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Revisiting Biosphere 2
Behibd the Black ^ | April 5, 2018 | Robert Zimmerman

Posted on 04/05/2018 1:32:52 PM PDT by Voption

"This week Diane and I have a friend visiting from back east. As locals generally do when guests visit, we used this visit as an excuse to go sightseeing at local attractions that we somehow never got the time to visit on our own.So on Tuesday we drove north to take a tour of Biosphere 2, what has been called “a giant space-age ark in the middle of the desert.” The idea, as sold heavily to the public when it was built in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was that eight people would try to live in a closed system for two years....The system wasn’t really closed however (power came from outside), and during the first two year mission it seemed they were somewhat lax about keeping the system closed..."

(Excerpt) Read more at behindtheblack.com ...


TOPICS: History; Hobbies
KEYWORDS: bass; biodome; biosphere2
Its backer, Texas oil man Edward Bass, spent somewhere between $150 to $200 million. It seems however that the managers running Biosphere 2 didn’t keep good books, and when Bass asked for an accounting they couldn’t provide it....
1 posted on 04/05/2018 1:32:52 PM PDT by Voption
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To: Voption

2 posted on 04/05/2018 1:35:44 PM PDT by Red Badger (The people who call Trump a tyrant are the same people who want the president to confiscate weapons.)
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To: Voption

Two men in, one man out.


3 posted on 04/05/2018 1:38:08 PM PDT by TexasGator (Z1)
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To: Voption

I toured that place once - Bass was a scientific HERO for funding that- it was amazing.

The ‘tards he got to run it, however, were something else.

The 8 lunatics who put themselves inside it for a year drove each other crazy, and according to the tour guide we talked to, they never speak to each other these days.

They should have kept it up after the first crew went in.

If they went nuts after 3 months they should have stopped, rebooted, and started again with a new crew.

And kept doing it until they learned things.

Now it is just being used as a giant greenhouse for experiments- but it was AMAZING thing to see, and I wish Bass was more renowned for his effort.


4 posted on 04/05/2018 1:45:27 PM PDT by Mr. K (No consequence of repealing Obamacare is worse than Obamacare itself.)
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To: Red Badger

I was thinking more along the lines of....
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
https://youtu.be/GbQy-0SzshA
(3:30)

On a more serious note however; I totally forgot about this place and it’s good to get an in-person opinion on it. And it’s apparently generating some authentic science now. From the last part of the Article:

“Biosphere 2 survives today because the University of Arizona needed a facility where it could do a controlled agricultural experiment, dubbed the “Landscape Evolution Observatory.” Unlike the original Biosphere 2 experiment, this project is from the get-go entirely focused on very specific scientific questions.....The money to run this project comes partly from grants, partly from the income provided by paying tourists on tours, and partly from a $30 million gift from Biosphere 2’s original backer, Ed Bass. Despite the facility’s checkered history, it appears that he hasn’t given up on it.”


5 posted on 04/05/2018 1:47:00 PM PDT by Voption
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To: Mr. K

Thank you for the info!


6 posted on 04/05/2018 1:48:22 PM PDT by Voption
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To: Voption

He probably believes in AGW..................


7 posted on 04/05/2018 1:51:20 PM PDT by Red Badger (The people who call Trump a tyrant are the same people who want the president to confiscate weapons.)
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To: Voption

I really loved that experiment. It was badly designed and poorly executed, but it really should have been continued using the lessons learned. Heck, I spent most of my high school years jotting down ideas for a Bioshpere 3.


8 posted on 04/05/2018 1:52:32 PM PDT by Ellendra (Those who kill without reason cannot be reasoned with.)
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To: Voption
...during the first mission, the oxygen levels in the facility dropped over time much more than expected, caused first by far cloudier weather than expected (resulting in less plant growth), and second by an unexpected absorption of oxygen by the curing concrete in the building. Both of these issues involved engineering miscalculations, but such mistakes are part of the development of all new technology. You can’t think of everything, and so you do experiments to find out what you failed to account for.

Concrete is not "new technology". And clouds are not even "technology", nor are they "new".

9 posted on 04/05/2018 1:53:00 PM PDT by WayneS (An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. - Winston Churchill.)
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To: Voption

Always thought it would be a blast to live in that thing. The trick would be to drive everyone else nuts as soon as possible so they’d leave and you could have it all to yourself.


