I may be mis-remembering, but I thought Martin Gardiner or one of the other bogus science writers did a take-down on how truly awful the science was, going into and coming out of Biosphere 2. is there really a lot of new information here?
I don't think retrospectively, you can fix opening the airlock and bringing things in and out, without fundamentally questioning the "sealed world experiment" problem
Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin did a comedy called 'Bio-Dome' in 1996. The two slackers get trapped in there or something, I can't remember the little bit of plot that there was.
That was the whole plot. Two slackers get trapped inside with a bunch of scientists, so they have to make food for the slackers who just want to screw around, and in the end the slackers teach the scientists a thing or two about life. One of Pauly Shore's best works. Also it gave us this amazing video of the Safety Dance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVdP8bQ94XY
Under the Dome is both a book (Stephen King) turned network drama (CBS) that ran for 3 seasons. Not quite the same as Biosphere or Biodome, but people are trapped under a dome.
The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle is heavily inspired by the Biosphere 2 experiment. It contains a lot of gossip and petty behavior, and a lot of people seem to find the plot overall boring, but I still liked it. (I simply find the premise fascinating, and I think Boyle captures the atmosphere of people living closely together in a locked space well.)
I toured the facility around 2005-6 (iirc). Looks like you still can.
It had a futuristic and lightly post-apocalyptic vibe. The jungle plants were growing out of control, pressing up against the glass panes of one of the habitats. Ants streamed in and out from the desert outside through a crack in a glass panel.
If you check it out (http://biosphere2.org/visit/tour-schedule-hours), you can have a full post-apocalypse vacation by adding a tour of the ICBM museum south of Tucson, the AMARC plane graveyard, Cosanti in Scottsdale and Arcosanti (where you can stay) north of Phoenix.
Any post-apocalyptic vacation in that area should also include a tour of the dendrochronology lab at the University of Arizona. Also Kartchner Caverns, if you're willing to drive a bit further than the Titan Missile Museum.
I highly recommend the ICBM museum in Tuscon. They go through the entire launch process for the tour. It takes less than a minute. It's quite something to imagine that within that short period, the end of civilization would be guaranteed.
I still liked the old launch procedures where people where involved and no hyper sonic missiles. Back then, some guy could step back and say - "Okay, its all fucked, so why should i drop one more rock at some poor town in nowheristan?" and give those after us a living chance by behaving reasonable. Today that wont happen, and the machines are that much more likely to just MCAS kill us via a design failure.
And while you are enjoying a buffet of extinction level mass homicide, I always recommend a stop at Rooster Cogburn’s Ostrich Ranch between Tucson and Phoenix. Check the internet, they aren’t open every day. But you can spend an hour feeding tiny livestock, giant nightmare birds, and end up covered in lorikeets. (Hint: the fallow deer have gross saliva. Feed them before the Sicilian donkeys. The donkeys will clean you up.)
Yeah, there are little plastic chutes in the fence for feeding them. I noticed those after I successfully and painfully retrieved my right coding hand from inside the head of one of those nightmare birds.
An interview with one of the participants, clearly she learned a new perspective concerning her place in the world.
Originally it was told by the media as a project for a prototype space colony. There are those with ambitions to get humans living on Mars and beyond, but it is not going to be as easy as sci-fi ideas of the 1950's would lead us to believe.
I would say Biosphere-2 was actually a really good experiment even though it is mocked for the lack of any good science. We learn a lot through follies, the delusions of grandeur that others have and how naive we once were.
What I would like to see is some original press from 1991 with the likes of BBC's Tomorrow's World or Horizon presenting the thing seriously, particularly when it comes to 'Space Colony'.
Hell i’d read an article analyzing exactly what role they played in the biospheres ecosystem.
The article implies they’re bad, prima facie. If you want to be “scientific” then lets address exactly what they were contributing and hurting.
Was biosphere 2 designed to account for an insect food chain? Was it designed to account for all the types of waste cockroaches eat?
The more I think about it the less i feel like the cockroaches were the result of a “failure” and the more I think they're actually the data that should be considered a result of the experiment!
The more I think about it the less i feel like the cockroaches were the result of a “failure” and the more I think they're actually the data that should be considered a result of the experiment!
I took a tour of Biosphere 2 when I was young. I remember the guide talking about two specific problems they didn't anticipate that dramatically altered the outcome of the experiment:
The 'domes' are supported by a metal lattice framework. That structure actually blocked too much sun and created extra shade which affected the plant growth.
