There were the dark fears, too, which we could scarcely admit to ourselves, let alone to the others. Would Biosphere 2 go disastrously wrong? After all, we were stepping into unknown territory. Maybe there was a reason why no one had ever built a biosphere before, practical reasons that we didn’t know about. The air could be poisoned by any one of the hundreds of trace gases; dangerous fungi might multiply and invade our bloodstreams. Plagues, locusts, fire, loneliness—we didn’t know what really lay ahead.
Although SBV included redundancy and what were hoped were fail-safe backups in the technical designs, we all knew the infallible rule of machines: they break down. If the cooling systems failed, temperatures could rise above 150 degrees under the glass roof in just a few hours, a biospheric oven. And dozens, no hundreds, of other disasters could easily be imagined, including the crew being run ragged working from dawn to dusk to keep everything going. Murphy’s Law could undoubtedly apply here as it does everywhere else: if nothing can go wrong, something will; if something goes wrong, everything will. This new world contained hundreds of machines, pumps, motors that could break down, tens of thousands of feet of cable and wiring ready to short-circuit. Were the eight of us heroes or fools for stepping in there?
We knew the world wanted to follow the experiment and how we eight were faring in our new world. The original idea that Biosphere 2 might be a quiet research and development project had evaporated when the US and international media began to run high-profile stories about what was happening in quiet, remote, Oracle, Arizona. None of us were prepared for an ever-increasing level of media attention. Thankfully, realizing we’d have to quickly learn the basics of dealing with the media, project management called in Carole Hemingway, of the Hemingway Media Group, to work with us. All eight of us had sessions with Carole and her partner Fred Harris, who became key parts of the Biosphere 2 media department throughout the year prior to closure. We learned how to effectively tell our stories and keep people informed about the progress of this “real time science” experiment which had captured the world’s imagination.
When we crossed the threshold, we couldn’t actually know if we would make it, although we were determined to do so and did not even admit the possibility of failure. From the Russian research in closed ecological systems, the less developed U.S. research, and SBV’s own studies, we were confident that it was possible. But not only did we not have all the answers—we didn’t even have all of the questions yet! This two-year experiment was the maiden voyage, the massive shakedown cruise for the most complex ecological experimental apparatus ever devised. If the system worked, Biosphere 2 would provide a powerful new experimental tool for the multidisciplinary science of biospherics, a controlled mesocosm in which to study global ecological processes both in detail and at a systems level, as a whole. The usually unmeasurable would become measurable.
Up with the crack of dawn, the first part of every morning is spent in the farm.
“Biosphere 2 is a new kind of telescope which can be used to look at the Earth itself. We need to take the time to understand how to use it, to discover the kind of questions we should ask, and to scale up from there.”
– Dr. Christopher Langton, Santa Fe Institute
June 2, 1992
INTERVIEWERS AND VISITORS always ask us what a typical day was like inside Biosphere 2. What did you do on February 10 or June 2? Did you mark your calendar with any special event that day? Or was it just another Monday or Tuesday?
Even if we didn’t check our logbook or diaries, we could say that we spent Tuesday, June 2, 1992 in a way that was unquestionably different from anyone else on Earth. But to us it was a fairly typical day. Here is a look at what filled our hours that day; the explanations of events are brief, because many of these daily tasks were a continuous part of the much larger challenges and research studies which the remainder of this book will detail.
Dawn broke over the Santa Catalina Mountains at 5:35 AM that morning. No activities were scheduled at that hour, but the crew’s early birds were already stirring. Linda got up to do her early morning check of the wilderness areas, including observations on how much had been eaten of the ‘monkey chow’ put out in bowls for the galagos (the small primates also known as bush babies) in the lowland rainforest. Sally made her early morning cup of mint tea and was already on her way to work in the vegetable patch of the agriculture system. Mark, who had also gotten up early, was hand-watering the supplemental crop boxes on the agriculture balcony, and cutting fresh mint and herbs for the kitchen. He would soon log into his email to review the weather report of the last twenty-four hours and record it in his notebook.
By 6:30, Gaie, the breakfast cook of the day, sounded the official wakeup call. She phoned each apartment, allowing the crew a half-hour to shower and dress before the hour of work that precedes breakfast.
There was one major difference between the bathrooms you’re familiar with and the ones inside Biosphere 2: we had no toilet paper. There was no way that our recycling system could handle the amount of toilet paper that eight people would produce in two years. Instead, we used a water spray that hung next to the toilet. We found it in a plumbing catalogue designed for Saudi Arabian customers; the Arabs (as well as many other cultures) consider toilet paper far less effective for hygiene and have used water for the purpose for centuries.
Flushing the toilet, of course, didn’t mean that ‘it went somewhere’ to be forgotten. All of the water that comes from the human habitat area—from toilets, showers, kitchens, laundries—went to the basement of the agricultural area and into the waste recycling system. Since we monitored the system every day, we could often tell if a faucet had been left open or a toilet was malfunctioning, because a suspiciously large amount of water would have entered the tanks.
After the wakeup call, Gaie headed for the kitchen to get breakfast going. She pre-heated the oven, boiled water for porridge and tea, and then stopped in at the command room to get the twenty-four-hour report on carbon dioxide to bring to the morning meeting.
By 7 AM, work had begun. Sally was milking the four she-goats, and Jane was feeding them. The buck and two bleating kids got their feed, too. Sally fed the chickens their portions of worms and azolla, a high-protein fern that grew on the surface of the water in the rice paddies. Later they’d bring the milk, plus eggs collected from the chickens, up to the breakfast table.
Jane checked the status of the irrigation tanks in the agriculture basement and the fields to ensure that the computer-programmed watering system had been triggered successfully. Sally began her daily collection of fresh vegetables, and since it was a Tuesday, she also brought up the next week’s rations from the basement by elevator—burlap sacks of sweet potatoes, taro, flour, and beans. The supplies and the five-gallon buckets of vegetables Sally had picked had accumulated in the plaza outside the main double doors leading into the farm.
Linda, Taber, and Mark took pruning shears and sickles to the rainforest. Linda and Taber climbed into the space frame in the northeast corner to continue cutting back morning glory vines that were shading the trees. Mark was working by the varzea, the rainforest stream, cutting and bundling up morning glory vines that tangled the steep slopes of the banks and waded into the stream to cut and haul out their roots. By the end of the hour, Linda and Taber gathered twenty-five pounds of the