Moorish architecture
(11:32):
to it as well, and some of the I guess
you would call the lungs of the building. And it
was designed by a company called Biospheric Design, and again
they were influenced, um by all of the sort of sixties,
seventy and eightiest retro future visions of what this glass
beheam of could be. And to me, I kind of
(11:53):
I even think about it as this futuristic crystal palace. Yeah,
it really does have that kind of looked to it.
I I was looking at again, these images are fabulous
and that you look at them and you see this
place kind of like emerging out of the desert, but
just emerging out of time. It's kind of it's it's
unreal to to look at it. And it was built
as the world's most air type building. It was designed
(12:14):
to leak no more than ten percent of its air
per year, and that is half the rate of the
Space Shuttle. And it's stealed on the bottom by a
stainless steel liner and on the top by steel and
glass frame structure. So it really does try to fit
those parameters really tightly. Because again, this was sort of
if you think about it, this was probably the thing
that the entire project was hanging on, this ability for
(12:36):
it to keep its energy steal. Right. Of course, all
this glass is key because obviously we need it. Again,
it's thermodynamically open, so we need heat energy energy from
the sun to actually enter through the glass. Yeah, in
order to compensate for changes in air volume which should
be caused by solar heating, right, the expanding atmosphere because
of the heat and because of those alternating day and
(12:57):
night temperatures, there were these large dome shape lungs that
were constructed to deal with that expansion and make sure
that the exterior didn't fracture to the point that the
building would lose its integrity in the case of that
seal that we were talking about. And so in this
seven million, two hundred thousand cubic foot sealed structure, how
much air do we actually have in there? How much
(13:18):
soil do we have in there? We have about hundred
and sixty one thousand cubic meters of atmosphere with about
seventeen thousand meters cubic meters of soil and about one million,
five hundred thousand liters of fresh water, which doesn't even
account for this big ocean they put in there. Oh, yes,
the artificial sea of biosphere to containing six hundred and
(13:42):
seventy six thousand gallons or two million, five hundred and
fifty five thousand, eight hundred ninety four liters uh and
this was designed to be a coral reef reminiscent of
the Caribbean and UH and just for future reference. And
you can see this in some of the images that
they were sharing on this the the ocean is situated
between the desert in the rainforest. It's kind of a
(14:06):
buffer zone, a temperature buffer. Yeah. So we've thrown all
these statistics out at you, and I think you guys
all have a good idea of how massive the structure was.
But just imagine yourself on a cliff. Okay, Like you
look above you and there's this glass dome, and you're
on this cliff, and you're now looking over at a
eight hundred fifty square mile coral reef, a four hundred
(14:28):
fifty square mile mangrove marsh, a nineteen hundred square mile
Amazonian rainforest, hundred square mile savannah grassland, and then oh sure,
I'll take a fourteen hundred square mile fog desert. Yeah
that sounds good. Oh, in a little tropical agriculture system
with a farm, in a human habitat with living quarters. Yeah,
(14:52):
that's right, because you have the whole agricultural section as well.
By the way, that rainforest um that was designed by
Sir Gillian Prance uh then director of the New York
Botanical Garden and uh as far as the the ocean
area is concerned. I was designed by Walter A. D
a geologist at the Smithsonian Institute. Yeah, and there's a
waterfall in there. It's absolutely gorgeous. And if you look
(15:14):
at some old footage of some of the Biospherians talking
about their experience, they well, I'll say it was beautiful.
Like That's the thing that stood out most to me
is just how incredible this environment was. Yeah. I mean
you look at these images and it's it's kind of
like silent running, except more fabulous. Like it's more amazing
looking than some of the sci fi visions that came
(15:35):
before it. It's it's on par with Wonka Land, except
that the waterfall is not chocolate but water. And we'll
come back to to Wonka in a bit um. And
you know, it reminds me a bit too. If I
remember when I was a kid, my family would go
up to the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, which has
these big I've been there, right, Well, you know they
have the big enclosed gardens, but but it's not really closed.
(16:00):
It's my no means of biosphere. But I remember walking
through it and like sort of imagining that I was
in a spaceship. It's a little like that. Yeah. Um.
And this is pretty amazing too. It it had something
like three thousand documented species of plants and animals across
its five biomes. So we're talking about everything from scorpions
(16:22):
to microbes, to coral reefs, to crops and pests. Yeah.
I mean, they really tried to represent actual ecosystems here,
not just a situation of viol let's have some goats
to milk, let's have some some chickens to eat, you know,
or anything like that. It was let's have actual ecosystems.
These need to be. These need to be the world
in small Yeah. And if you have any doubt about
(16:43):
the breath and depth of this project, consider that some
of these species were grown in greenhouses, but some of
them were trucked in as entire landscapes. And you had
swaths of tropical rainforest sampled from Venezuela savannah, from French Guiana,
desert from the Baja Marsh, from the ever Glades, and
at the suggestion and left us of william S Burrows,
(17:04):
bush babies were introduced to supply companion primates. I did
not I did not run across that in my notes
that William S Burrows actually contributed to this project. Sure,
he weighed in it on as well. You want his
name on the credits list when the scientists start pulling
things apart later on, right, that's gonna help. Um. Now.
Jane Poyter, who was one of the biosphereans, and we'll
(17:27):
talk a little bit more about her later, she said
that they called it their Garden of Eden on top
of an aircraft carrier. And that's an app comparison, I think,
because the the infrastructure required, the technology required for all
of that, for all these these ecosystems to thrive within
this contained environment, is pretty extensive. Yeah, because when we're
(17:47):
talking about that structure below it, we're talking about twenty
six air handler units in the basement of the technospheres
they called it, that had the ability to heat and
cool air and create condensate water for biospheres tooth and
rain and fog atmospheres. Yeah, underneath you had mazes of pipes,
events water tanks, a huge, huge empty vaps that we
(18:08):
used to process human waste. Um. Yeah, but of course
the cooling system because you're having to you're trying to
keep a sealed greenhouse cool in a desert um and
that requires a great deal of energy. So it is
it's like an aircraft carrier, were the infrastructure beneath the
this magical sci fi eten and you've got electrical power
(18:29):
supplied to the biosphere from natural gas energy center, which
is located outside of biosphere too, through air tight penetrations.
Just in case you were wondering how that was happening,
but still you can you can argue that, I guess
it's geothermically it's geothermically open, so so that's allowed. All right,
So now you have an idea of eating on top
of this aircraft carrier. We're gonna take a quick break
(18:50):
and we get back. We're going to talk about life
in the biosphere. All right, we're back, and yes, indeed,
life in the biasphere. Instantly, when you think about Biasphre two,
you can't help but focus on the human aspect of it.
Those eight individuals that actually went in dressed in their
(19:12):
kind of star trek looking uniforms and gave some wonderful
speeches before they did too, and and then had to
live in there, had to work in there and roll
with some of the difficulties that ended up popping up. Yeah,
night to ninety one. They enter for two years in
twenty minutes, as Jane Pointner says, and uh, all eight
(19:33):
of them hung out together. We're talking about Jane Poytner,
who was the lead scientist. There was Roy Walford, a
doctor who studied restricted calorie diets, Tkayror McCallum, Linda Leah botanist,
Abigail Ailing, a marine biologist, Mark Nelson who was in
charge of the waste recycling systems, Mark von Telo who
(19:55):
was in charge of those machines, that technosphere, and then
Sally over student Stone who was the captain of them all.
And this was not the first time these individuals met.
This was a close knit group. They were all biosphereans. Uh.
They were they were all very much in line with
the ideas of John Allen uh and UH and they
(20:17):
had been engaged in this and work leading up to this.
So it's important to know that these these were not
just chamos taken off the street. That while some of
them may have engaged in theater in the past, these
were not just It wasn't a theater troupe that was
thrown into this. Uh. This Eden on an aircraft carrier. Uh.
These were individuals who were very invested in the idea
(20:38):
and had varying backgrounds that befitted someone that was going
to live in a biosphere for two years. Yeah. And
you know, if this were a theater troupe that was
just thrown in there, as the media kind of tried
to pretend, you know, they wouldn't last for more than
twenty four hours. And I'm not saying anything against theater troupe.
