Two men in, one man out.
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.
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.
Concrete is not "new technology". And clouds are not even "technology", nor are they "new".
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.
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.
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.
“”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”
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.