Biosphere 2 is a great story and I wish there were more follow ups. They tried to set up favorable initial conditions and then seal the hatch. They found that the environment inside shifted and became inhospitable. The crops they planned on didn’t all sustain. Then they called it all off.
What if they had allowed the biosphere to keep shifting until it found its equilibrium point, and then set about finding advantages in that? Crops that would sustain in that?
An iterative process could build on mistakes and learnings. A one-shot, naive, all-or-nothing attempt where your starting conditions have to be just right… no wonder that it failed, but where was the next iteration? Why give it all up instead of tuning? I know it’s about money, but I wish someone with money cared enough to keep this thread going.
guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I mean, Biosphere 2 failed because it was started by a cult that mismanaged the shit out of it, then Steve Bannon took over and outright killed the company. A lot of the really crazy shit that happened was a result of corporate power struggles. The first Biosphere experiment lasted two years and is considered overall a success, probably because Steve Bannon wasn’t there.
Even the claims of stir craziness were kind of overblown. They got evaluated, everything they experienced was consistent with everything that was known about long-term isolated group environments. They’re a rough experience.
It was a fine enough experiment in the early 90’s, but there are incorrect assumptions about how it would apply to space travel. For one, the Biosphere project is considered a “failure” because they set themselves the goal of creating a completely self-contained bubble that needed no outside inputs, and yet at various points systems in the sphere needed repair and replacement, which is completely normal and absolutely what would happen in space. No space company worth anything would let a mining colony collapse because a carbon scrubber broke and “hAhA yOu NeEd oUtSiDe InPutS tO kEeP lIviNG JuSt LiKe tErReStRiAl cOloNieS.” No, they’d ship in a new scrubber and keep the line moving.
scarabic@lemmy.world 10 months ago
They would ship in a new scrubbed but could they? We have to assume that a colony might need to self subsist for long periods, at least as long as Biosphere 2 was running, because of the practical considerations in shipping replacement parts to Mars.
guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Bringing tons of spare parts can extend the length of time between required visits, also, again, I’m considering that the only way the cost of these colonies can possibly ever be justified is as part of setting up a space-based economy/space-based supply chain. That means regular round trip visits to bring at least some of those resources back to Earth where the value can be realized. Breakdowns occur, shit happens, a ship might crash/have a catastrophic systems failure/etc on the way, creating periods where they can’t get fresh supplies and they have to get creative. I get it.
My main point though is that the Biosphere experiments were held to an extremely high standard of isolation because the point was to explore what would happen in a completely enclosed system. That’s useful for exploring how far you can take closed systems, but at the end of the day, again, no real space based activity would or could be held to the same standard of isolation. They were called frauds because someone brought some plastic bags into the enclosure (sure, it contaminates the experiment, also, space colonies won’t exactly be experiments in the same way Biosphere 2 was)