BIO what?

Main Chamber

If you are old enough to recall the 80's you might remember reading about a group in Arizona that built a self-contained replica of the earth's environment called Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1 being the earth). Once built, eight scientists (called Biospherians) climbed in and shut the door behind them with the intention of staying in complete isolation within their artificial environment for 2 years. They came close to achieving their goal. They had a medical emergency when one member had a serious laceration on her hand. The second was a systemic failure of their environment to produce enough protein requiring them to import supplements. The project still holds the record for a group living in isolation.

It was widely believed that the Biosphere project was an exercize designed to determine what it would take to create a human-friendly environment in outer space. The facts are actually a bit different.

Biosphere 2 was built with private capital with a profit objective... can you imagine that? This massive project, and I mean it's MASSIVE... was built by one of the famous Texas oil patch tycoon Bass brothers. He called himself an enviro-entrepreneur. His hope was this experiment would result in technology that could be commercialized. Although Biosphere 2 taught us many things about how the earth works, it was a commercial failure. After the 2-year live-in, the place fell into disrepair until Columbia University bought and ran it in the late 90's. They then sold it to the University of Arizona that has turned it into one of the largest environmental labs in the world.

Okay so you might be bored hearing about our tour of Biosphere 2 but it was so impressive I'm going to carry on a bit longer. For those of you whose concentration has been impaired by age, drugs, politics or booze and require constant titillation, I will throw in this conversation:

John to Tour Director: "How many scientists lived in Biosphere?" 
Tour Director: "There were 8 scientists ... 4 men and 4 women."
John: "Was there any hanky-panky?" (Tour group giggles and looks embarrassed)
Tour Director: "Huh, what do you mean by hanky-panky?"
John: "Come on, even a grad student like you knows what hanky-panky is... you know, sex?"
Tour Director: (blushing. A titter runs through the mostly middle-aged tree-hugger group): Huh, well it was after all TWO years... uh... but I think what happened in Biosphere stayed in Biosphere."

The Biosphere was located outside of Tucson for the copious sunshine. Because they wanted to totally isolate the project from any outside biological influence, they laid down a steel membrane under the entire project... several acres in size. There are so many engineering marvels in this project it's hard to figure out where to start so I'll simply describe one and if you're interested in learning more you can go online.

One of two "lungs"

Because the structure is glass and steel it takes in a lot of solar energy. As the structure warms the air inside expands, increasing the air pressure. In a normal structure the heated air would simply be vented to atmosphere but because Biosphere 2 is a totally closed environment it cannot be vented and without venting the structure would explode. To solve this problem there are two huge domes they call "lungs". Inside each is a massive bladder. Each dome is connected to the main structure by a large hallway. As the pressure in the structure heats up and expands, air flows into the lung compressing the bladder and vice versa when the temperature goes down. I mean who in the hell thinks up this stuff!

Inland Sea

When they created the various sub-climates within the Sphere (rain-forest, savanna, temperate, wetland, etc)  they not only imported the vegetation required for each area, they tried to import the various insects common to that type of environment. They imported, for example, 11 species of ants but two years later during a bio- inventory they found only 9 species, none of which were from those imported. Even steel won't keep those little buggers out!

Lots more fun with John and Jill to report but not today as we're off for a bit of spelunking!