The concrete used in the construction was sucking up carbon dioxide and changing the environment unexpectedly. That also reduced plant growth.
I really don't believe the entire thing was useless. It wasn't successful, but it failed in many interesting ways ;P
My favorite failure mode was that the trees started to fall over under their own weight when they got too tall, because there was no wind inside the dome. As they learned, wind is essential for trees because they must grow stronger trunks in reaction to the wind, and the wind helps blow off parts of the tree that aren't strong enough.
That's explicitly why you remove supports for new trees fairly early on in the planting process. If they indeed just learned that upon this experiment, they probably needed better horticulturists.
Something like this happens with trees in Houston. Because water can only readily penetrate the ground in the strip of soil between the road and sidewalk, their roots only grow in the strip of soil, and only have strength in the same direction as the street. So when a hurricane comes along, they tend to fall either straight out over the street, or straight back towards the house.
This just shows that we have to do a lot of tedious testing before there is a chance to go to Mars. Even pretty innocent looking things can cause huge problems that can’t be anticipated beforehand
I always get downvoted to oblivion for pointing this out, but the Elon Musk hype squad is just not being realistic about how far we are from establishing a permanent colony on mars. Severe issues remain.
A Mars colony is something humanity should start thinking seriously about once we successfully run a production-grade lunar colony for about a decade-- long enough to recognize and tackle the worst bugs.
Quicker, sure. Though not particularly cheaper. And the moon has a bunch of problems that Mars doesn't, like 14 day nights. The moon's advantages are probably seem intuitively somewhat larger than they actually are.
Mars, flat? It has the highest mountain in the Solar System, Olympus Mons. Plenty of rugged places on Mars that outshine anything Earth can put up.
But yeah, we probably wouldn't put a base those places, not initially. Though I wonder if a volcano base would tell us more about the planet's interior...and its fairly flat including lots of high walls to protect against winds/storms?
But without saying "this is a test for Mars" such a colony will never be built. Even in Antarctica shipping in supplies once a year is just sooo much easier.
I understand a Martian colony as a kind of romantic dream. I understand a longish-term Martian outpost for scientific purposes. I don't get a Martian colony as a serious proposal for pretty much any reason. It's like 1000x more expensive, dangerous, and inconvenient than colonizing any number of very-inhospitable places on Earth.
To survive planetary disaster? Well 1) Mars is already worse than most imaginable post-disaster Earths would likely be, and 2) you could build a couple highly-survivable emergency bunker-habitats and pay people to live in them (in shifts, say, so there are always enough inside to ensure survival but they're not stuck in there full time) for, surely, less money than Martian colony establishment & maintenance would cost. You might still screw it up and they might not succeed if things really got that bad, but I'd bet their odds are better than any Martian colony we're likely to manage to put up in the next 100 years.
While imo the moon is probably a better immediate target for approaching space fairing status, I think Mars does provide useful opportunities.
I think on the architectural & engineering side developing structures for Mars would provide immense progress in understanding sustainability for life on earth or elsewhere. This has applications for doomsday scenarios if you care about that as well as just general efficiency and sustainability of structures.
Likewise I think Mars has benefit as a potential launch point for space travel as it has an abundance of fuel and a significantly lighter gravity well.
Another part is the whole "necessity is the mother of invention" aspect. There is no quicker way to progress than doing. Yes it may be horribly dangerous but trial by fire has been repeatedly shown as a very effective way of exploring the unknown.
> 2) you could build a couple highly-survivable emergency bunker-habitats and pay people to live in them (in shifts, say, so there are always enough inside to ensure survival but they're not stuck in there full time) for, surely, less money than Martian colony establishment & maintenance would cost.
We could call these bunker-habitats "vaults", maybe.
Then proceed to raise some capital for our startup and eventually call it "Vault-Tec"[0].
> You might still screw it up and they might not succeed if things really got that bad, but I'd bet their odds are better than any Martian colony we're likely to manage to put up in the next 100 years.
We could further fund it by conducting various sociological experiments.
What could go wrong?[1]
The trouble is many of the problems of living in those environments are very different. Mars does have an atmosphere, which means cheap abundant CO2. It has much stronger gravity. The numerology is completely different. The moon’s vacuum environment is much harsher with starker temperature differences. It looks like sharp moon dust will be a significant abrasion risk to equipment - not a problem on Mars. Also while both have water ice, the methods for extraction will likely be very different.
