Scorpio
On September 26, 1991, I entered Biosphere 2 with seven other people. I was 29 at the time, idealistic and full of hope. I thought that we were making history and that we were going to change the world. The first President Bush was talking about sending humans to Mars - getting involved in the Biosphere 2 project seemed to me to be a way to participate in that vision right here on earth. Inside our three acre mini-world we would live as if in space.
Things didn't turn out quite as I expected and it took me more than a decade to be able to relive what happened there, to integrate it into my life and to even talk to some of my fellow crew members. But time has a way of healing many wounds, and I now see it as one of the seminal life-changing experiences I am likely to have.
After 15 years' reflection, I have come to realize that Biosphere 2 was, and still is, one of the most misunderstood and undervalued scientific projects of the Twentieth Century. At a social gathering about two years ago, I heard the Biosphere referred to as "that failed experiment in the Arizona desert" one time too many. I was incensed and decided to write a book to dispel the nonsense that is still recited about the project.
Biosphere 2 is an almost-airtight structure, consisting of an above-ground glass and steel structure set over a steel pan. It houses a desert, a savannah, a rainforest, a marsh, an area of intensive agriculture, a human habitat and an ocean.
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Evolution theory teaches
By larsmith, March 19, 2007 at 06:47Evolution theory teaches that everything alive within Biosphere I had evolved by an incredible series of accidents and that they came from nothing.
Many of these living things were then incorporated into Biosphere II to be part of an experiment to see if man could perhaps set up a life-sustaining biosphere on planets on which there is no evidence that evolutional accidents have been able to produce life forms and/or to sustain life forms.
Many of the worlds greatest minds got together, with some degree of optimism, to create and to maintain Biosphere II. One of the things they learned is that the combined intelligence and knowledge and experience and engineering and planning that went into the experiment were enough. One of the things learned is that there was not enough combined knowledge / experience ( et al ) to produce the results which evolution is credited with producing; ie: balanced oxygen and other gasses and balanced living conditions for both plant, animal, insect and human life.
Part of what may have been learned might be a heightened degree of scepticism as to whether evoltion theory is reliable or perhaps even believable. If man's knowledge is not adequate to create an ecosystem which can sustain stable habitation, how could a series of accidents have produced it ?
If oxygen had not been pumped into Biosphere II, how long would this artificial world have been habitable by the life forms placed there-in ? Would many of the life forms there have eventually died out ?
I'd be interested in learning what, if any, impact the Biosphere II experiment has had on people's perception and/or understanding of the theory(ies) of evolution.
If the combined intelligence, exercised over the life of the experiment(s) resulted in declined and declining life sustainability, how could the accidents which are acredited with evolutional successes have produced better results.