I'm I'm one of you guys out there, um, one
(20:59):
of of us. But because we can't help, you know,
Big Brother, the TV series Reality Sensation, when we think
about this, because that idea was inspired by biosphere too,
So we think about individuals thrown into this environment. We
think of instantly think about interpersonal conflict and people who
don't know each other having to deal with each other.
And I'm not saying that actors have a lot of
(21:21):
interpersonal but I'm saying there's a huge psychological element to this,
and that all those biosphereens had to be ready for this,
and they trained for this in various ways over the
two years um that this was being put into place,
and some of them and I believe it was Pointner
in perhaps Sally's silver stone. They also did some some
(21:43):
closed system trials and lived and tried to work in
smaller environments to get themselves ready for this. Yeah, and
by and large, all these individuals went on after biosphere
to continue to work in in in related areas UM.
You know, for instance, Mark Nelson continued to work in
UM in watershed management, environmental engineering. Uh, you know, they
(22:08):
all stayed within their their wheelhouses. So these were people
that were invested long term in the disciplines that brought
them to buy it through the biosphere. Yeah, particularly Jane Potner,
and we can talk about her later, but she's done
a lot of work in the fields of environmental science
and space exploration. But so, all right, you get a
group of people together, you they're all working together, they're fine,
but you know, they have to deal with the basics, right,
(22:30):
like food, and this is where things get a bit
dicey in the biosphere. All right. Now, keep in mind
that if you you want a pizza in the biosphere,
you're gonna have to make it from scratch. And we're
talking about taking the seed, growing the seed, threshing the wheat,
um feeding your goat, milking the goat. So, as Jane
(22:52):
Pointner has said, um in some of her talks, if
you want a pizza, it's going to take four months.
And I think that gives you an idea of the
kind of challenges they were up against in producing their
own food and maintaining it. Yeah, I believe the original
estimate was that they would be able to grow eighty
percent of the food they needed within the biosphere. Um.
And and even that was it was pretty ambitious, considering
(23:15):
that they just had about a half an acre to
grow all this food that they're they're not using pesticides,
they're they're having to do all the work themselves. But
but then, but before they launch, uh, the management decided, well,
isn't gonna cut it. We need to and to make
up for that, we're gonna put everybody on a calorie restricted,
(23:36):
low fat, nutrient dense diet. Yes, it's just sensible, right,
I mean, because if food is an issue, well, then
we're gonna we're gonna cut back as much as we're
we're pushing the envelope on our ability to produce it.
And a lot of that has to do with the
types of food that you can grow at that point, right,
and managed to grow. And when you're thinking about the
(23:56):
food again, you had mentioned there are no pesticides or
herbicides here, so that makes a little bit more difficult
to produce this food. And the reason why there are
no pesticides and herbicides is because those chemicals would have
affected the air quality. Because although this biospheres atmosphere is
really large, right, it's small enough where those toxins would
have built up really quickly and had a very negative
(24:17):
effect on the health and well being of everybody inside.
I mean, those agents are are problematic for the world
in large when you're dealing with the world and small
even more so. Again, this is why this is such
an amazing experiment, because you are saying things at a
microcosm of of the macrocosmic world. And so when you're
looking at that first winter, you have al Nino in effect,
(24:43):
and that means that there's an unusual amount of cloud
cover in southern Arizona, and that is contributing to unexpectedly
low food production. Yeah, less biomass production, less food. And
then on top of that again no pesticide, no or beside,
so you're in having to actually deal with mites and
diseases cutting into your crop production. You don't get that
(25:06):
pristine modern agricultural hall out of this. Yeah, and then
you've got chickens who are failing to produce sufficient numbers
of eggs, and they and the pigs are consuming a
lot of the resources. So the biospherians decide that they're
going to slaughter the farm animals. Now keep in mind
too that um you know, call calling back maybe to
(25:28):
an older episode of Real Wilding in which we talked
about the cascade effect. Once you remove one species, well,
it's a domino effect because so you can only imagine,
and this only three thousand species wide world, that if
you take out some of some of these elements, some
of these animals and these plants they're dying off, then
(25:50):
that's going to affect everything else. Yeah, because cycles are
key here. You need you need the nitrogen cycle, the
phosphorus cycle, just the basic add and flow that is
there's central to Uh. The success of the biosphere needs
to be in place in biosphere too. And when things
start falling apart, uh, the center cannot hold nicely done, yes,
(26:13):
and indeed the center cannot hold and food becomes an issue,
and there are rumors that maybe the biospherience are smuggling
in food, especially when Jane Poytner accidentally slices off the
tip of her finger and she has to leave the Biosphere,
which is another big kerfuffle, right because we've left in
um and when she does leave it, she returns with
(26:35):
a double bag, which people say, I bet that's full
of bags of Cheetos and in ho hoes and whatever else. Yeah,
and I mean she apparently it was not. She claims
it was not. It was apparently she just said with
some drawings and circuit board something that to that extent um. Yeah,
the media was really invested in this, and this wasn't
even our modern our news cycle. I mean, imagine if
(26:58):
they did bios, if Biosphere two had taken place during
the age of Fox News. I I cannot even imagine
the field day they would have had with this, because
because everybody was really into this, it was ambitious project.
You had what you had these well meaning, uh you know,
kind of hippie science guys and gals going into this thing.
(27:18):
And then you begin to see shortcomings happening. You begin
to see, uh, things like this person leaving and come
again with a mysterious bag. So there's all this room
to go, oh, what are they doing there? There? They
don't know what they're doing there there. The system is
flawed and and then that the schaden Freud effect kicks
in and you get to set back and uh and
and have a hearty laugh at this whole project. Yeah,
(27:39):
keep in mind that there were a ton of people
that were outside of the structure looking in because again
we're talking about glass, and they would observe the bio
experience and this was like a big deal. There are
a ton of people that were really interested in so
it's a human zoo and they look in and what
do they see? But the bio experience are beginning to
turn orange? Yes, And I kid you not, it sounds
like it just made that up. Oompa Loompa's to return
(28:01):
to Willy Wonka. And that has everything to do with
their diet, which was largely sweet potatas. Yeah, of their
diet the first year it was sweet potatoes. So we're
talking about a lot of beta caroteen, right, and of
the fact they consumed was from bananas, and so yeah,
as as a consequence there can began to turn orange
can you imagine, you know, I'm sure the media was
(28:23):
like and now they're turning into Pompa's. It's difficult. It's
difficult to imagine becoming sick of sweet potatoes, but I'm
sure it would happen. And it's difficult to imagine turning
orange because of eating too many of them. But you well,
and that becomes one of the problems here under the
biosphere is that you've got that limited calorie restricted diet.
(28:46):
You have decreased i would say mental health as a result,
because there's some depression setting in. Um. Here are some statistics.
Men lost sixteen of their b m I their body
mass index in six months, women lost eleven percent. Their
average systolic blood pressure decrease from a hundred nine to
(29:06):
eighty nine, and their distalic BP decrease from seventy four.
So these are some pretty big changes happening in their bodies. Yeah,
and you know, the sources we're looking at didn't really
go into this as much. But we've talked about what
happens when an individual is is cut off into a
solitary confinement environment and this is a rather sprawling complex,
(29:27):
so it's not you know, one to one with someone
being in a tiny cell, but still they're engaging with
the same place and the same people every day, day
and day while rolling with with with this calor restricted diet,
with problems with their food supply and other issues that
will get into. Yeah, and Pointner says that they became
pretty obsessed with food, or at least she did. And
(29:48):
she actually has a book called The Human Experiment two
years in twenty minutes inside Biosphere too, and she talks
about watching a film right yeah, and and the united
she find herself not even focusing on the plot or
the characters. It's about what they're eating, you know, because
you put yourself in that those shoes, imagining yourself, you know,
feeling this hunger, and and there you're watching, you know,
(30:10):
a food fight and a big comedy. That's the way
I'm imagining it, that it's like classic Hollywood food fight
and they're just like, throw that pie at me. This
next description, I think is it's kind of pathetic. She says,
sometimes we lined up in the second story windows of
the habitat and took turns peering through binoculars at fat people.
And then she says, for everyone seemed to overweight to us.
