"Biosphere-2": Failure of an experiment to create a closed ecosystem

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

We are building a large-scale colony on Earth, completely isolated from the outside world, planting plants there to generate oxygen, importing livestock and settling eight colonists for two years! A great idea for a scientific experiment to create closed life support systems for possible future colonies on the same Mars. True, there is a serious flaw in this idea - people. They turned out to be one of the main reasons for the failure of the ambitious scientific experiment "Biosphere-2".

What is Biosphere-2?

In the 1970s, American financier Edward Bass, who comes from a wealthy Texas family that made billions from oil, met John Allen, an ecologist, engineer and inventor of Biosphere-2. Allen had ideas, Bass had money to spend on those ideas. In the 80s, these ideas crystallized enough into a project for which Bass was not sorry to allocate $ 150 million.

Allen planned to place 10 square kilometers of land under transparent domes, populate them with plants, animals and people. What for? He wanted to test how flexible life is, whether it is possible to enclose it in an airtight box and whether it can exist in it in a balanced way. In addition, "Biosphere-2" could show (at least approximately) whether a person would be able to take with him his usual habitat for the colonization of other planets.

Construction began in 1987 in Arizona. It was complicated by the fact that window seals and other structures had to be as airtight as possible in order to minimize air leaks. Otherwise, the team would not be able to capture changes in oxygen density under the dome. In total, "Biosphere-2" concentrated 180 tons of air.

Since during the day the air was heated by the sun and expanded, and at night, on the contrary, it was compressed, the engineers had to neutralize these pressure drops. For this it was decided to build huge domed diaphragms, which were called "lungs".

In total, at the start, the building contained about 20 tons of biomass, represented by 4 thousand species. At the same time, it was expected that 5-20% of them would simply die out. All this biomass was distributed over five wild biotopes (rainforest, mini-ocean with a coral reef, mangrove swamps, savannah, foggy desert) and two more anthropogenic - fields and vegetable gardens, as well as living areas with laboratories and workshops, where man ruled. The least space was occupied by the ocean - only 450 square meters, while the fields and gardens for the eight future "bionauts" occupied an area of 2500 square meters. They settled on four goats with a goat, 35 hens with three roosters, two sows and a boar. The local pond was inhabited by fish.

Underneath all of this were premises with technical infrastructure, and a natural gas station was installed outside, which supplied energy to the entire complex. The closed ecosystem had to provide itself 100% with water, food, fertilizer waste and air. Calculations showed that all this was feasible. But as is usually the case, soon after the experiment began, something went wrong.

Tabernacles of Eden?

Eight volunteers, four men and four women, entered this earthly paradise for the first time on September 26, 1991. They had a simple task: to go back no earlier than two years later. Naturally, all these months the team had no time to get bored. They have worked in the fields, tending to livestock and performing planned experiments.

- To make pizza, I had to harvest wheat and make dough. Then feed and milk the goats for cheese. It took me four months to make pizza at Biosphere-2,”said Jane Poynter, one of the participants in the experiment, during her TED Talks. According to her, she spent two years and 20 minutes in an isolated world.

However, here Jane is not completely honest. A little over two weeks later, the girl chopped off the tip of her middle finger while working on a rice hulling machine. A local doctor from the team tried to attach it, but the finger did not want to heal. Jane was urgently evacuated from paradise and sent to the medical center, where her finger was sewn into place. Seven hours later, she returned back to the Biosphere.

But she rarely mentions this incident. More Jane likes to talk about how exciting it was for the first time to breathe a truly different air, which, besides her, only seven people in the world breathed. And feel like a part of the biosphere.

“When I exhaled, my carbon dioxide was fueling the sweet potatoes I was growing. And we ate an awful lot of sweet potatoes. And this sweet potato became a part of me. In fact, we ate so much of it that it turned me orange. I literally ate the same carbon over and over again. In a bizarre way, I ate myself in a way.

The crack in the heavenly ark

The desert was the first to emerge from man's obedience: the accumulated moisture at the top of the dome generated almost continuous rain over it. Corals in the ocean began to die: the water absorbed too much carbon dioxide.

Over time, both the sensors and the colonists themselves began to notice a drop in the oxygen level in the local atmosphere. The content of this extremely important element in 16 months decreased from 21% to a critical 14%. As the studies at the end of the experiment showed, there were too many cement structures inside "Biosphere-2" that absorbed carbon dioxide and thereby reduced the concentration of oxygen produced.

For a long time people had to live practically in high mountains. Oxygen starvation, naturally, negatively affected the health of the "bionauts". Both physical and mental. Jane recalls that their doctor, a rather elderly man by that time, at some point was no longer able to add up the numbers. Some team members could not finish the phrase, as they had to catch their breath in the middle.

