In December of 1989, if all goes well, eight scientists will enter a 2 1/ 2-acre glass-covered enclosure in the southern Arizona desert. Known as Biosphere II–the Earth is Biosphere I–the structure in essence is a large terrarium that replicates seven of the world`s tropical environments: rain forest, savannah, salt-water marsh, fresh-water marsh, ocean, thorn scrub and desert. Once inside, the scientists will seal the airlock behind them, and for the next two years they will live there, totally dependent on the ”mini-planet” for their every need. During those two years, barring medical emergencies, they will not come out to the outside world. They will act as if they were living on the planet Mars. Literally.
Food will come from a section of the Biosphere devoted to intensively grown fruits and vegetables. In addition to basic staples, grapes will be available for homemade wine, and the scientists, who will go by the futuristic-sounding name of ”biospherians,” will wake up in the morning to the smell of coffee from beans they have grown themselves. Cocoa plants will provide chocolate. Fish will be netted from a mini-ocean and special growing vats. Chickens and goats will provide eggs, milk and meat. ”The goats will be fenced in, or they`ll eat the rain forest,” Kathy Dyhr says resignedly. ”You know how goats are.” Dyhr is director of information systems for Space Biospheres Ventures, the company backing the project.
The construction of the world`s first large-scale closed environmental system on a 2,500-acre ranch north of Tucson is an ambitious undertaking. Nothing remotely near its scale has been tried before; the only successful closed system operating today has involved only shrimp, algae and microbes in a sealed glass sphere slightly smaller than a volleyball. The tiny shrimp eat the algae, which feed on the nitrogen fertilizer byproducts of the microbes, which in turn metabolize the waste from the shrimp. Nothing enters; nothing leaves.
One of the keys to making the Biosphere project work is to dovetail biogeochemical functions. For example, the number of animals and humans
–beings that breathe in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide–must balance with the plants, which take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen.
Space Biospheres Ventures (SBV) is a private for-profit company operated under the auspices of the London-based Institute of Ecotechnics, which in turn is largely a product of the vision of John Allen, a 58-year-old philosopher, playwright, scientist and thinker with a cosmic sense of destiny. Allen is executive chairman of SBV. He and the bright, young people who surround him see the Biosphere project as nothing less than a way to enable life on Earth
–not just humankind but all life, from microbes to mammals–to colonize the Moon, other planets and, eventually, other star systems.
Heady stuff. But while some surely consider Allen and his views outrageous if not demented, many others believe devoutly in the experiment that Allen and his associates have undertaken. A testament to those convictions is the fact that the seven-year, $30 million Biosphere II project is entirely privately funded. One of Allen`s primary backers is Edward P. Bass, a freethinker and the youngest of the four oil-rich Bass brothers of Texas, who together are reportedly worth some $4 billion.
Though nearly everyone involved in space exploration says biosphere research is critical to mankind`s future in space, no one, aside from the Russians, is doing this kind of research on a large scale, largely because of the cost. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is monitoring the project closely and has praised the cutting-edge work going on amidst the saguaro cactus of southern Arizona. Several of the nation`s top scientists are designing different areas of the Biosphere, and many more scientists are interested in monitoring the project. Many regard a biosphere superior to the more traditional metal space station as a space colony because once established, it is self-sufficient and will seldom, perhaps never, need resupplying. And, argue the people at SBV, it is more human. ”A future in space that is (purely) technological is not one that people would wish on their children,” says Dyhr, ”but a future in space in the context of a biosphere makes all the difference.”
There are hardheaded financial reasons behind the venture as well. One of the more practical goals of SBV is to market these self-sustaining biospheres. And in the course of development, SBV will have perfected a number of different technologies for agriculture, high-tech construction and the monitoring of air and water that it believes will find a ready market.
The opportunity for ecological research, according to some of the biologists and botanists involved in the project is mind-boggling. ”It`s wonderful,” says Tony Burgess, a Tucson botanist with the U.S. Geological Survey who is designing the desert area and will travel around the world to obtain species for that desert biome, or ecological community of living organisms. ”They`re paying me real money to learn everything I can about the desert and giving me a system to test some stuff,” Burgess says. Scientists also say that the reduction of the Earth`s fragile natural systems to a human level to allow people to see and scientists to study–for the first time
–exactly how life on the planet is interrelated and how the disruption of certain aspects of the cycle can affect other parts, will redefine the way we see our place on Earth.
”It`s not easy,” says Carl Hodges, one of the primary consultants on the project. ”When you`re trying to design a world, you have all the problems in the world.”
Allen, the man most responsible for launching the Bio-
sphere II project, is an Oklahoma native, a big man who played center on the Colorado School of Mines football team and attended several other universities including Harvard. Described by those who know him as a New Age Renaissance Man, he`s a trained metallurgist, engineer and management consultant and has worked for David Lilienthal, the first director of the Atomic Energy Commission. He has been heavily influenced by the noted American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller and has written plays and recorded unusual-sounding jazz music under the pseudonym ”Johnny Dolphin.”