We can make sustainable space habitats now. They solve the same problems a Mars colony do, for a fraction of cost, with no huge rockets, months-long trips, and certain death if something goes wrong.
I don't see why this realization should be regarded as a counter argument to establishing a Mars colony. It's really really hard and a lot of problems need to be solved.
The most important thing for me is that most if not all of these problems are extremely relevant on earth and for dealing with climate change and overpopulation. Now one could say that we should then solve them for Earth first, but that's not how things work. We only have solar panels today because there wasn't any better way to power satellites. Earth makes things so easy that we won't go for >99% water reclamation, 0 waste green houses and so on.
> I don't see why this realization should be regarded as a counter argument to establishing a Mars colony. It's really really hard and a lot of problems need to be solved.
The point is that, right now in 2019, we do not know how to build a self-sustaining colony outside of Earth's biosphere. If you want such a thing to exist, you have to do a lot of research first to enable it. But, in general, the space enthusiast crowd isn't interested in pushing for that kind of research. And without that research, a lot of the arguments for space travel are very moot.
I'm such a space enthusiast and I'd absolutely love a Biodome 3. That said, I think that people tend to confuse "sustainable colony" and "self-sustaining colony". If it ever comes to it, we will have a sustained presence on Mars for decades before it becomes self-sustaining. That said even with supplies from Earth a Mars base will need a lot of sustainability tech that can be applied on earth too.
If people look at creating a Mars colony as a voluntary extreme sport, like climbing Everest, BASE jumping, or wingsuit flying, with their corresponding death rates, you might understand the motivation of the people wanting to go to mars a bit better. For those types of people risking death to do something extreme is fun and going to Mars would be both very high risk and extreme.
A safety first attitude won't build a spacefaring civilization, but hopefully the Elon Musk anti-hype squad does not stop people from using their own resources to try and build one.
You won't know the what the severe issues are till you are there and trying to stay alive will be a great motivator to solve problems quickly. Simulating Mars gravity on Earth is impossible so Mars is going to be the best place to build a working model of a Mars colony.
> For those types of people risking death to do something extreme is fun and going to Mars would be both very high risk and extreme.
Getting there would be. Living there would be constant danger plus tedium, the space equivalent of working on a farm barely making ends meet for the rest of your life. Such lives don't have enough dopamine hits to keep people of such dispositions around long.
> Living there would be constant danger plus tedium, the space equivalent of working on a farm barely making ends meet for the rest of your life. Such lives don't have enough dopamine hits to keep people of such dispositions around long.
Training for ultra-marathons (and running them) is painful and tedious. The thing that people need are goals. For example "survive on Mars for 2 months". Then the next person will come along and say "I bet I can do in for 3". Then 6, then 12. And if enough people do it, suddenly you have a "base camp" from which to run your extreme survival competitions.
The dopamine drip will last a long time. Eventually, someone will fall in love with Mars in the same way they fall in love with Everest or El Capitan, or whatever, and then a colony can start.
Humans are crazy, and a subset of us enjoy pushing past the boundaries merely to prove that it is possible to ourselves. To prove that we have no limits. I think those people should be given every opportunity that humanity can afford to give them to push the limits of human capability.
"You won't know the what the severe issues are till you are there and trying to stay alive will be a great motivator to solve problems quickly. Simulating Mars gravity on Earth is impossible so Mars is going to be the best place to build a working model of a Mars colony.
"
Gravity is probably one of the smaller problems. I don't see the point of going to Mars until we have a lot of experience doing similar things on the Moon or just on Earth. We should also have done a lot of long-distance flights like going to an Asteroid or just orbiting Mars first.
Nothing in spaceflight is guaranteed, and Earth-Mars spaceflight is a lot less subject to guarantee than Earth-ISS spaceflight, which hasn't been trouble free.
Sure, but supplies last a bit and can be made reduntant. So as long as there is a steady stream, wheter every half year or 2 years .. it is possible. Expensive, sure, but possible.
If (and this is still a big if) you can send a hundred tons to Mars for a few dozen million dollars, a Mars colony should become totally doable. A self-sufficient colony is a whole different matter, but it doesn’t have to be self-sufficient.
For me, virtually all of those are worth solving through whatever effort is required, as it gains one advantage you can't get on earth:
You're very far away from all the people who can't/won't/etc. go to Mars. For the foreseeable future you'd still be subject to needing resources sent periodically, but this would at least be a pretty limited interface. Hopefully science would be a good enough export to pay for it, otherwise some kind of nonprofit endowment would be needed.
