Reboot the Biosphere

Sure Biosphere 2 was the laughingstock of the science community when its mission came to a close in 1993. (Blame the Star Trek-like uniforms.) But scientific findings spiraled out of it long after the project was officially canceled. Some 150 papers and scads of new insights into the environment are due to the visionary wonderland that is Biosphere 2.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you, wasn't it stuck to blow
your mind? My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Julie Ducks.
This is part two of our two part series on
biosphere two. UM. This is definitely one of those that

(00:23):
if you didn't listen to part one, you really need
to go back and listen to part one because there's
very much the uh uh the second helping on this topic. Yeah,
although we will attempt to give you like a two
minute rundown on this alright, uh talking about a desert arc, yes,
in around talking about eight people dressed like star trek ease, Yeah,

(00:43):
kind of in a ascending from a cult like structure
that was very much in tune with an environmental ideas
and gazing beyond planet Earth to possible uh care of
forming of other worlds, yes, and submitting themselves into this
desert arc, this biodome so that they could try to
accomplish this kind of terraforming task and as you say,

(01:07):
a sort of CULTI like a group. These people came
out of um all under the management of Johnny Dolphin
that's actually the pen name for John Allen who was
the group's leader, and this centric Texan millionaire Edward Bass,
who funded the whole two hundred million dollar projects. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:28):
So in indeed kicking this thing off, you have vision,
you have finance, and you end up having one of
the biggest uh scientific megaprojects you could you could ask for,
certainly to come out of out of the private sphere. Yeah,
because again we're talking about more than seven million cubic
feet here this biodome. We're talking about five different habitats

(01:51):
in the ocean, a desert, rainforest and turned on also
an agricultural area, beautiful agriculture and all of it, all
of it just created by like some people at the
top of their field. They didn't skimp on this. It
wasn't somebody just trying to recreate um technology out in
the desert. They were ringing in great minds. UH. Put
a lot of money into this and it was meant

(02:13):
to last a hundred years with revolving crews as we
would continue to learn from the biosphere and perfect the technology.
But after two years are are eight Biospherians emerged very underweight,
I would say, and orange and orange because of their diet.
But you know, they survived and and they learned some

(02:35):
things about that. But there was so much momentum and
really money that was caught up in this project already
that there was a second Enclosure experiment that began in March.
But you know, as we discussed in their first episode,
the first the first mission was kind of a bust, Yeah,
and the second one was doomed from the start. Yeah,

(02:57):
they really gave it. I mean the first mission they
went the full two years. They stuck with it despite
all of the problems, the infighting, the infighting, coaches, the cockroaches,
they just spiraling collapse of everything, the the extinctions. It was,
everything was in just pretty bad shape. But then yeah,
they they pushed on and they said, all right, let's

(03:19):
spruce it up, let's get some new people in there,
let's go to phase two. But it was very much
like that that final date in a relationship where maybe
one side thinks that this can still work. You know,
we still got it, we still got the magic, and
the other side has arrived at the dinner to break up.
This is the money man, right, this is Bass and

(03:39):
uh he Edward Bass at this point is really frustrated
by the growing costs and the lack of communication because again,
as we had discussed in the other episode, there's a
lack of transparency. That kind of pr is bad, and
so he tries to seize back the property with the
help of federal marshals. Now days later, two of the
original Biospherians tried to sab taj the experiment, opening the

(04:02):
doors to the outside. So just after seven months here
the second phase, the second enclosure experiment, it ends. Yeah.
I mean the energy alone has been has been sulid,
you know, and so much of that first venture, that
first crew, that first two years in the biosphere too,
it was sustained by that energy, I feel, and without

(04:24):
that energy, with that tarnished, I mean, it's just not
gonna go. Yeah. And at points you could even say
they may have achieved, you know, briefly for minutes, you know,
a utopia. They've had those waterfalls, they were they were
actually harvesting wheat, they were sustaining themselves. Yeah, but you know,
it comes to any utopia idea is ultimately a tragedy story.

(04:45):
You know, these are utopias exist in our our stories
in large parts so that they can fall. And that's
kind of what happened with bi And what I love
about this too is it's such a microcosm of the
corporate world because you know, the first crew, it all,
it all goes to Helena hand ask, so to speak.
And what does management do Instead of saying, you know,
we should reassess this project or maybe just stop doing it,

(05:06):
they say, oh, it's just new people we need, we
need new energy in here, and they get a new
crew in um. So bad management happening. So what happens
to our sparkling treasure in the desert. Well, one of
the key things here is that you even without even
with all this failure behind us, it's still a fabulous structure.