Then even the slender people who were spurting catch up
(30:34):
on sausages and shoveling them into their mouths. We were
culinary voyers. This reminds me of old cartoons where you know,
you'd have the one character would be starving on the
desert island and they look at the other one and
they start picturing a big ham hawk and yeah, yeah, yeah,
and it seems like that is in a sense sort
of what's happening. And moreover, they just they're not is uh,
(30:54):
you know, energy felled this they might be, and so
the tasks that they have to do take a lot longer. Yeah,
because there's a lot of work to be done because
again growing your own food, dealing with the animals, maintaining
the environment, keeping records, and then just just day to
day toil. And you're having to do all of that
while rolling with these with this shortage of nourishment. You're right,
(31:15):
it's like extreme farming. And also you have to to
keep in mind that the carbon dioxide levels were rising,
so they were continuously harvesting in sequestering biomass or plants
all over the facility so they can control that or
try to And then they would shovel and scrape carbonate
off their homemade natural CEO to scrubber. So keep that
(31:37):
in mind with just the regular things that they were
having to do just to survive. And one of the
things are having to deal with your is just the
unpredictability of the physical environment. I mean that's the thing
about biosphere too. And again keeping in and keep in mind,
it was such an ambitious project, in such a large,
sprawling project, again trying to to take the ecosystem, larger
ecosystems and contain them and manage them within an enclosed environment.
(32:00):
It unforeseen consequences are going to take place, things you
couldn't possibly think of. So, for instance, they had to
deal with a cockroach explosion, their cockroaches everywhere. Crazy ants
are invading from the outside. They're breaking through your space
shuttle a ceilant to to get into that environment and
(32:20):
start causing havoc. Yeah, they eventually did um cross the
silicone seal that was eventually penetrated, and so then you
have two different biomes uniting with each other, right, which
you know would obviously affect the integrity of the experiment.
Um As you said, they have the cockroaches, they those
on night duty have have the dubious task of collecting
(32:41):
those cockroaches and other environments and uh feeding them to
the animals, because again, that's a resource they can't waste.
That there's some food for the animals that they don't
have to go out and collect for themselves they're harvest Hey, guys,
I really need that key to the banana room because
I think the cockroaches might be getting in there. Well,
that's the thing that, by the way, we failed to
(33:02):
mention that that the only locked room in the Biosphere
two was the banana room because apparently the scent was
such a siren smell to all of everybody on these
restricted diets that they had to lock cut up to
make sure people didn't get up in the Meanwhile, morning
glory vines are overrunning all of the other plants, including
(33:24):
the precious food crops yep, and fish too many in number.
They begin to die off, and that's partly because there's
a phosphorus trapped in the water system. Yeah, the phosphorus
cycles out of whack. Yeah, and then those fish start
to clog the oceans filtration systems. Another unforeseen circumstance lack
of wind resulted in the trees not developing stress would
(33:45):
to cope with mechanical stress, so they were brittle and
prone to collapse, which actually later on and we'll talk
about this in another episode, really helped to inform people
about ecosystems and how important, uh you know, trees and
tree canopies are and how they interact with the environment.
As I mentioned before, nitrous and phosphors cycles are disrupted,
the nitrous oxide levels actually end up growing high enough
(34:07):
to reduce vitamin B twelve synthesis to a level that
could impair or damage the brain. And meanwhile a third
of the flora and fauna wind up just going extinct
in the biosphere too, including most of the vertebrates and
all of the pollinating insects. So again, collapse, more and
more collapse is spiraling out right now, the death knail
(34:30):
perhaps to this whole endeavor. And keep in mind of
laughing cas nitrous oxide is tasso, which can crazy, right,
you have a loss of oxygen. So initially it was
at which is roughly the same Earth's right, but it
drops to four and Pointner says it was like playing
atomic hide and seek. They could not figure out how
(34:51):
they were losing it. They lost seven tons of oxygen,
and it turns out that that oxygen was reacting with
the concrete structure. So that was sart of siphoning it
off and leading to gradually and continuously lower levels, so
much so that the biospherians were getting really groggy, they
had sleep apnea, they couldn't complete sentences, and so finally, um,
(35:16):
this we need some outside help for this, which caused
quite a fracture. Yeah, because ultimately reached the point where, hey,
to keep going, we need outside air, we need we
need oxygen pumped into biosphere too. Otherwise when we've gotta
we gotta crack, we gotta crack a window. And essentially
that's what they're doing. They're kind of reaching the point
where you're saying, let's go ahead and crack the window.
(35:36):
Um by letting by letting in a shifted in oxygen,
it was brought into the form of a liquid oxygen.
And this is one of those things that happens during
the course they're two years that really ratchets up this
idea of idealism versus science. Right, So, so essentially you
have two groups that disagree on how to manage things,
(35:57):
and you can understand how this fracture just causes were
more squabbling, right, because again, everyone's hungry, everyone's sluggish, everyone's
been been stuck in there this long. And meanwhile they're
also they're also outside stress issues to consider because originally
this whole thing was budgeted at thirty million, and it
had already cost or reported two hundred million. So so
(36:19):
there was a financial aspect of this as well. Right,
So it's not just the eight of them making these
decisions autonomously. Autonomously, I want to add, you know, you
have the management outside. You've got John Allen and others
who are trying to control this, whose money and vision
are ultimately at stake in this uh, in this endeavor, right,
and this kind of adds to those two different factions
(36:41):
or those differences on how things should be managed. So
just consider this, for the last fourteen months of the mission,
the eight crew members, would you know that the two
different groups would not make eye contact or speak to
each other unless absolutely necessary. Now I do that if
like a meeting goes more than twenty minutes here, it works,
(37:02):
so I can't really blame them, But imagine for two years,
you know, and imagine this too, that's like losing half
of your social sphere, right, So think about half of
all your friends just evaporating. Now, think about you being
in that biosphere with four people you like and four
people or three people you like, and four people you hate. Yeah,
(37:23):
and like a deep personal hatred, the kind you can
only have for someone after you've you've worked really closely
with them and and and this, and shared vision with
them and then had a big falling out and we're
unable to escape their presence. Yeah, awkward every single day.
So apparently one of the crew set up funding for
psychological monitoring and counseling ahead of time. But this experiment
(37:44):
was rejected by management. And we'll talk a little bit
more about this, but some of that is tied to
the idea that this wasn't the most transparent of projects.
That being said, they stuck it out and the the
eight crew members all emerged alive through the airlock in
September three, though in two separate groups of four uh,
(38:06):
not speaking to each other. Everybody was grumpy. Everybody was
probably ready to hit the nearest buffet. But but they
they did. They stuck it out. They made it to
the end of the experiment. And that's something I feel
like to keep in mind through all this, despite all
the flaws which we'll get into. I mean, an experiment
in its essence is not a thing where you set
(38:28):
out to necessarily reach that success point. It's about two
and you learn from the failures of the experiment as well.
You learn from the the the unforeseen consequences of the experiment.
And this was a sprawling experiment. Yeah. Pointer talks about
this too, and her Ted talk like this was unchartered territory,
no one had ever done this before. Of course there
would be failure. Um. So we'll talk more in the
(38:50):
next episode about some of the stuff that actually spiraled
out of it that was really advantageous um. But I
think for now it's probably worth mentioning at After this,
this phase one of the experiment closed out. It was
largely ridiculed as this kind of I don't know performance,
Aren't this quasi science? Yeah, I mean there were so
(39:13):
many moving parts through this, so many people involved in it. Um.
There there's plenty of areas to pick away at this,
at the structure of the idea. Because we mentioned the
CEO to Scrubber, which is a controversial issue that was
supposedly sort of secretly installed, which which you know, there's
a there's an X on the checklist there. Then there's
(39:34):
the oxygen having to be brought in. There's that bag
that probably had Twinkies in it that came in. Um,
there's a there's a criticisms about the the scientific pedigree
of the individuals that were placed in their criticisms about
the oversight, criticisms about the record keeping. Um. And then
you start dipping into the history of the Synergist as well,
(39:55):
and people start saying, well, this sounds a lot like
a cult. So you're basically have like theater trupy, you know,
environmental cult members and Star Trek uniforms going into this thing.