IMHO Biosphere 2 was not a realistic experiment for a self-sustained off-world colony. They tried to to mimic a complex self-regulating biosphere and failed. The pragmatic approach is going with a tightly controlled artificial ecosystem with the absolute minimum number of species and heavy technological involvement. The russian BIOS-3 is a much better model for a Mars colony.
Yes, this is the key point. Biosphere 2 had too many conflicting goals. Species diversity is cool and all. But if your goal is even century-scale self-sufficiency, you arguably you don't need pieces of so many ecosystems. I mean, what do bush babies really do for you?
Cockroaches are a tough problem. And management of soil microbes. But maybe the most practical solution is to gamma sterilize all bulk inputs, and carefully seed with just what you want.
The particular atmospheric problem here would have been pretty easy to solve on Mars since settlers would be allowed to exchange gasses with the atmosphere. But that wouldn't work on a space station. Come to think of it, I wonder if Space Lab, Mir, and the ISS have had their share of unexpected gas mixture related close calls.
I remember when this was big news. Mars colonization was big in the late 80s/early 90s, as it was "the next step" now that we had the Space Shuttle. This experiment was supposed to show us the way.
I think it's failure actually helped a lot, showing us that we just weren't ready to colonize Mars yet.
My company provided the first Internet connection for Biosphere 2 in the 1995 timeframe. This was right after the bust, they were taken over by Columbia University. At the time I took a tour of most of the complex and it had a very weird, abandoned feel to it. FWIW, most of the systems that monitored / controlled everything there (like Jurassic Park) were ran on HPUX.
Interestingly, the legacy of Biosphere 2 includes the recently emerging fasting and fasting-mimicking science demonstrating some interesting healthspan promoting properties. Dr. Roy Walford of Biosphere 2 helped kick off the caloric restriction field thanks to his experiences.
Valter Longo explains that his tenure in Walford's lab as one of the preludes to some of his great work demonstrating that some of the benefits of CR are achievable by using discrete periods of fasting as opposed to long-term restriction, which has obvious challenges of practicality and undesirable effects like emaciation just to name a few.
He talks about Dr. Walford's time in biosphere 2 and how it impacted both Walford's work and, ultimately, his own.
I spent a week at the Biosphere during the transition, after the old crew had been fired and they were trying to figure out how to salvage something useful out of the project. It was a big a mess as every article written about it, including this one, said. One fact that stuck with me was all the sensor data was useless because no one had calibrated any of the sensors on installation. The other was that everyone universally agreed banana wine was disgusting.
The sensors were a dumb mistake. But some of the other mistakes, like trying to get the gas balances right. Those seem like useful learning lessons. Ed Bass sure didn't get his money's worth out of the project and I'm not sure any of us did. But some useful stuff came out of it.
I remember seeing a documentary, where the documentary film maker who was hired by the Biospherians was talking about his experiences there. He remembers when the hummingbirds were dying, and how the Biospherians didn't want to let him photograph and film that. He also talked about how one night at dinner, they all took out these animal masks and started making animal noises. (Something about getting in touch with the spirits of nature or some such.)
Lots of people sharing their tour anecdotes, but I wanted to add: my favorite part of the experience is when they take you inside the "lungs".
Due to the immense amount of atmosphere inside, they needed a way to handle the expansion and contraction over the course of the day, so they built a giant diaphragm roof that can raise and lower on top of an auxiliary dome. During the tour they take you inside to see it inflated, then take you into the outer shell and crack a door so you can watch the whole thing collapse.
Super simple mechanism, but it really hit home the complexity of the problem space.
Here's an experiment which could be started relatively inexpensively, but which would yield significant results: Start with just recycling water. Build a similar facility, or build a new one, but at first, just try to completely recycle the water. This could be done through greenhouses completely enclosing an artificial wetlands, which would be used to recycle human wastes. Pure water could be recovered by running dehumidifiers.
Such a facility could be built in the desert, much smaller, but incorporating the lessons of Biosphere 2. (For example, that conventional glass blocks too much sunlight, and that curing concrete releases CO2.)
Next, just completely recycle the air.
Only after that, see if the ecosystem could be expanded and food grown for the inhabitants. That should also be staged, with the 1st part involving just supplying enough calories, the next parts working towards complete nutrition.
