Biosphere 2

Story

Biosphere 2 was built to be a planet in miniature — 3.14 acres of sealed glass and steel in the Sonoran Desert, engineered to keep eight people alive without a single breath from the outside world. The name was deliberate: Earth is Biosphere 1. This was the second.

Construction ran from 1987 to 1991, funded almost entirely by Texas billionaire Ed Bass, who committed $150 million to the project after meeting systems ecologist John P. Allen at the Synergia Ranch, a counterculture commune in New Mexico. The structure's glass-and-steel spaceframe was designed by Peter Jon Pearce, a one-time associate of Buckminster Fuller — and the engineering had to be extraordinary. Seals tight enough that oxygen loss during the first two-year mission still measured less than 0.25 percent per month.

On September 26, 1991, eight crew members sealed themselves inside: Roy Walford, Jane Poynter, Taber MacCallum, Mark Nelson, Sally Silverstone, Abigail Alling, Mark Van Thillo, and Linda Leigh. They grew most of their own food — bananas, sweet potatoes, rice, wheat, cowpea beans — and reported near-constant hunger in the first year. By the end, they had lost an average of 16 percent of their body weight. Oxygen quietly bled from the atmosphere. Nineteen species of vertebrates went extinct inside. Morning glories ran rampant.

But inside this slow-motion struggle, something worked. The agricultural system produced at yields estimated to exceed the most efficient farms in Southeast Asia. The crew's health markers — cholesterol, blood pressure, immune function — improved measurably. The experiment was not a failure. It was something stranger: a partial success in conditions no one had fully anticipated.

One engineering problem nobody could fully solve sits above everything, visible to anyone who looks up. The sun heats the air inside during the day; at night it cools and contracts. Rather than fight those forces — which would have been structurally ruinous — the designers built pressure-relief chambers called "lungs": enormous white domes where a giant flexible diaphragm rises and falls with the building's breath.