If we ever want to survive on other planets, we must devise effective and sustainable ways not to die. It means growing food, having water and oxygen, and all the other things we have on earth that prevent us from being a corpse.
Shortly after transforming an entire planet, we have the choice to create our own artificial biospheres for people who will be living in space – enclosed ecosystems with their own oxygen, plants and everything we need to sustain life. Ambitious trials of this took place on Earth, including the infamous Biosphere 2.
Biosphere 2 costs between 150 and 200 million dollars (Biosphere 1 is by the way the earth, if you are wondering) is a research facility in the desert that – for a while – is such a closed ecosystem, recreating many aspects. of the Earth itself. Inside the 2.75-hectare complex, enclosed in steel and glass as the dome of The Simpsons movie3,800 species of plants and animals were locked up with eight people (four women and four men) who would rely on the food grown and oxygen circulating to survive.
The plan was that the project would last two years, but had difficulty from the beginning.
Two weeks after the mission, one of the occupants, Jane Poynter, caught her hand in the rice thirst and lost the tip of one of her fingers. The GP was able to apply it again, but soon decided that she needed surgery outside the dome. When she returned later that day, supplies were snatched from her, which turned out not to be the only secret stock the “Biospherians” would dive into.
Food within the sphere did not grow fast enough to sustain the inhabitants, and they all began to lose weight. The crops were too slow and labor intensive. The coffee bushes, for example, took weeks to make enough for a single cup for the Biospherians to sit through and think about the problem “we have no other food either”. Within months, they were forced to break into food supplies that the outside world was unaware of.
The pollinators – hummingbirds and honeybees – have died out, which has contributed to their farming problems. Ten months after the project, the advisory board issued a damning report on the situation, as well as the fact that the crew members concerned had little scientific expertise. The advisory board then stopped everyone, which is never a good sign that things are going well.
Worse would come even more, as oxygen levels in the biosphere began to decline, and no one at the time could figure out exactly why. In January 1993, while nine months of the experiment were still left, oxygen levels dropped to about 15 percent, equivalent to 3,660 meters on a mountain.
“It felt like mountain climbing,” said one Guardian contestant. ‘Some of the crew got sleep apnea. I noticed that I could not complete a long sentence without stopping and catching my breath. We worked in a kind of slow-motion dance, without wasting any energy. If oxygen levels had dropped lower, there could have been serious health issues. ”
To increase their tension, the biosphere has become a tourist destination to recoup the high cost. As they starved, struggled to breathe, cockroaches began to take over and mites attacked their crops, they were watched as if they were in a zoo.
The group broke and threw cups and spat on each other. With morale as low as the oxygen levels (mainly the latter), it was decided that the crew should get food, as well as the secret seeds and vitamins that are sneaked into the complex every two weeks.
Half of the crew wanted to continue without supplies from outside, while the other half were keen on things like ‘food’ and ‘being able to breathe’. It was decided that oxygen and food should be provided to the crew, who spent the rest of the time living in their detachable sustainable habitat by … receiving supplies and breathing air from the earth.
The biggest takeaway from the project was expecting the unexpected. When they entered, the team did not expect problems such as oxygen droplets (it turned out that the soil was contaminated with oxygen-producing bacteria), perhaps because the whole project was started by a hippie theater group rather than scientists.
However, the project was not quite over, with a strange twist yet to come. Steve Bannon (yes, that Steve Bannon) took over the management of the project in 1993. A second crew had already entered the dome when Bannon fired the entire leadership.
When members of the first mission heard about this, their concern for the safety of those inside increased. On April 4, 1994, two former biospheres – Abigail Alling and Mark Van – climbed down to the dome early in the morning, opened doors and smashed glass panels to allow air to flow to Biosphere 2, forcing the experiment to end.
Since then, no one lives in Biosphere 2. This is probably a good thing, given the lack of oxygen and food in there.