1991 was an eventful year–the Soviet Union collapsed, our Iraq adventure began, Scott Norwood’s kick went wide right, Magic Johnson tested positive for HIV, Jeffrey Dahmer and Mike Tyson were arrested on the same day (though for different crimes), and in the Arizona desert, 8 people sealed themselves inside Biosphere 2, which gave rise to an unnameable film starring Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin.
It got ugly in there, and by 1994 it was an irretrievable mess, at least as far as the original plan was concerned. But it’s still being used for research today, and proving itself useful.
But space-suited theatrics and Noah’s ark overtones aside, Biosphere 2 was still the world’s most ambitious test tube. Such tubes could still be valuable in an age of environmental sensors and satellite recordings, helping fill a research niche between small- and large-scale observations, generating hypotheses for field studies of climate change and other environmental vagaries.
“The large-scale closed systems that can be constructed in B2 allow carefully controlled physical experiments with actual environmental systems,” said Larry Winter, deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and an advisor to its University of Arizona-run incarnation. “You can think of B2 as the ecoscience equivalent of a chem lab.”
The original Biosphere 2 mission, though convoluted, did generate useful findings. Some were almost conceptual — that life inside the sphere changed in such unpredictable ways, and could be so profoundly affected by human activity, was a lesson unto itself. More tangibly, it produced a wealth of literature on how future biospheres might be constructed by space explorers and colonizers, who cannot expect to bring with them enough supplies for long-term survival.
Other research described carbon and oxygen cycles within the sphere, the physiology of plants in a high-CO2 environment, waste remediation and agricultural techniques. It wasn’t a bad show for what was, in effect, a beta test focused less on academic research than the survival of its inhabitants.
Nobody tell Pauly Shore.