Instead of sealing the system from the get-go, first build it "leaky," then prevent the leaks.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadI don't think retrospectively, you can fix opening the airlock and bringing things in and out, without fundamentally questioning the "sealed world experiment" problem
It had a futuristic and lightly post-apocalyptic vibe. The jungle plants were growing out of control, pressing up against the glass panes of one of the habitats. Ants streamed in and out from the desert outside through a crack in a glass panel.
If you check it out (http://biosphere2.org/visit/tour-schedule-hours), you can have a full post-apocalypse vacation by adding a tour of the ICBM museum south of Tucson, the AMARC plane graveyard, Cosanti in Scottsdale and Arcosanti (where you can stay) north of Phoenix.
> the first Saturdays of April and October
... so, a week from tomorrow!
https://www.google.com/search?q=april+1+2017+%22trinity+site...
Here's an example of a video by a visitor on that day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aShq03n3i6c
A better primer on the BBC news website:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/magazine-41151951/building-a-n...
An interview with one of the participants, clearly she learned a new perspective concerning her place in the world.
Originally it was told by the media as a project for a prototype space colony. There are those with ambitions to get humans living on Mars and beyond, but it is not going to be as easy as sci-fi ideas of the 1950's would lead us to believe.
I would say Biosphere-2 was actually a really good experiment even though it is mocked for the lack of any good science. We learn a lot through follies, the delusions of grandeur that others have and how naive we once were.
What I would like to see is some original press from 1991 with the likes of BBC's Tomorrow's World or Horizon presenting the thing seriously, particularly when it comes to 'Space Colony'.
The article implies they’re bad, prima facie. If you want to be “scientific” then lets address exactly what they were contributing and hurting.
Was biosphere 2 designed to account for an insect food chain? Was it designed to account for all the types of waste cockroaches eat?
The more I think about it the less i feel like the cockroaches were the result of a “failure” and the more I think they're actually the data that should be considered a result of the experiment!
I for one welcome...
The 'domes' are supported by a metal lattice framework. That structure actually blocked too much sun and created extra shade which affected the plant growth.
The concrete used in the construction was sucking up carbon dioxide and changing the environment unexpectedly. That also reduced plant growth.
I really don't believe the entire thing was useless. It wasn't successful, but it failed in many interesting ways ;P
But yeah, we probably wouldn't put a base those places, not initially. Though I wonder if a volcano base would tell us more about the planet's interior...and its fairly flat including lots of high walls to protect against winds/storms?
https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Mars_Expres...
To survive planetary disaster? Well 1) Mars is already worse than most imaginable post-disaster Earths would likely be, and 2) you could build a couple highly-survivable emergency bunker-habitats and pay people to live in them (in shifts, say, so there are always enough inside to ensure survival but they're not stuck in there full time) for, surely, less money than Martian colony establishment & maintenance would cost. You might still screw it up and they might not succeed if things really got that bad, but I'd bet their odds are better than any Martian colony we're likely to manage to put up in the next 100 years.
I think on the architectural & engineering side developing structures for Mars would provide immense progress in understanding sustainability for life on earth or elsewhere. This has applications for doomsday scenarios if you care about that as well as just general efficiency and sustainability of structures.
Likewise I think Mars has benefit as a potential launch point for space travel as it has an abundance of fuel and a significantly lighter gravity well.
Another part is the whole "necessity is the mother of invention" aspect. There is no quicker way to progress than doing. Yes it may be horribly dangerous but trial by fire has been repeatedly shown as a very effective way of exploring the unknown.
We could call these bunker-habitats "vaults", maybe. Then proceed to raise some capital for our startup and eventually call it "Vault-Tec"[0].
> You might still screw it up and they might not succeed if things really got that bad, but I'd bet their odds are better than any Martian colony we're likely to manage to put up in the next 100 years.
We could further fund it by conducting various sociological experiments. What could go wrong?[1]
[0] https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault-Tec_Corporation
[1] https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault
Mars has dust fine enough to be effectively aerosolised, and the low pressure makes removing it a bit tricky.
NASA has some ideas. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/kennedy-scientists-developing-t...
We haven't really used spin gravity in practice yet, so there are technical problems to solve there.
The most important thing for me is that most if not all of these problems are extremely relevant on earth and for dealing with climate change and overpopulation. Now one could say that we should then solve them for Earth first, but that's not how things work. We only have solar panels today because there wasn't any better way to power satellites. Earth makes things so easy that we won't go for >99% water reclamation, 0 waste green houses and so on.
