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For Sale: Biosphere 2
jangobongo writes "The Texas company that built and owns the Biosphere 2 Center near Tucson, AZ has put the property up for sale. Built at a cost of over $200 million, Biosphere 2 was originally used as a a self-sustaining environment for humans with eight "biospherians" sealing themselves in for two years to see if they could survive without outside intervention. The Biosphere 2 campus consists of a 3.1-acre glass terrarium and 70 other buildings on 140 acres, and includes offices, classrooms, laboratories, residential housing, and a hotel and conference center. Because it is a very expensive place to operate, the more than 85,000 visitors last year were not enough to make money on tourism alone. Potential uses for the property: a religious college, spa, golf resort or even a technology park."
Did they ever actually manage to live in the thing without outside support in the form of O2 and food?
Would it be possible to convert it into a location to house fragile or endangered plants and certain animals? I mean, if they can solve that oxygen problem, that is.
I was fortunate enough to get to do research there in 2001. The place is absolutely amazing. We didn't actually live inside the Biosphere, there's a trailer/kit house village down past the lungs. The researchers there are literally from all over the globe.
As for the areas you didn't see on the tour, there isn't much to see in the coastal desert, and all of it is visible if you walk around the outside. The agricultural biome was partitioned off into 3 managed forests, since they are not needed for food production. At the time I was there they were ramping up each to different levels of CO2 to see what effect that had (which I guess simulates what would happen if CO2 levels rose significantly on the earth).
The tropical rainforest is sealed off from the tour areas, since that's where the bulk of the 'research' takes place. At the time, we were only allowed to go in twice to check on our experiment, which was a good thing IMO. There's a 'mountain' inside with fans at the top to help air circulate, and yes, the vegetation is very dense, so it is hard to see from the outside. I don't think any significantly sized animals live there anymore. In fact, when they had the first experiment there they had a problem with these primates (I believe they were galagos?) that would climb up the scaffolding in the rainforest biome, slip, and fall to their deaths right next to the outside windows. Of course, the PR people and the tour groups were not impressed when they would see all these dead 'monkeys' pressed up against the glass. So they had to go. I think the only larger animals that did remarkably well were in the oceans.
The AC is right when they say this was a very large "learning experiment" rather than a failed one. Even though they had many problems, they were handled in a controlled way and accounted for in the experiment and the data they took. If anything, the problems helped them learn more, since those are the types of unexpected things colonists in space will deal with.
This site has some good photos of the different biomes and the living/mechanical areas. If anyone has any questions or wants to know more of the 'unofficial history' let me know and I'll try to field them
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Nick Lane's book Oxygen argues that the Earth's oxygen is not a tightly-regulated homeostatic system -- the old saw about the Amazon being the lungs of the Earth. The oxygen in the atmosphere is the result of the small excess of carbon fixed by plants that doesn't get consumed or decayed by animals and bacteria, with volcanoes supplying the makeup CO2 to drive the process. Just as the fossil fuels are the relic of this process, O2 is the fossil gas relic of the process. The only reason we are not burning up all the oxygen by burning coal is that most fossil fuel is very low grade shales and sandstones while coal, gas, and oil are only a small quantity of concentrated carbon.
The claim is that contrary to the Gaia Hypothesis which would argue for tighter homeostatic control of O2 and other gasses, O2 reached 35 percent during the Age of Coal (Carboniforous) while some tens of millions of years later in the Permian, O2 crashed to 15 percent. Scientists are supposed to know this from isotope ratios in rocks from those strata.
So the Earth is a poor model for a closed ecological system in that the processes controlling O2 operate over geologic time and are perhaps less tightly regulated than once thought.
Following those links, I stumbled upon BIOS-3, in Siberia, which seemed an entirely more realistic attempt at finding out what it takes to make an enclosed system containing humans. Far less space, far less cost, much more rapid turnover of matter, and they report exactly what limits they're running up against. Sometimes I think the Americans should give up and just fund the Russians, who seem more practical.