How can we take any of it seriously? Well, especially
when you consider that the founder, John Allen, his pen
name was John Dolphin, Johnny Dolphin. That really helps there.
(40:17):
Uh yeah, I mean Dolphins and Space and John C.
Lily and I mean, yeah, we touched a little bit
about Alan. That is just a character very much a
charismatic leader of a movement with lots of ideas. Uh.
And if you if you were to say, hey, kind
of sounds like a cult leader. You know, maybe you
wouldn't be that far off the off the track. Well,
(40:39):
even know we're discussing this earlier. It's probably if it
was is a cult, it's probably the most productive cult
in the world. And you've got to look at this
thing and say, Wow, the fact that they were able
to come up with us and energize and mobilize enough
people to do this to pull it off to some
degree is pretty amazing. Yeah. I mean, generally speaking, uh,
(41:00):
the energy of occult tends to to go astray. But
in this case, the centergist really got a lot of
things done even before biosphere too. And granted they they
benefited from some terrific funding as well, but uh, but yeah,
they Maybe the thing here is that if you're if
you're gonna do a big project, like there's really a megaproject, uh,
(41:23):
that that kind of skips ahead of some of the phases.
You know, It's not like they didn't build a mom
and pop biosphere. They built an epic biosphere. Maybe you
need the energy and guidance of a cult like structure
and a cult like energy to reach that point. So
maybe there should be like a NASA cult formed to
create the momentum. Yeah, I mean maybe, I mean, certainly
(41:47):
I could see where it's it's two sides of the
same coin. It's like, how do you want to get
to to that point? Do you want to go with
something that's rigorously scientific but also um, you know, um
adheres to the limitations of politics? Well, where do you
go with like blank check uh funded cult? I don't know.
(42:07):
I think that's what's so exciting and frustrating about this
project is because you could see it had legs. You
could see where it might have if if it had oversight,
if it had had transparency and um and the management
was a bit different. Let me put it that way.
You can see how this thing could have created, um,
(42:28):
some very intentional studies, long term studies. That being said,
there was still plenty of accidental science that came from this,
and we'll talk about this in the next episode. Indeed,
if you could have possibly combined the sensibility of the
synergist movement with a more rigorous structure, a little more
NASA in there, uh you know, along with the funding,
(42:50):
who knows what we could have we could have achieved
with this. But as again, as we'll discussed in the
next episode, we really did get a lot out of
Biosphere Too. Uh, even though at the time it is
very much discussed as a failure. At the time, Uh,
it kind of became the laughing stock in the media
towards the end. Um, despite all of that, Uh, there
was there's a lot of good that came out of this. Indeed,
(43:12):
And if you guys are interested in looking at some, um,
some documentaries on this, I want to recommend the New
York Times. They have a documentary that's like twelve minute
long documentary. Yeah, it's called Biosphere Too, an American Space Odyssey.
And then there is a documentary about the actual building
of Biosphere Too called Well Apples Grow on Mars. Yeah.
(43:35):
I think at the end of the day, I mean,
Biosphere Too is something that will be in the history
books long term. It will come a time when this
is very much at least a bullet point, a very
strong bullet point in uh the history of humanity as
we uh explored more about how our world works and
attempted to take it beyond Biosphere one. I agree. I
(43:57):
think it is only now beginning to get its due. Uh.
So there you have it. Hey, In the meantime, while
you're waiting for episode two on this topic, head on
over to stuff to blow your mind dot com. That's
where you'll find all of the episodes we've ever done.
You'll find blog post videos, and you'll also find a
gallery of Biosphere two images. You'll probably find that linked
(44:17):
on the front page, but also the landing page for
this particular episode will include that link. And if you
have some thoughts on this on biospheres or living in
closed systems, maybe you have submitted yourself to one let
us know. You can email us at below the mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
(44:39):
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas,
and we are sealed inside the Stuff to Blow Your
Mind podcasting chamber right now, and we are going after
(00:23):
a really fascinating topic and one that that really meshes
well with our our sealed environment here. Yes, that's right.
We're doing a little armchair traveling today and we're going
to travel back to or ninety two or so. But
before we do that, let's talk about this concept of
a utopia, a garden of Eden. This is this thing
that we aspire to. Oh yes, I mean, this is
(00:46):
an idea that has been with this rageous right that
there perhaps was a primordial time, an untouched time, where
everything was was perfect, and that we could maybe recreate
that through some system, because it seems it seems like
we have all of these flaws right in in in
human culture and human society. The way we do things,
the way we interact with the world. It's it's inherently flawed.
(01:08):
We're on this doom trajectory and there's got to be
something we could do to change at some order. We
could put on ourselves, some technology we could we could
aspire to something that would turn things around and save
us from ourselves and maybe, depending on what your worldview
is and you and and how you view your mythic history,
(01:28):
return us to some uh, some previous mode of living
that was pristine, yeah, replete with waterfalls, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
we could do that. We are of course talking about
biosphere too, which how do you explain this? I think
about it as like this burning man fever dream, like
(01:52):
let's put up an arc in the desert and create
a utopia. But it's not, in fact a fever dream,
or may be it was, uh one of the founders
of this idea's fever dream. It actually came into reality
in the early nineties and it served as this kind
of mini earth. Yeah, I mean, it was, in a
(02:13):
sense kind of a scientific burning Man because because the
you can certainly make comparisons between the the energy that
that started each of these endeavors, and while one was
what one was based in, uh in art and expression
and have just having a big old party out in
the middle of nowhere, the oh, there is a scientific endeavor. Yeah,
and we're talking about this miniature air tight world that
(02:35):
sprang up in the desert, and we're gonna take a
look at this in two episodes. Today's episode is going
to focus more on the architecture and what happened during
this experiment, um so. And we do want to mention
that there have been other biospheres built before, mainly in
the sixties and seventies by Russian and American scientists, but
(02:56):
those really pale in comparison to the grand er that
is biosphere too. Yeah, the grandeur is key here because
this was I mean, it was really a realization of
ideas that had previously mostly been the domain of conjecture
and even science fiction. Like I instantly think back to
n film Silent Running, where you had h all of
(03:17):
the forest on Earth had been decimated, and you had
and you had all the ecosystems of the Earth sealed
off and self contained hemispheres in space looked after by
Bruce dern in some Robots and and that is a
really beautiful film with a strong ecological message, but it
was very much science fiction. But fast forward a couple
of decades and you see it actually take shape on
(03:39):
the Earth, and it is an amazing endeavor. It is.
The project was originally conceived and executed by a group
of adventurers, artists, and philosophers known as the Centergists, and
they have the financial backing of Texas billionaire Ed Bass
and oil magnet, and with that financing, they were actually
(04:01):
able to bring this this idea to life. Yes. First
of all, Ed Bass is one of two really key
individuals for this whole project, because of course he had
the funds to make it happen. Uh, And he's really
is one of these characters that also makes you rethink
the term Texas oil billionaire because this is a guy
you know that that was and is remains very active
(04:22):
and environmentalist and philanthropic endeavors. But the other key individual, uh,
the other guy that this could not have happened without,
is one John Allen. And we could really just devote
a whole podcast that who wanted to to just analyzing
John Allen because with this guy, you have a Colorado
School of Minds trained metal orgist in Harvard NBA. All right,
(04:43):
no big deal, uh, nineteen sixty three, he's uh, he's
in a Manhattan office building. And the story goes that
this was following two hallucinogenic experiences with peyote. He looks
out the window at this uh, this the sprawling metropolis,
and in sees the air out there, and he realizes
that he can't open the window to get to that air.
He has this epiphany. Uh. So he quits his job,
(05:06):
heads out and begins seeking wisdom around the world. Um.
By ninety seven he's become a self styled esoteric teacher
in San Francisco, and his students go to New York
and they set up a theater company. From there, they
go to New Mexico where they start a commune near
Santa Fe. And eventually he Eat meets add Bass, and
add Bass starts listening to some of his ideas, and uh,
(05:30):
and his ideas are really impressive. Yeah. I should also
mention to you that that this group also has an
oceanic research vessel. And all this time there they are
trying in earnest to be rigorous about a scientific approach
to the environment. And at this time Alan really comes
(05:51):
up with the basis of this idea of the biosphere.