The point is that, right now in 2019, we do not know how to build a self-sustaining colony outside of Earth's biosphere. If you want such a thing to exist, you have to do a lot of research first to enable it. But, in general, the space enthusiast crowd isn't interested in pushing for that kind of research. And without that research, a lot of the arguments for space travel are very moot.
A safety first attitude won't build a spacefaring civilization, but hopefully the Elon Musk anti-hype squad does not stop people from using their own resources to try and build one.
You won't know the what the severe issues are till you are there and trying to stay alive will be a great motivator to solve problems quickly. Simulating Mars gravity on Earth is impossible so Mars is going to be the best place to build a working model of a Mars colony.
Getting there would be. Living there would be constant danger plus tedium, the space equivalent of working on a farm barely making ends meet for the rest of your life. Such lives don't have enough dopamine hits to keep people of such dispositions around long.
Humans, somehow, manage.
Training for ultra-marathons (and running them) is painful and tedious. The thing that people need are goals. For example "survive on Mars for 2 months". Then the next person will come along and say "I bet I can do in for 3". Then 6, then 12. And if enough people do it, suddenly you have a "base camp" from which to run your extreme survival competitions.
The dopamine drip will last a long time. Eventually, someone will fall in love with Mars in the same way they fall in love with Everest or El Capitan, or whatever, and then a colony can start.
Humans are crazy, and a subset of us enjoy pushing past the boundaries merely to prove that it is possible to ourselves. To prove that we have no limits. I think those people should be given every opportunity that humanity can afford to give them to push the limits of human capability.
Gravity is probably one of the smaller problems. I don't see the point of going to Mars until we have a lot of experience doing similar things on the Moon or just on Earth. We should also have done a lot of long-distance flights like going to an Asteroid or just orbiting Mars first.
Right now a Mars colony would be plain suicide.
If the plan is to have a self-sustaining colony, then yes. But if supply flights are guarantied, I don't see the problem.
You can grow food in space. We do. We just can't have a enclosed system yet and are probably quite far away from it.
But I agree, that I think it makes much sense to do more ground- and moonwork first.
Nothing in spaceflight is guaranteed, and Earth-Mars spaceflight is a lot less subject to guarantee than Earth-ISS spaceflight, which hasn't been trouble free.
You're very far away from all the people who can't/won't/etc. go to Mars. For the foreseeable future you'd still be subject to needing resources sent periodically, but this would at least be a pretty limited interface. Hopefully science would be a good enough export to pay for it, otherwise some kind of nonprofit endowment would be needed.
Cockroaches are a tough problem. And management of soil microbes. But maybe the most practical solution is to gamma sterilize all bulk inputs, and carefully seed with just what you want.
Isn't there something we want that eats them?
https://www.peststrategies.com/pest-guides/cockroach-guides/...
This is the first time I hear about concrete sucking up CO2. Usually it's the other way around.
I think it's failure actually helped a lot, showing us that we just weren't ready to colonize Mars yet.
Valter Longo explains that his tenure in Walford's lab as one of the preludes to some of his great work demonstrating that some of the benefits of CR are achievable by using discrete periods of fasting as opposed to long-term restriction, which has obvious challenges of practicality and undesirable effects like emaciation just to name a few.
He talks about Dr. Walford's time in biosphere 2 and how it impacted both Walford's work and, ultimately, his own.
Starts around here around 00:01:45... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6PyyatqJSE&t=00h01m43s
The sensors were a dumb mistake. But some of the other mistakes, like trying to get the gas balances right. Those seem like useful learning lessons. Ed Bass sure didn't get his money's worth out of the project and I'm not sure any of us did. But some useful stuff came out of it.
https://twitter.com/julianweisser/status/1111686000248410112...
Due to the immense amount of atmosphere inside, they needed a way to handle the expansion and contraction over the course of the day, so they built a giant diaphragm roof that can raise and lower on top of an auxiliary dome. During the tour they take you inside to see it inflated, then take you into the outer shell and crack a door so you can watch the whole thing collapse.
Super simple mechanism, but it really hit home the complexity of the problem space.
Such a facility could be built in the desert, much smaller, but incorporating the lessons of Biosphere 2. (For example, that conventional glass blocks too much sunlight, and that curing concrete releases CO2.)
Next, just completely recycle the air.
Only after that, see if the ecosystem could be expanded and food grown for the inhabitants. That should also be staged, with the 1st part involving just supplying enough calories, the next parts working towards complete nutrition.
Instead of sealing the system from the get-go, first build it "leaky," then prevent the leaks.