Free Republic

It sounds like a sci-fi movie, or the weirdest series of Big Brother ever. Eight volunteers wearing snazzy red jumpsuits seal themselves into a hi-tech glasshouse that’s meant to perfectly replicate Earth’s ecosystems. They end up starving, gasping for air and at each other’s throats – while the world’s media looks on. But the Biosphere 2 experiment really did happen. Running from 1991 to 1993, it is remembered as a failure, if it is remembered at all – a hubristic, pseudo-scientific experiment that was never going to accomplish its mission. However, as the new documentary Spaceship Earth shows, the escapade...

"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...

As for-sale listings go, this one is a real fixer-upper-a 10-bedroom, 5 ½-bath glass house situated in Arizona's Sonoran Desert. The landscaping is lush, but it's a bit overgrown. (Truth be told, it's a real jungle.) There's a million-gallon pool, but the water is more than slightly brackish. The utility bills are a bear — about $1 million a year. And the place is infested with five species of cockroaches and overrun with voracious ants.