Both Allen and Bass are publicity shy and have refused to give interviews after several harshly critical articles appeared in Texas newspapers and the Washington Post in 1985.
Allen and his associates started out as a theater group in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco in 1967. From there the group moved to a ranch near Santa Fe in 1969. The group eventually grew to an estimated 50 to 80 members with a dozen or so at its core. Some of those original members are now working on an array of projects throughout the world, which involve some 40 interconnected legal and corporate entities.
The governing body of these projects is the Institute of Ecotechnics, a British company based in London that has the stated goal of ”interrelating man, his culture, his techniques and biomes with the evolving biospheric totality on the planet Earth.” Founded in 1969, the institute essentially examines ways that mankind and his technology can coexist with the Earth without destroying it. Much of the research from the institute`s various projects will be applied to the Biosphere project.
The institute is owned by the people involved in its projects. The projects, all privately financed, include:
— A three-year, ice pack-to-ice pack expedition by the Heraclitus, a very sophisticated 82-foot research vessel modeled after a Chinese junk. The ship, which has aluminum masts, a concrete hull and computerized steering mechanisms, has logged 130,000 miles since 1975. Among other trips, it has circumnavigated South America and sailed 2,500 miles up the Amazon River. Its current trip, begun last January, will take it from Puerto Rico to Georgia, back down the east coast of South America, through the Strait of Magellan and up the west coast of South America, along the Central American coast, out to Hawaii and then north to Alaska and the Bering Sea. One of the purposes of the trip is to collect botanical and marine information for use in the Biosphere II project.
— The Caravan of Dreams, a converted warehouse in downtown Ft. Worth that has included an avant-garde theater, a nightclub, a karate school and living quarters for Allen and other members of his group. Original plays by Allen have been performed here. The building is topped with a large, neon-lit glass dome that houses an extensive collection of cactus and desert life.
— Las Casas de las Selvas, a 1,042-acre experiment in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, looking into ways that denuded tropical rain forests can be reforested.
— Two projects in northwestern Australia studying ways for mankind to make a sustained living in a desert savannah environment: Savannah Systems, a 5,000-acre project where biologists are experimenting with different species of grasses that resist drought, and Quanbun Downs, a 300,000-acre working cattle- and horse-breeding ranch that seeks practical applications for the knowledge gained at Savannah Systems.
— The Les Marroniers project, which is restoring a farm dating from the time of Louis XIV near Aix-en-Provence, France, through an advanced farming system that is compatible with a Mediterranean climate.
f all his projects, however, Biosphere II is Allen`s pet and the key to his goal of establishing life on other planets.
The concept of Earth as an organism and of biospheres that can be created by humans is not new. Vladimir I. Vernadsky, a Russian geologist, cartographer and crystallographer who lived from 1863 to 1945, is credited with first developing the idea of this planet as a biosphere. He hypothesized that the Earth was not a just collection of different species all doing their own thing on the planet. Instead, he thought that all the various forms of life that form the Earth`s crust like the skin of an orange, though appearing to be acting independently of one another, actually interplay and work together as one large organism or one giant living cell. Mankind, according to his theory, is not separate from this organism called the biosphere but is an integral part of it.
The idea was independently conceived also by James Lovelock, a British biologist and inventor who wrote the book ”Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth” in 1979. Calling the biosphere Gaia for a Greek goddess of Earth, Lovelock theorized that life does not just adapt to the environment, as Darwin postulated, but that the environment is also adapting to the life within it. Lovelock also theorized that the biosphere may even have its own consciousness.
A fundamental aspect of the biosphere theory is that life on the planet has a tendency to expand into all available ”econiches” (components of an ecosystem), a trait Vernadsky called the ”pressure of life.”
In an intriguing 90-page book, titled ”Space Biospheres,” that reads like a ”Star Trek” screenplay, Allen, writing with Mark Nelson, chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics, takes the biosphere concept further. For one reason or another, Allen says, it`s inevitable that Earth will one day cease to support life. Some scientists predict, for example, that within 5 billion years the Sun will burn out. Or man may destroy the planet much sooner. One of Allen`s key points is that space biospheres are the logical extension of ”the pressure of life”–a way for the bio-
sphere to hedge its bet against such a collapse. Earth is ”doomed to die unless it can birth offspring that can escape to other stars,” Allen writes. He believes that he and the SBV people are participants in the pressure of life. By building mini-biospheres, they believe they are, in essence, preparing seeds of life that can be transplanted, first to nearby planets and then to other stars like a fleet of interplanetary Noah`s Arks sailing on some cosmic tradewind and eventually making port somewhere in the universe to release a living cargo onto some barren sphere. Should such colonization be successful, Allen says, the biosphere will achieve ”cosmic immortality.”
Because there is water on Mars in the form of ice, Allen has chosen the planet as the first goal for colonization.
