Well, really, it’s the Biosphere 2.
a few weeks ago i went to arizona for a conference held by some colleagues at university of arizona. i arrived in tucson and checked into a hotel that i last visited more than 5 years ago during a capstone class trip to observe at kitt peak national observatory in the tohono o’odham nation. i got dinner with a colleague and turned into bed. i woke up the next morning, walked over to the steward observatory in uofa’s campus, and loaded into a shuttle to travel to the conference’s enigmatic venue: biosphere 2.
i fell for the joke when we arrived and asked aloud, “where’s biosphere 1?” my colleagues gleefully answered, “the earth.” i felt a deep resentment begin to build in the back of my brain, but thankfully, i don’t think i embarrassed myself that badly the remainder of the trip.
the biosphere (i’ll be dropping the 2 for the rest of this post) was a surreal little place, up out past tucson, near oracle. the conference itself went very well, and we were able to wander around the grounds in between talk sessions and meals to have a look.
originally designed to demonstrate and develop human space colonization technology in a closed environmental loop, the biosphere got lots of press in its early days for the sealed missions undertaken by a handful of bionaughts.
the project was funded by some oil scion who thought, naively, that america was going to make it to mars within the millenia, and by then, all of the important life support technology developed insitu at the biosphere could be sold to nasa for a major profit.
the manned expedition was plagued by constantly depleting oxygen (the culprit, the quick setting concrete they used for the foundation), high nutrient but incredibly low calorie diets, and interpersonal conflicts. the company went belly up in the mid 90s, in the middle of its second manned mission (which did apparently achieve a greater degree of stability than the first mission).
it was then taken over by columbia university, who conducted more closed loop (though this time unmanned) experiments, before being sold to uofa in the 2000s. they’ve turned it into a tourist trap crossed with a research facility, but i couldn’t honestly tell you what research was being done there.
overall, not the worst place to spend a weekend. until next time, clear skies.
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