He says, quote, there is a crisis of misalignment between
the biosphere and the technosphere. These seem to be out
of balance a catastrophe. Biosphere too, instead creates a balance
between biosphere and technosphere. In other words, he's going to
try to use the technology and and the money here
(06:13):
that to create something of an artificial utopia. There's a
great deal of interest with the synergists, who later redub
themselves the Institute for Eco Technics, with not only understanding
the environment but essentially bottling it up in the same
way that you have, uh, the idea of a bottled terrarium. Uh.
(06:35):
And and this is of course, is is looking into
the future, thinking about the long term survival of the
human rights, thinking about space exploration, thinking about how do
we take not just a little of our environment with us,
How do we not just take uh, you know, a
portion of it that we consume and it has to
be replenished. How do we take a self sustaining portion
of our world with us and and even see other
(06:56):
worlds with it. Yeah, this really was one of the
missions of this project. And according to The New York
Times in and they reported on it, the structure was
builed as the first large habitat for humans that would
live and breathe on its own as cut off from
the Earth. As a spaceship. And again the idea was
to to have this many atmosphere that could be portable eventually,
(07:18):
but also to better understand Earth's biosphere or as the
biosphere Ian called it, biosphere one. Yes. Yeah, I also
want to point out that at a at a conference
in oracle In, Allan announced his plan to build a
prototype Mars calling on Earth before the decade was out.
And he and he he said that the destiny of
(07:39):
human beings was to see Earth's life into space. In
the first stop would be a working colony on Mars.
So these are some of the far reaching, ambitious ideas
that were that were in the heads of John Allen
and ultimately in the heads of those who, for lack
of a better word, followed him and and and just
bought into his vision. Now, let's talk about really where
(07:59):
the rubber meets the road here when we're talking about
this building. Okay, because so far we've been talking about
all these sort of like esoteric ideas of utopia and
biosphere and balancing. But what do you need in order
to do that? You need an incredibly huge structure. And
from nineteen eighty seven to ninete this structure was built
(08:22):
in the snore and desert about thirty miles north of Tucson,
and we were talking about a seven million, two hundred
thousand cubic foot sealed glass and space frame structure spread
over three point one five acres massive. Yeah, and I
should also add that the original idea is they built
this thing to laugh. The idea was that rotating crews
(08:42):
would work here for a century. So one crew comes in,
then the next crew comes in, and the experiment keeps
going and going. Uh. You know, in all this, I
keep thinking that like one of the other only other
minds that comes that comes to my mind when I
when I think of vision, like this is Walt Disney,
and we know we've talked about his plans for for uh,
for Walt Disney World and especially for Apcot Center, and
(09:05):
how ambitious, crazy ambitious those ideas were, and those ideas
had to be rolled back to meet the realities of business.
And with Biosphere too, you see a bit of that.
But they actually they actually got more of that vision
somewhat accomplished, initially accomplished well, and we'll talk at a
little bit about this more later, but there had to
(09:26):
be an immense amount of excitement here because that's you know,
initially the plan was thirty million dollars to build this,
but it took two hundred million dollars. With that kind
of wallet open, you can see how a lot of
people would be interested in jumping on this and contributing
to it, because you are, in a sense, making history
(09:46):
with this building and with this plan. And one of
the things, one of the reasons why it was so
expensive is because it had to emulate a closed system
that was energetically open, much like Earth. Right, So in
other words, it's a materially closed system. So plants, for instance,
(10:06):
biomass can't leave the system, but energy can, right, because
whether or not it's heated or if it's absorbed um
in other ways, it can move around in an energetic way.
And that takes a lot of engineering, a lot of
know how, and a lot of technology to pull that off.
And it didn't skimp on bringing in great minds to
(10:28):
work on this. It wasn't one of these situations where
it's like a crazy guy building a pyramid out in
the desert. No, that they brought in some of the
finest minds to help construct not only the structure itself,
but then ultimately the environments within it. Indeed, I mean
it really became this unprecedented research tool, a mini Earth
as much as you could make. All Right, we're gonna
(10:48):
take a quick break, and when we come back, we're
gonna continue talking about the structure itself and the creation
of the environments with it. We're back, all right, um
I I really love the architecture of Biosphere too. Yes,
it's very beautiful. And if you haven't seen it, or
(11:10):
haven't seen it recently, go visit our website. I'm going
to make sure that we have a gallery there some
really stunning images of this place, because yeah, it's it's
a beautiful building. It's absolute retro futurist. It's got, um
you know, the geodesic structures, those domes that are inspired
by Buckminster Fuller. It's got even sort of Moorish architecture
(11:32):
to it as well, and some of the I guess
you would call the lungs of the building. And it
was designed by a company called Biospheric Design, and again
they were influenced, um by all of the sort of sixties,
seventy and eightiest retro future visions of what this glass
beheam of could be. And to me, I kind of
(11:53):
I even think about it as this futuristic crystal palace. Yeah,
it really does have that kind of looked to it.
I I was looking at again, these images are fabulous
and that you look at them and you see this
place kind of like emerging out of the desert, but
just emerging out of time. It's kind of it's it's
unreal to to look at it. And it was built
as the world's most air type building. It was designed
(12:14):
to leak no more than ten percent of its air
per year, and that is half the rate of the
Space Shuttle. And it's stealed on the bottom by a
stainless steel liner and on the top by steel and
glass frame structure. So it really does try to fit
those parameters really tightly. Because again, this was sort of
if you think about it, this was probably the thing
that the entire project was hanging on, this ability for
(12:36):
it to keep its energy steal. Right. Of course, all
this glass is key because obviously we need it. Again,
it's thermodynamically open, so we need heat energy energy from
the sun to actually enter through the glass. Yeah, in
order to compensate for changes in air volume which should
be caused by solar heating, right, the expanding atmosphere because
of the heat and because of those alternating day and
(12:57):
night temperatures, there were these large dome shape lungs that
were constructed to deal with that expansion and make sure
that the exterior didn't fracture to the point that the
building would lose its integrity in the case of that
seal that we were talking about. And so in this
seven million, two hundred thousand cubic foot sealed structure, how
much air do we actually have in there? How much
(13:18):
soil do we have in there? We have about hundred
and sixty one thousand cubic meters of atmosphere with about
seventeen thousand meters cubic meters of soil and about one million,
five hundred thousand liters of fresh water, which doesn't even
account for this big ocean they put in there. Oh, yes,
the artificial sea of biosphere to containing six hundred and
(13:42):
seventy six thousand gallons or two million, five hundred and
fifty five thousand, eight hundred ninety four liters uh and
this was designed to be a coral reef reminiscent of
the Caribbean and UH and just for future reference. And
you can see this in some of the images that
they were sharing on this the the ocean is situated
between the desert in the rainforest. It's kind of a
(14:06):
buffer zone, a temperature buffer. Yeah. So we've thrown all
these statistics out at you, and I think you guys
all have a good idea of how massive the structure was.
But just imagine yourself on a cliff. Okay, Like you
look above you and there's this glass dome, and you're
on this cliff, and you're now looking over at a
eight hundred fifty square mile coral reef, a four hundred
(14:28):
fifty square mile mangrove marsh, a nineteen hundred square mile
Amazonian rainforest, hundred square mile savannah grassland, and then oh sure,
I'll take a fourteen hundred square mile fog desert. Yeah
that sounds good. Oh, in a little tropical agriculture system
with a farm, in a human habitat with living quarters. Yeah,
(14:52):
that's right, because you have the whole agricultural section as well.
By the way, that rainforest um that was designed by
Sir Gillian Prance uh then director of the New York
Botanical Garden and uh as far as the the ocean
area is concerned. I was designed by Walter A. D
a geologist at the Smithsonian Institute. Yeah, and there's a
waterfall in there. It's absolutely gorgeous. And if you look
(15:14):
at some old footage of some of the Biospherians talking
about their experience, they well, I'll say it was beautiful.
Like That's the thing that stood out most to me
is just how incredible this environment was. Yeah. I mean
you look at these images and it's it's kind of
like silent running, except more fabulous. Like it's more amazing
looking than some of the sci fi visions that came
(15:35):
before it. It's it's on par with Wonka Land, except
that the waterfall is not chocolate but water. And we'll
come back to to Wonka in a bit um. And
you know, it reminds me a bit too. If I
remember when I was a kid, my family would go
up to the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, which has
these big I've been there, right, Well, you know they
have the big enclosed gardens, but but it's not really closed.