(05:28):
It's still a fabulous facility. I mean, it's it's unparallel.
There's nothing else like it on earth. So it's extremely valuable.
It's not just low let's doze it. Let's turn into
them all like, that's not the first idea that anyone
turns to. And certainly, even with the with the problems
that occurred, even with this, you know, the failure of it,

(05:48):
it still means a lot to the people who conceived
it and paid for it. Sure, and a lot of
them stayed with the project UM, and I don't mean
the biosperience themselves, other some I'm still consult with it. UM.
In the summer ninety five, Columbia University takes over the
lease and those rice patties and sweet potato fields, the
sweetato fields that sustained half of their diet the first

(06:10):
year for the biasperiens. Those are pulled up and cotton
wood trees are planted in their place, and researchers partitioned
off the giant greenhouse, varying the conditions in each area.
So that was one of the criticisms of the original
project that there was no controls. Even though you could
say there were some controls in place, they were trying
to control the atmosphere. So the university or Columbia University

(06:33):
begins to study how changes in temperature at different heights
of the tree canopy effect leaf respiration. And they start
to look at different species of invasive ants that had
snuck in and try to figure out, um, you know,
some of the reef building in the ocean and how
to monitor that. So you get these inklings that hey,
maybe we could repurpose some of this. Yeah, they and

(06:54):
they seem to be hitting their stride just around two
thousand three, but that's when it in the least ends
and uh and then it ends up it's kind of
being shuttered again. One of the problems here is that
is that it was still really costly, uh six thousand
dollars per year mostly for cooling to run this thing.
And there's stuff that the university wanted to do that

(07:15):
they couldn't do because they quote unquote couldn't break it.
You know, they there were limits to how much they
could they could mess with the with the infrastructure and
with the environments. Yeah, and it's still tied to John Ellen, right,
so he's only going to let people mess with it
to a certain decree. And it's still all essentially on
loan from its owner at best. Yeah, So after two

(07:36):
thousand and three, essentially just becomes a kind of roadside
tourist attraction. And at the same time there's this robust
suburb springing up around it, and it's just a ghost facility.
Like you said, you could you could look through the
windows and you'd see like pins still setting on desk.
You know. It was just right, yeah, haunted by the
ghosts of the ghosts of the spirit that when into it. Yeah,

(08:00):
it's just beautiful decay at this point. All right, we're
gonna take a quick break. When we get back, we're
gonna talk about rebooting the biosphere. All right, we're back.
Um now, as you know, at this point in its history,
it was sold to Wonka Industry and they began creating chocolate. No, no,

(08:22):
not really at the end. All right, if you have
any thoughts, you can always email that now. But in reality,
we hit the year two thousand seven and then we
finally begin to see some movement again. And this comes
from the University of Arizona, uh and and this really
came in the nick of time because at this point,
like you said, condos were springing up and the facility

(08:42):
was at real risk of being bulldosed so they could
put up some more condos. So University of Arizona steps
and they take over the lease. And in two thousand
and eleven, after they've been working on it for a while,
the building was officially donated to the university, and Bass
ended up contributing twenty million dollars to help get the
project off the ground. Because again, you know, he was
he was never he was still invested in it, not

(09:05):
only financially, but that invested in the spirit of it.
Like I feel like this is a guy who didn't
want he didn't want that that that that biosphere too
to become the biosphere to condos. Yeah, because I think
at the end of the day, he believes in the
project and understood that it could have long term impact.
So it was great that University of Arizona stepped in
and in two thousands and something that really did become

(09:27):
interested in it because they wanted to study the relationship
between the desert and the ocean. And they found that
the Gulf of California, the closest marine environment to the
snore and desert, could be studied in the biosphere. Uh
that the oceans environment that the biosphere had. So for
them it was like this big moment of uh, Okay,

(09:48):
we could really figure out what's going on in this
certain body of water by emulating it here in a
controlled environment, we can mess around and we can get
some really conclusive data. And moreover, you also, by the way,
have this seven million cubic foot atmosphere, this artificial atmosphere,

(10:09):
which is the largest of its kind in the world,
and it's really the only place where you can kind
of study these sort of things in earnest. Yeah. So
while the original ocean was meant to to to be
reminiscent of the Caribbean and all these coral reefs. Um,
they they end up saying, well, let's take a more
local model and installid in here. Uh. Let's get a
little less spaceship with the biosphere too, uh and and

(10:31):
focus more on studying more immediate environment. Yeah, and more
immediately which we'll talk about in a little bit of
this idea that you can you have like a model
that is expressing itself over a matter of days rather
than years. Um. Also they could test out marine technology,
which is really helpful. Yeah. So you end up with
a mini ocean, a scale down version of the Gulf

(10:52):
of California. Uh and uh, and you end up with
like starfish, sea arch and small reef fish and bottom
dwelling sharks called the horn shark. And they really want
to get Humboldt squid in there as well. Yeah. Those
are awesome. Um. So what you see here is a
legacy that's beginning to develop, because now the bios here
too has spawn something like one and fifty papers, right,