10 posted on 04/05/2018 1:55:54 PM PDT by bigbob (Trust Trump. Trust Sessions. The Great Awakening is at hand...MAGA!)
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To: Voption

The biggest problem is they went at it backwards. They started with the “big” run, which of course had problems and wound up completely invalidating the science. The first run should have been a month, they shouldn’t have tried for a whole year until the 10th run having built the length with every time. They’ve still managed to run some OK science there in intervening years, especially when it was run by Columbia. And being a fair bit cooler than the city it’s a great place to go in the summer.


11 posted on 04/05/2018 1:58:59 PM PDT by discostu (It's been so long, welcome back my friend, to the show, that never ends.)
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To: WayneS

A self sustaining sealed system bigger than a fish tank is very much new technology. Most new tech is built of things that already existed but nobody put them together that way with that goal before.


12 posted on 04/05/2018 2:02:13 PM PDT by discostu (It's been so long, welcome back my friend, to the show, that never ends.)
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To: Voption
No lie - I thought the title said Blogosphere 2.
13 posted on 04/05/2018 2:03:18 PM PDT by Windflier (Pitchforks and torches ripen on the vine. Left too long, they become black rifles.)
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To: Red Badger

Red Badger;
You’re killin’ me guy!
:)
-Respectfully... No, Zimmerman is not a climate-change nut.
(as for myself, I only try to link to hi-quality stuff and everyone is welcome to take a look or not.)

He’s on “our side!” Tea-Party, classical-liberal, free-marketer, science-writer & science-historian.
He lives in Arizona, took the Tour, and wrote about it...
—never met the Guy, but I’ve read his books & listen to him on the John Batchelor Show.
http://behindtheblack.com/climate-and-sun-science-bibliography/
“Below is a bibliography of all the research I have done on the subject of climate change, with a secondary focus on the question of the Sun’s influence on that climate. This bibliography covers a period from around 2002 until 2010, when I stopped adding to the list... I publish it here both as a reference for my readers, and to also document the scope of my knowledge, should others ask why I have concluded that the field of climate science is very complex, that we really don’t know what is going on, and that anyone who says the science is settled has likely not done much research in the field. I don’t say that blindly. I base it on a careful review of the field, and the questions that good climate scientists are struggling with.”


14 posted on 04/05/2018 2:24:33 PM PDT by Voption
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To: Voption

We visited the BioSphere a couple of years ago. We found it dirty and not well kept. I cannot imagine living there. IIRC, a member of the first group to ‘live’ in the BioSphere nearly cut off a finger and had to be removed to a hospital, within the first few weeks. I would have stayed out. Looking from afar, the East Coast, when the experiment was begun, I thought it would be a great place. Now it is a place for biology experiments for kids from the U of Arizona.


15 posted on 04/05/2018 3:30:10 PM PDT by originalbuckeye ('In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act'- George Orwell.)
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To: Voption

“”This week Diane and I have a friend visiting from back east. As locals generally do when guests visit, we used this visit as an excuse to go sightseeing at local attractions that we somehow never got the time to visit on our own.So on Tuesday we drove north to take a tour of Biosphere 2, what has been called “a giant space-age ark in the middle of the desert.””

I next expected to read “And as we do with all of our visitors from the east, we kicked them out of the car and drove off when we got there”


16 posted on 04/05/2018 4:42:09 PM PDT by Celerity
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To: Voption

The problem began with the original design concept. To start with, design solely for biological efficiency. That is, you first want a closed ecosphere that is entirely *balanced* and can operate without any intervention. A terrarium.

Only when you have that can you intentionally create a situation of *imbalance*, in which people would consume the excess, and their waste would replenish deficits. Almost as important as the people themselves is their microbiological biome. All the different kinds of bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms in them. They likely need to be incorporated into the ecosystem even before the people arrive.

So when the humans are introduced, you are not creating imbalance, but restoring balance.


17 posted on 04/05/2018 6:36:06 PM PDT by yefragetuwrabrumuy (Liberals have become moralistic, dogmatic, sententious, self-righteous, pinch-faced prudes.)
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To: WayneS

missed the whole point, didn’t you


18 posted on 04/06/2018 4:02:12 AM PDT by Mr. K (No consequence of repealing Obamacare is worse than Obamacare itself.)
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To: Mr. K

No. I merely pointed out a ridiculous statement made by the author.


19 posted on 04/06/2018 8:03:04 AM PDT by WayneS (An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. - Winston Churchill.)
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To: WayneS

He was not talking about CONCRETE being a new technology, he was talking about a fully enclosed biosphere habitat, as the ‘new technology’ that was under test.


20 posted on 04/06/2018 9:12:00 AM PDT by Mr. K (No consequence of repealing Obamacare is worse than Obamacare itself.)
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