- You wake up gasping for air because the composition of your blood has changed. And then you literally do this: you stop breathing, then you breathe in, and it wakes you up. This is terribly annoying.

In addition, the microflora of the rainforest got out of control, which began to develop too quickly. The unforeseen proliferation of microorganisms and insects caused additional oxygen consumption. They especially bred in black soil. For the experimental fields, the best and most fertile was chosen.

The media, which had previously been skeptical about the experiment, in some cases calling its participants a "survival cult sect", trumpeted that the team was literally slowly dying. All these factors have led to the fact that the management decided to include the supply of oxygen to heaven from the outside.

Human factor

But one of the most important reasons for the failure of the experiment was the human factor. None of the members of the "Biosphere-2" team was in isolation for more than a couple of months. Only Taber McCallum had the experience of a three-year sailing trip. The quarrels in the team quickly divided the eight into two groups, which, according to Jane, even after so many years, do not tolerate each other.

Each group had their own vision of how it would be better and more correct to continue the experiment. Some believed that it was necessary to unload the crew and transfer part of the scientific work to the scientists outside the dome, sacrificing complete isolation, to allow the import / export of equipment and samples. Others believed that it was necessary to completely preserve the purity of the experiment and cope on their own. They feared that opponents would lead the experiment to permit the import of food, which would be a real failure of the project.

As a result of conflicts, the team could not work together and move forward smoothly. People dined separately, tried not to look each other in the eye, and talked very rarely.

The conflicts were aggravated by the lack of oxygen and food, people became depressed, irritated. The same insects and microorganisms that ate oxygen negatively affected the growth of crops. The team was forced to switch to a low-calorie, low-fat diet.

The preacher of diet, by the way, was the same doctor of medicine Roy Walford, who tried to sew Jane's finger. He was convinced that a person's daily diet should be limited to 1500 kilocalories without fat, which would increase a person's life expectancy up to 130 years. Unfortunately, he died at the age of 79 (11 years after leaving Biosphere-2) as a result of respiratory arrest associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Some experts have suggested that it could be the result of the scientist's low energy intake.

If Walford was prepared for such a diet, then many other participants did not like this restriction in food. Constant crop failures, many hours of work in the fields … the team did not leave the thought of food, and their weight melted like ice cream on a hot asphalt. Taber from a real big man turned into an emaciated martyr, having lost 27 kg, eating only fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes, eggs and goat milk products.

The team saw meat only on Sundays - a little chicken or fish. In order not to lose a single precious calorie, some members of the team, according to Poynter's recollections, licked the plates after each meal.

Nevertheless, Walford, who regularly took blood tests of all participants, found that the indicators were close to ideal: cholesterol, insulin and glucose levels dropped, and blood pressure returned to normal. But the "bionauts" did not become happier from this.

In November 1992, some of the colonists began to eat seed supplies that were not grown inside the building. Amid media reports of food stashes, food smuggling, allegations of data falsification, the entire scientific advisory board of the project decided to leave it.

In the meantime, the public has formed an opinion about "Biosphere-2" as a kind of Olympic sport (they say, how long will they last without opening the doors), and not as a scientific experiment, a theory that is being worked out on a model, gradually making changes. Thus, by the end of the experiment, the background around him was mostly negative.

Experiment aftertaste

In September 1993, the doors of Biosphere-2 were opened. And they released the exhausted colonists from there. Here's what Jane Poynter has to say about the moment of deliverance:

- I would say that we all came out a little nuts. I was thrilled to see all my family and friends. For two years I have seen people through glass. And so everyone ran to me. And I pulled back. They stank! People stink! We stink of hairspray and deodorant and all that bullshit.

In 1994, the second mission of the "bionauts" began. Already in a different composition. The concrete was prudently sealed and prepared to spend 10 months in captivity. But first, two dismissed members of the former team burst into the dome in protest, opened several emergency exits, breaking the seal for 15 minutes. Five glasses were also broken. The commanders of the new crew left the dome one by one, and in June 1994 the sponsors abandoned the project and closed its funding.

Despite all the millions of dollars, spacious premises and the best black soil, the first mission to Biosphere-2 can be considered a failure. People could not achieve stable oxygen circulation in their dome, and constant crop failures and proliferating pests put them literally on the brink of survival. In addition, this eight colonists demonstrated that man is one of the weakest links in such isolation.

"Biosphere-2" still stands in the Arizona desert. Now it is more of a botanical garden with a dome, which belongs to the state university. Experiments are being carried out there, but not on such a large scale. Excursions for schoolchildren and tourists are constantly held. One of the attractions that are shown during the excursions is the inscription left by the former “bionaut”: “Only here we felt how much we depend on the surrounding nature. If there are no trees, we will have nothing to breathe, if the water is polluted, we will have nothing to drink."