(11:14):
all these different studies that are going on. It's proved
that people could indeed exist in a completely closed system,
a manufactured system. Uh yeah, they suffered depression, they became
incredibly thin, but they survived. And so this was also
a precursor for isolated confined environment psychology and bast here

(11:35):
to really, according to David L. Chandler, writing for Wired,
demonstrated that ecology can be a science. So previous to this,
we we weren't really looking at uh Land air mass
and the intricacies between them in the ocean to figure
out how the environment was sort of doing this tango

(11:56):
with these different elements. Yeah. You know again, you you
in science, you learn from your missteps as well as
as your successes. And this was such an enormous project
with such an enormous um you know, reach that that
that you end up with having all these lessons that
pop up, and you know, they just had not occurred
before because no one had dried something like this. Yeah,

(12:18):
and Chandler says that, um, you know, no one, no
one had ever really essentially made a giant test tube
with full control of every variable. And he said, you know,
biosphere made complex natural systems more like chemistry and physics
something researchers could experiment on instead of just observe, which
is key. And it was also deciding that Biosphere two

(12:38):
may not be much of a spaceship, but maybe it's
a bit of a time machine. Yeah, because you can
go back and you can look at the data on
the carbon cycles and see the areas areas in which
scientists can better understand interactions between chemical elements and the atmosphere,
particularly when it comes to carbon fluctuations and tree canopies.
Because consider this, even though a single carbon atom might

(13:00):
cycle in a few weeks or years on planet Earth,
decades may pass before say a rainforest in Brazil effects
say a farm in Iowa. But in biosphere too, these
kind of conditions can be studied at a much more
rapid pace. So the same carbon cycle would take just
three days before one biome was affected by another. That's amazing, yeah, yeah,

(13:23):
And again studying the world in small to better understand
the world at large. Alright, let's tick through some of
these findings that came out of Biosphere too, and also
kind of maybe accidental findings, you know, I mean, some
of them obviously were done in earnest, but a lot
of this stuff reminds me of Stephen Johnson when he
talks about innovations and how they will spiral out and

(13:45):
and no one can really predict how one innovation can
come in and affect everything else exactly exactly. So one
thing that we learned here again we mentioned that that
fabulous ocean environment meant to mimic the Caribbean with coral reefs.
What we learned that orl reefs are salvageable. Marine biologist
Guy ailing Us oversaw the artificial reach and reef and

(14:06):
again this was the largest ever constructed um and in
the process she learned lessons from managing ecologically stressed reefs
in the real world. You know, these are environments where
they're you know, they're they're continually suffering from fishing, from dumping,
from diving, uh adventures that are damaging the fragile ecosystem
of the reef. So we're able to to to to

(14:29):
learn how to say of our actual reefs by studying
them within biosphere too. Yeah, and uh again. David L. Chandler,
writing for Wired, says that complexity is not maybe as well.
He says, complexity is no obstacle, but I would say
it's maybe not as much as an obstacle. Biosphere two
does have a lesson of complexity. As an obstacle, it does.

(14:52):
It does that the things will collapse. But he says
the point here is that while some species died out
bees for example, of course we know it's important for pollination.
He says, the system balanced itself remarkably well. And we
have seen that too when we looked at some of
the rewilding studies. Yeah, I mean they say nature finds
a way, right, and uh, but one of the big

(15:15):
concerns for humanity is will nature find a way without us?
All right? Another big lesson is that massive spacecraft will
hold their air again. Space was very much on the
minds of the designers of Biosphere too, and and on
the minds of those that ended up occupying it for
those two years. And the project was one of the
largest seal structures ever built, and yet the overall air

(15:37):
leakage rate was less than ten per per year. The
big tay home, of course, was do not use concrete
when making your spaceship, because it ends up sucking up
that CEO two, which the plants need to produce oxygen,
which the humans need to stay alive. Another finding human
beings can eat less. Well, we know that already, but

(15:59):
the point year is that Roy Walford, who conducted the
first reliable long term experiment on caloric restriction in biospheriens,
found that they got the nutrition that they needed with
less food, really, and they emerged with improvements and blood pressure,
cholesterol level and other health indicators. Okay, they might have

(16:20):
become overly obsessed with food and a bit depressed, but hey,
they did they survived. Another big one is that waste
can be recycled. So again for two years, they're all
in there, they're producing waste as well as waste from
the goats the chickens, and they're recycling all of this
through natural, low tech filtration methods. So the work that

(16:43):
was that was done in biosphere two along these lines
was pioneering and it led to a number of very
successful subsurface water treatment systems that are now used in
Mexico and other developing countries. Also worth noting that you
look back on how they were recycling their sewage uh
and uh and and and you know, and then re
drinking it once it was purified, purifying it through plants,