(16:00):
It's my no means of biosphere. But I remember walking
through it and like sort of imagining that I was
in a spaceship. It's a little like that. Yeah. Um.
And this is pretty amazing too. It it had something
like three thousand documented species of plants and animals across
its five biomes. So we're talking about everything from scorpions
(16:22):
to microbes, to coral reefs, to crops and pests. Yeah.
I mean, they really tried to represent actual ecosystems here,
not just a situation of viol let's have some goats
to milk, let's have some some chickens to eat, you know,
or anything like that. It was let's have actual ecosystems.
These need to be. These need to be the world
in small Yeah. And if you have any doubt about
(16:43):
the breath and depth of this project, consider that some
of these species were grown in greenhouses, but some of
them were trucked in as entire landscapes. And you had
swaths of tropical rainforest sampled from Venezuela savannah, from French Guiana,
desert from the Baja Marsh, from the ever Glades, and
at the suggestion and left us of william S Burrows,
(17:04):
bush babies were introduced to supply companion primates. I did
not I did not run across that in my notes
that William S Burrows actually contributed to this project. Sure,
he weighed in it on as well. You want his
name on the credits list when the scientists start pulling
things apart later on, right, that's gonna help. Um. Now.
Jane Poyter, who was one of the biosphereans, and we'll
(17:27):
talk a little bit more about her later, she said
that they called it their Garden of Eden on top
of an aircraft carrier. And that's an app comparison, I think,
because the the infrastructure required, the technology required for all
of that, for all these these ecosystems to thrive within
this contained environment, is pretty extensive. Yeah, because when we're
(17:47):
talking about that structure below it, we're talking about twenty
six air handler units in the basement of the technospheres
they called it, that had the ability to heat and
cool air and create condensate water for biospheres tooth and
rain and fog atmospheres. Yeah, underneath you had mazes of pipes,
events water tanks, a huge, huge empty vaps that we
(18:08):
used to process human waste. Um. Yeah, but of course
the cooling system because you're having to you're trying to
keep a sealed greenhouse cool in a desert um and
that requires a great deal of energy. So it is
it's like an aircraft carrier, were the infrastructure beneath the
this magical sci fi eten and you've got electrical power
(18:29):
supplied to the biosphere from natural gas energy center, which
is located outside of biosphere too, through air tight penetrations.
Just in case you were wondering how that was happening,
but still you can you can argue that, I guess
it's geothermically it's geothermically open, so so that's allowed. All right,
So now you have an idea of eating on top
of this aircraft carrier. We're gonna take a quick break
(18:50):
and we get back. We're going to talk about life
in the biosphere. All right, we're back, and yes, indeed,
life in the biasphere. Instantly, when you think about Biasphre two,
you can't help but focus on the human aspect of it.
Those eight individuals that actually went in dressed in their
(19:12):
kind of star trek looking uniforms and gave some wonderful
speeches before they did too, and and then had to
live in there, had to work in there and roll
with some of the difficulties that ended up popping up. Yeah,
night to ninety one. They enter for two years in
twenty minutes, as Jane Pointner says, and uh, all eight
(19:33):
of them hung out together. We're talking about Jane Poytner,
who was the lead scientist. There was Roy Walford, a
doctor who studied restricted calorie diets, Tkayror McCallum, Linda Leah botanist,
Abigail Ailing, a marine biologist, Mark Nelson who was in
charge of the waste recycling systems, Mark von Telo who
(19:55):
was in charge of those machines, that technosphere, and then
Sally over student Stone who was the captain of them all.
And this was not the first time these individuals met.
This was a close knit group. They were all biosphereans. Uh.
They were they were all very much in line with
the ideas of John Allen uh and UH and they
(20:17):
had been engaged in this and work leading up to this.
So it's important to know that these these were not
just chamos taken off the street. That while some of
them may have engaged in theater in the past, these
were not just It wasn't a theater troupe that was
thrown into this. Uh. This Eden on an aircraft carrier. Uh.
These were individuals who were very invested in the idea
(20:38):
and had varying backgrounds that befitted someone that was going
to live in a biosphere for two years. Yeah. And
you know, if this were a theater troupe that was
just thrown in there, as the media kind of tried
to pretend, you know, they wouldn't last for more than
twenty four hours. And I'm not saying anything against theater troupe.
I'm I'm one of you guys out there, um, one
(20:59):
of of us. But because we can't help, you know,
Big Brother, the TV series Reality Sensation, when we think
about this, because that idea was inspired by biosphere too,
So we think about individuals thrown into this environment. We
think of instantly think about interpersonal conflict and people who
don't know each other having to deal with each other.
And I'm not saying that actors have a lot of
(21:21):
interpersonal but I'm saying there's a huge psychological element to this,
and that all those biosphereens had to be ready for this,
and they trained for this in various ways over the
two years um that this was being put into place,
and some of them and I believe it was Pointner
in perhaps Sally's silver stone. They also did some some
(21:43):
closed system trials and lived and tried to work in
smaller environments to get themselves ready for this. Yeah, and
by and large, all these individuals went on after biosphere
to continue to work in in in related areas UM.
You know, for instance, Mark Nelson continued to work in
UM in watershed management, environmental engineering. Uh, you know, they
(22:08):
all stayed within their their wheelhouses. So these were people
that were invested long term in the disciplines that brought
them to buy it through the biosphere. Yeah, particularly Jane Potner,
and we can talk about her later, but she's done
a lot of work in the fields of environmental science
and space exploration. But so, all right, you get a
group of people together, you they're all working together, they're fine,
but you know, they have to deal with the basics, right,
(22:30):
like food, and this is where things get a bit
dicey in the biosphere. All right. Now, keep in mind
that if you you want a pizza in the biosphere,
you're gonna have to make it from scratch. And we're
talking about taking the seed, growing the seed, threshing the wheat,
um feeding your goat, milking the goat. So, as Jane
(22:52):
Pointner has said, um in some of her talks, if
you want a pizza, it's going to take four months.
And I think that gives you an idea of the
kind of challenges they were up against in producing their
own food and maintaining it. Yeah, I believe the original
estimate was that they would be able to grow eighty
percent of the food they needed within the biosphere. Um.
And and even that was it was pretty ambitious, considering
(23:15):
that they just had about a half an acre to
grow all this food that they're they're not using pesticides,
they're they're having to do all the work themselves. But
but then, but before they launch, uh, the management decided, well,
isn't gonna cut it. We need to and to make
up for that, we're gonna put everybody on a calorie restricted,
(23:36):
low fat, nutrient dense diet. Yes, it's just sensible, right,
I mean, because if food is an issue, well, then
we're gonna we're gonna cut back as much as we're
we're pushing the envelope on our ability to produce it.
And a lot of that has to do with the
types of food that you can grow at that point, right,
and managed to grow. And when you're thinking about the
(23:56):
food again, you had mentioned there are no pesticides or
herbicides here, so that makes a little bit more difficult
to produce this food. And the reason why there are
no pesticides and herbicides is because those chemicals would have
affected the air quality. Because although this biospheres atmosphere is
really large, right, it's small enough where those toxins would
have built up really quickly and had a very negative
(24:17):
effect on the health and well being of everybody inside.
