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Biosphere II funding and research cut back
perfessor multigeek writes "Columbia U. is starting to pull out of Biosphere II. According to the New York Times (reg req. blah, blah) Columbia, under a new, more "pragmatic" leadership, disappointed with the science coming out, and short of cash with the stock market drop, is starting to pull funding and academic programs from Biosphere. Funny, none of the current articles even mention the original purpose, just this past week made more crucial, of preparing for building a synthetic biome in space or on Mars. Arrgh!"
because of NASA releasing plans to have a manned mission to mars by 2010. The original purpose was to learn to live in an independant enviornment, ie. living completly off what could be carried from earth to where ever.
j.goforth
I visited Biospehere a good 8 years ago, and the place was a joke. Supposedly they were thinking it was still a "closed" system, yet there I saw a line of ants, 1/2 inside and 1/2 outside the 'sphere.
My guess is that the Bio-Dome movie was made by people that visited the real thing in the early 1990's.
In this time of being accountable for the money that you spend...
As for the original purpose, the folks running the place now may be eager to suck it up to the "respectable" science establishment, but that is the only reason to deny the original intent of (admittedly, among other things) learning how to build a self-sustaining system.
The place was built in large part at the detailed instruction of a bunch of cultists not far above the Raelians on the rationality or honesty scale and these days Columbia, NASA, et al are eager to deny/downplay the origins of the place. Not to mention those aspects of the original plan that they consider "not real science"
As for ongoing work, well, yeah, "due to a lack of funding". Duh. Check the Biosphere site and you'll see that quite a lot more was going on quite recently. Something like fifteen colleges/univ/institutes had ongoing projects as of less then a year ago.
Personally, I think that part of this is a last-ditch attempt to get more money out of Bass and the local government. But mostly, I think it's a case of both genuine issues of less money at Columbia (though, funny, as somebody living within walking distance of their campus, I can say that they certainly *seem* to have plenty of money for things like construction when they *feel* like it) and a desire to wash their hands of something that clashes with the conservative, narrow-minded approach to research that has always hampered so much of academia. (Not that I have any personal bitterness about this at all, with almost everybody on both sides of my family in my parent's generation having gotten science PhDs, been disillusioned and seen enough academic bull sh*t to ensure that none of us in my generation (me and siblings/cousins) have chosen to continue that particular "family business".)
Face it folks, the first continuing program to research and be willing to publish about lunar/other planet colony engineering was done by a local chapter (Portland, OR) of L5 not because they were so stunningly brilliant (thought they were certainly very cool, smart, and dedicated) but because anybody in "legitimate" academia who publishes about such stuff takes their slim chances of tenure anywhere and chucks 'em out the door.
Look at what has happened to the Bass program at Yale. They took his twenty million, promised to back it up and tie it into their academic community, and are now waffling around trying to find excuses to keep the money but route around the mandate that came with it.
The short form: it's up to us DIY'ers. Good thing that techies make so much money. (or, in some cases, used to.)
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
If you want to see some interesting results from the original experiment, there is a PBS TV episode that covered it in detail.
e re /
Look at:
http://www.pbs.org/opb/intimatestrangers/biosph
for the program information.
I saw this several months ago, and it was rather interesting some of the problems they encountered as well as some of the more interesting conclusions that they came up with. They tried to keep it a closed system and ran into many problems including problems with the coral reef and unhealthy CO2 levels.
Some of the scientific research done there litterally can't be done anywhere else (unless you built a similar facility). It is too bad that more money isn't being spent on pure science research like this.
I don't know the administration side of things for this project, however, and sometimes project like this tend to chew up lots of money on overhead/administrative costs, especially if they are managed by somebody who is not a particularly good adinistrator (as in a scientist promoted through the Peter Principle) or some MBA type who doesn't know anything about the research they are doing.
Government grants toward pure research are also drying up.... which is why something like the Mars mission would be particularly interesting.