(17:04):
soil atmosphere machines, they were doing this back then, and
it wasn't until eighteen late eighteen years later in two
thousand nine that NASA announced total water recycling on the
International Space Station. Now, you know it's not necessarily one
to one on that scale. But again coming back to
that comparison between the the synergist powered UH movement that
leads to biosphere too and the more controlled environment of

(17:27):
say NASA. Now, one of the rarest microbes ever found
was discovered in the waters of the Biosphere Ocean, and
this amiba is called you Hyperamiba Biospherica, and it thrived
because there was an absence of natural predators. So the
lesson here is that even though you might have really
strict biological controls in place, you just don't know what

(17:48):
is going to show up. That's kind of the beauty
of it. Yeah, you have this contained environment with any
you don't know how all the variable is going to
shake up, so you might end up essentially with a
stowaway UM. Another big take home here is that sealed
ecosystems have a future. UM Biosphere projects found a number

(18:08):
of imitators, each with its different spin. There was the
verstance the Zurich Zoo reproduced a pet of the piece
of the Madagascar rainforest. The Biosphere Foundation, which can is
actually uh contains some of the Biosphere team are currently
planet planning to build a simulated habitats for prospective Mars colonist.
Because again, the individuals involved in in Biosphere Too, they

(18:32):
didn't just there. It's not like their spirits were all
crushed and they said, all right, I guess I'll just
be a banker. I guess I'll just get hardware store now.
They for the most right, they all remained within the
fields that brought them to Biosphere too, and continue to
work with some of those synergist ideals in their minds. Yeah,
and if you want more information on the biospheres and
the future of them in terms of space exploration, I

(18:54):
know that tech stuff goes into this topic a little
bit deeper to try to figure out like what stuff
was actually viable can that you can take from Biosphere
two and some of the nineties six season seventies Biosphere
experiments from Russian and American scientists and what did they
learn from that? So check that out if you're interested.
I also wanted to point out that Jane Pointner, she

(19:16):
she emerged as the lead scientists. In fact, I think
she was the only degreed scientists um among the biospherians. She,
along with her husband Tabor McCallum, and their company Paragon
Space Development, has had experiments flown on the International Space Station,
the Russian mir Space Station, and the US Space Shuttle,

(19:36):
as well as working on underwater technologies with the US Navy.
And she's also worked on projects to mitigate climate change
and grow crops and um some typically arid and hostile
regions of Africa and Central Africa. So so as you
have mentioned, these are people who are passionate about not

(19:57):
just the project but their respective fields. All right, So
there you have it, our two parter on Biosphere two.
And I really hope here at the end of the day,
you know, now that you've you've given this topic of
chance and then really, you know, let us chat into
your ear for a while about it, that you have
a new respect for what they set out to accomplish,

(20:17):
for some of the ideas going into it, and ultimately
what we end up gaining from Biosphere too, that it
wasn't just one of these sort of v H one
remember the nineties missteps. It was it was more than
just a footnote in the in the cultural history of America.
Yeah that if previous to listening to this, your only
reference to this was Polychhore's Biodome. We hope that has

(20:39):
now been replaced with this, this amazing, ambitious, um really
innovative project that that should get its due for the
impact that it's had on this scientific community. Yeah, indeed,
and really should be. I feel like it should have.
It should be inspiring more and more products. There should be.
It's a story that should have influence a fiction more.

(21:00):
We should have, you know, more fictionalized accounts of of
of what this consistent of it should have influenced our
science fiction and and even horror more. I see shades
of it here and there, but not not the profound
impact it feels like it should have had. Yeah. I
cannot believe that there's not a full scale documentary on this,
and I can't believe that more of the Biospherians haven't

(21:20):
talked about their experience beyond Jane Poytner, because this is
really a window into an amazing time and it has
all of the elements I think that that make it
a fascinating story. I mean you've got the cult angle
to it, you have science, you have this science fiction angle,
you have this idea of terror forming and and then

(21:44):
you've got the psychological component that and I don't know
if we've mentioned this yet, that inspired the TV series
Big Brother. Yeah, yeah, so in that respect it certainly
had a pop cultural residence. But but but yeah, like
why has uh? You know, the sign antologists and l
Ron Hubbard have seen their their altered form takes cinematic

(22:04):
shape in the Master. Why not the sentergis, the synergis
are far more interesting and far more beneficial to h
to human culture. In my opinion, I dare say fun loving, yes,
fun loving to our science loving Alright, so you have
once again thank you for listening. Be sure to check
out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com because that's

(22:24):
where you'll find all the podcast episodes, blog post videos,
as well as a cool image gallery of biosphere too.
So if you really need some images to go along
with what you've heard here, check that out and those
those images will take you to a different time, a
different place, and a different spirit. And if you have
thoughts on this, you can send them to blow the mind.
How Stuff forward Stockholm for more on this and thousands

(22:51):
of other topics. Does it, How stuff works dot com