I mean, those agents are are problematic for the world
in large when you're dealing with the world and small
even more so. Again, this is why this is such
an amazing experiment, because you are saying things at a
microcosm of of the macrocosmic world. And so when you're
looking at that first winter, you have al Nino in effect,
(24:43):
and that means that there's an unusual amount of cloud
cover in southern Arizona, and that is contributing to unexpectedly
low food production. Yeah, less biomass production, less food. And
then on top of that again no pesticide, no or beside,
so you're in having to actually deal with mites and
diseases cutting into your crop production. You don't get that
(25:06):
pristine modern agricultural hall out of this. Yeah, and then
you've got chickens who are failing to produce sufficient numbers
of eggs, and they and the pigs are consuming a
lot of the resources. So the biospherians decide that they're
going to slaughter the farm animals. Now keep in mind
too that um you know, call calling back maybe to
(25:28):
an older episode of Real Wilding in which we talked
about the cascade effect. Once you remove one species, well,
it's a domino effect because so you can only imagine,
and this only three thousand species wide world, that if
you take out some of some of these elements, some
of these animals and these plants they're dying off, then
(25:50):
that's going to affect everything else. Yeah, because cycles are
key here. You need you need the nitrogen cycle, the
phosphorus cycle, just the basic add and flow that is
there's central to Uh. The success of the biosphere needs
to be in place in biosphere too. And when things
start falling apart, uh, the center cannot hold nicely done, yes,
(26:13):
and indeed the center cannot hold and food becomes an issue,
and there are rumors that maybe the biospherience are smuggling
in food, especially when Jane Poytner accidentally slices off the
tip of her finger and she has to leave the Biosphere,
which is another big kerfuffle, right because we've left in
um and when she does leave it, she returns with
(26:35):
a double bag, which people say, I bet that's full
of bags of Cheetos and in ho hoes and whatever else. Yeah,
and I mean she apparently it was not. She claims
it was not. It was apparently she just said with
some drawings and circuit board something that to that extent um. Yeah,
the media was really invested in this, and this wasn't
even our modern our news cycle. I mean, imagine if
(26:58):
they did bios, if Biosphere two had taken place during
the age of Fox News. I I cannot even imagine
the field day they would have had with this, because
because everybody was really into this, it was ambitious project.
You had what you had these well meaning, uh you know,
kind of hippie science guys and gals going into this thing.
(27:18):
And then you begin to see shortcomings happening. You begin
to see, uh, things like this person leaving and come
again with a mysterious bag. So there's all this room
to go, oh, what are they doing there? There? They
don't know what they're doing there there. The system is
flawed and and then that the schaden Freud effect kicks
in and you get to set back and uh and
and have a hearty laugh at this whole project. Yeah,
(27:39):
keep in mind that there were a ton of people
that were outside of the structure looking in because again
we're talking about glass, and they would observe the bio
experience and this was like a big deal. There are
a ton of people that were really interested in so
it's a human zoo and they look in and what
do they see? But the bio experience are beginning to
turn orange? Yes, And I kid you not, it sounds
like it just made that up. Oompa Loompa's to return
(28:01):
to Willy Wonka. And that has everything to do with
their diet, which was largely sweet potatas. Yeah, of their
diet the first year it was sweet potatoes. So we're
talking about a lot of beta caroteen, right, and of
the fact they consumed was from bananas, and so yeah,
as as a consequence there can began to turn orange
can you imagine, you know, I'm sure the media was
(28:23):
like and now they're turning into Pompa's. It's difficult. It's
difficult to imagine becoming sick of sweet potatoes, but I'm
sure it would happen. And it's difficult to imagine turning
orange because of eating too many of them. But you well,
and that becomes one of the problems here under the
biosphere is that you've got that limited calorie restricted diet.
(28:46):
You have decreased i would say mental health as a result,
because there's some depression setting in. Um. Here are some statistics.
Men lost sixteen of their b m I their body
mass index in six months, women lost eleven percent. Their
average systolic blood pressure decrease from a hundred nine to
(29:06):
eighty nine, and their distalic BP decrease from seventy four.
So these are some pretty big changes happening in their bodies. Yeah,
and you know, the sources we're looking at didn't really
go into this as much. But we've talked about what
happens when an individual is is cut off into a
solitary confinement environment and this is a rather sprawling complex,
(29:27):
so it's not you know, one to one with someone
being in a tiny cell, but still they're engaging with
the same place and the same people every day, day
and day while rolling with with with this calor restricted diet,
with problems with their food supply and other issues that
will get into. Yeah, and Pointner says that they became
pretty obsessed with food, or at least she did. And
(29:48):
she actually has a book called The Human Experiment two
years in twenty minutes inside Biosphere too, and she talks
about watching a film right yeah, and and the united
she find herself not even focusing on the plot or
the characters. It's about what they're eating, you know, because
you put yourself in that those shoes, imagining yourself, you know,
feeling this hunger, and and there you're watching, you know,
(30:10):
a food fight and a big comedy. That's the way
I'm imagining it, that it's like classic Hollywood food fight
and they're just like, throw that pie at me. This
next description, I think is it's kind of pathetic. She says,
sometimes we lined up in the second story windows of
the habitat and took turns peering through binoculars at fat people.
And then she says, for everyone seemed to overweight to us.
Then even the slender people who were spurting catch up
(30:34):
on sausages and shoveling them into their mouths. We were
culinary voyers. This reminds me of old cartoons where you know,
you'd have the one character would be starving on the
desert island and they look at the other one and
they start picturing a big ham hawk and yeah, yeah, yeah,
and it seems like that is in a sense sort
of what's happening. And moreover, they just they're not is uh,
(30:54):
you know, energy felled this they might be, and so
the tasks that they have to do take a lot longer. Yeah,
because there's a lot of work to be done because
again growing your own food, dealing with the animals, maintaining
the environment, keeping records, and then just just day to
day toil. And you're having to do all of that
while rolling with these with this shortage of nourishment. You're right,
(31:15):
it's like extreme farming. And also you have to to
keep in mind that the carbon dioxide levels were rising,
so they were continuously harvesting in sequestering biomass or plants
all over the facility so they can control that or
try to And then they would shovel and scrape carbonate
off their homemade natural CEO to scrubber. So keep that
(31:37):
in mind with just the regular things that they were
having to do just to survive. And one of the
things are having to deal with your is just the
unpredictability of the physical environment. I mean that's the thing
about biosphere too. And again keeping in and keep in mind,
it was such an ambitious project, in such a large,
sprawling project, again trying to to take the ecosystem, larger
ecosystems and contain them and manage them within an enclosed environment.
(32:00):
It unforeseen consequences are going to take place, things you
couldn't possibly think of. So, for instance, they had to
deal with a cockroach explosion, their cockroaches everywhere. Crazy ants
are invading from the outside. They're breaking through your space
shuttle a ceilant to to get into that environment and
(32:20):
start causing havoc. Yeah, they eventually did um cross the
silicone seal that was eventually penetrated, and so then you
have two different biomes uniting with each other, right, which
you know would obviously affect the integrity of the experiment.
Um As you said, they have the cockroaches, they those
on night duty have have the dubious task of collecting
(32:41):
those cockroaches and other environments and uh feeding them to
the animals, because again, that's a resource they can't waste.
That there's some food for the animals that they don't
have to go out and collect for themselves they're harvest Hey, guys,
I really need that key to the banana room because
I think the cockroaches might be getting in there. Well,
that's the thing that, by the way, we failed to
(33:02):
mention that that the only locked room in the Biosphere
two was the banana room because apparently the scent was
such a siren smell to all of everybody on these
restricted diets that they had to lock cut up to
make sure people didn't get up in the Meanwhile, morning
glory vines are overrunning all of the other plants, including
(33:24):
the precious food crops yep, and fish too many in number.
They begin to die off, and that's partly because there's
a phosphorus trapped in the water system. Yeah, the phosphorus
cycles out of whack. Yeah, and then those fish start
to clog the oceans filtration systems. Another unforeseen circumstance lack
of wind resulted in the trees not developing stress would
(33:45):
to cope with mechanical stress, so they were brittle and
prone to collapse, which actually later on and we'll talk
about this in another episode, really helped to inform people
about ecosystems and how important, uh you know, trees and
tree canopies are and how they interact with the environment.
As I mentioned before, nitrous and phosphors cycles are disrupted,
the nitrous oxide levels actually end up growing high enough
(34:07):
to reduce vitamin B twelve synthesis to a level that
could impair or damage the brain. And meanwhile a third
of the flora and fauna wind up just going extinct
in the biosphere too, including most of the vertebrates and
all of the pollinating insects. So again, collapse, more and
more collapse is spiraling out right now, the death knail
(34:30):
perhaps to this whole endeavor. And keep in mind of
laughing cas nitrous oxide is tasso, which can crazy, right,
you have a loss of oxygen. So initially it was
at which is roughly the same Earth's right, but it
drops to four and Pointner says it was like playing
atomic hide and seek. They could not figure out how
(34:51):
they were losing it. They lost seven tons of oxygen,
and it turns out that that oxygen was reacting with
the concrete structure. So that was sart of siphoning it
off and leading to gradually and continuously lower levels, so
much so that the biospherians were getting really groggy, they
had sleep apnea, they couldn't complete sentences, and so finally, um,
(35:16):
this we need some outside help for this, which caused
quite a fracture. Yeah, because ultimately reached the point where, hey,
to keep going, we need outside air, we need we
need oxygen pumped into biosphere too. Otherwise when we've gotta
we gotta crack, we gotta crack a window. And essentially
that's what they're doing. They're kind of reaching the point
where you're saying, let's go ahead and crack the window.
(35:36):
Um by letting by letting in a shifted in oxygen,
it was brought into the form of a liquid oxygen.
And this is one of those things that happens during
the course they're two years that really ratchets up this
idea of idealism versus science. Right, So, so essentially you
have two groups that disagree on how to manage things,
(35:57):
and you can understand how this fracture just causes were
more squabbling, right, because again, everyone's hungry, everyone's sluggish, everyone's
been been stuck in there this long. And meanwhile they're
also they're also outside stress issues to consider because originally
this whole thing was budgeted at thirty million, and it
had already cost or reported two hundred million. So so
(36:19):
there was a financial aspect of this as well. Right,
So it's not just the eight of them making these
decisions autonomously. Autonomously, I want to add, you know, you
have the management outside. You've got John Allen and others
who are trying to control this, whose money and vision
are ultimately at stake in this uh, in this endeavor, right,
and this kind of adds to those two different factions
(36:41):
or those differences on how things should be managed. So
just consider this, for the last fourteen months of the mission,
the eight crew members, would you know that the two
different groups would not make eye contact or speak to
each other unless absolutely necessary. Now I do that if
like a meeting goes more than twenty minutes here, it works,
(37:02):
so I can't really blame them, But imagine for two years,
you know, and imagine this too, that's like losing half
of your social sphere, right, So think about half of
all your friends just evaporating. Now, think about you being
in that biosphere with four people you like and four
people or three people you like, and four people you hate. Yeah,
(37:23):
and like a deep personal hatred, the kind you can
only have for someone after you've you've worked really closely
with them and and and this, and shared vision with
them and then had a big falling out and we're
unable to escape their presence. Yeah, awkward every single day.
So apparently one of the crew set up funding for
psychological monitoring and counseling ahead of time. But this experiment
(37:44):
was rejected by management. And we'll talk a little bit
more about this, but some of that is tied to
the idea that this wasn't the most transparent of projects.
That being said, they stuck it out and the the
eight crew members all emerged alive through the airlock in
September three, though in two separate groups of four uh,
(38:06):
not speaking to each other. Everybody was grumpy. Everybody was
probably ready to hit the nearest buffet. But but they
they did. They stuck it out. They made it to
the end of the experiment. And that's something I feel
like to keep in mind through all this, despite all
the flaws which we'll get into. I mean, an experiment
in its essence is not a thing where you set
(38:28):
out to necessarily reach that success point. It's about two
and you learn from the failures of the experiment as well.
You learn from the the the unforeseen consequences of the experiment.
And this was a sprawling experiment. Yeah. Pointer talks about
this too, and her Ted talk like this was unchartered territory,
no one had ever done this before. Of course there
would be failure. Um. So we'll talk more in the
(38:50):
next episode about some of the stuff that actually spiraled
out of it that was really advantageous um. But I
think for now it's probably worth mentioning at After this,
this phase one of the experiment closed out. It was
largely ridiculed as this kind of I don't know performance,
Aren't this quasi science? Yeah, I mean there were so
(39:13):
many moving parts through this, so many people involved in it. Um.
There there's plenty of areas to pick away at this,
at the structure of the idea. Because we mentioned the
CEO to Scrubber, which is a controversial issue that was
supposedly sort of secretly installed, which which you know, there's
a there's an X on the checklist there. Then there's
(39:34):
the oxygen having to be brought in. There's that bag
that probably had Twinkies in it that came in. Um,
there's a there's a criticisms about the the scientific pedigree
of the individuals that were placed in their criticisms about
the oversight, criticisms about the record keeping. Um. And then
you start dipping into the history of the Synergist as well,
(39:55):
and people start saying, well, this sounds a lot like
a cult. So you're basically have like theater trupy, you know,
environmental cult members and Star Trek uniforms going into this thing.
How can we take any of it seriously? Well, especially
when you consider that the founder, John Allen, his pen
name was John Dolphin, Johnny Dolphin. That really helps there.
(40:17):
Uh yeah, I mean Dolphins and Space and John C.
Lily and I mean, yeah, we touched a little bit
about Alan. That is just a character very much a
charismatic leader of a movement with lots of ideas. Uh.
And if you if you were to say, hey, kind
of sounds like a cult leader. You know, maybe you
wouldn't be that far off the off the track. Well,
(40:39):
even know we're discussing this earlier. It's probably if it
was is a cult, it's probably the most productive cult
in the world. And you've got to look at this
thing and say, Wow, the fact that they were able
to come up with us and energize and mobilize enough
people to do this to pull it off to some
degree is pretty amazing. Yeah. I mean, generally speaking, uh,
(41:00):
the energy of occult tends to to go astray. But
in this case, the centergist really got a lot of
things done even before biosphere too. And granted they they
benefited from some terrific funding as well, but uh, but yeah,
they Maybe the thing here is that if you're if
you're gonna do a big project, like there's really a megaproject, uh,
(41:23):
that that kind of skips ahead of some of the phases.
You know, It's not like they didn't build a mom
and pop biosphere. They built an epic biosphere. Maybe you
need the energy and guidance of a cult like structure
and a cult like energy to reach that point. So
maybe there should be like a NASA cult formed to
create the momentum. Yeah, I mean maybe, I mean, certainly
(41:47):
I could see where it's it's two sides of the
same coin. It's like, how do you want to get
to to that point? Do you want to go with
something that's rigorously scientific but also um, you know, um
adheres to the limitations of politics? Well, where do you
go with like blank check uh funded cult? I don't know.
(42:07):
I think that's what's so exciting and frustrating about this
project is because you could see it had legs. You
could see where it might have if if it had oversight,
if it had had transparency and um and the management
was a bit different. Let me put it that way.
You can see how this thing could have created, um,
(42:28):
some very intentional studies, long term studies. That being said,
there was still plenty of accidental science that came from this,
and we'll talk about this in the next episode. Indeed,
if you could have possibly combined the sensibility of the
synergist movement with a more rigorous structure, a little more
NASA in there, uh you know, along with the funding,
(42:50):
who knows what we could have we could have achieved
with this. But as again, as we'll discussed in the
next episode, we really did get a lot out of
Biosphere Too. Uh, even though at the time it is
very much discussed as a failure. At the time, Uh,
it kind of became the laughing stock in the media
towards the end. Um, despite all of that, Uh, there
was there's a lot of good that came out of this. Indeed,
(43:12):
And if you guys are interested in looking at some, um,
some documentaries on this, I want to recommend the New
York Times. They have a documentary that's like twelve minute
long documentary. Yeah, it's called Biosphere Too, an American Space Odyssey.
And then there is a documentary about the actual building
of Biosphere Too called Well Apples Grow on Mars. Yeah.
(43:35):
I think at the end of the day, I mean,
Biosphere Too is something that will be in the history
books long term. It will come a time when this
is very much at least a bullet point, a very
strong bullet point in uh the history of humanity as
we uh explored more about how our world works and
attempted to take it beyond Biosphere one. I agree. I
(43:57):
think it is only now beginning to get its due. Uh.
So there you have it. Hey, In the meantime, while
you're waiting for episode two on this topic, head on
over to stuff to blow your mind dot com. That's
where you'll find all of the episodes we've ever done.
You'll find blog post videos, and you'll also find a
gallery of Biosphere two images. You'll probably find that linked
(44:17):
on the front page, but also the landing page for
this particular episode will include that link. And if you
have some thoughts on this on biospheres or living in
closed systems, maybe you have submitted yourself to one let
us know. You can email us at below the mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
(44:39):
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
dot com
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