Conventional futurist wisdom suggests that if our atmosphere should completely go to pot — which it certainly appears to be doing — humans could still eek out an existence living in self-sustaining biospheres. This would hardly represent a desirable outcome, but hey, it would certainly beat extinction. Moreover, a successful biosphere would prove to be an important step in the direction of space colonization, terraforming and remedial ecology.
But there is one major problem with this suggestion: we have yet to create a closed ecosystem that can support human life for the long term. This revelation seems strange at first, but it's true. We can send men to the moon, but we can't sustain an artificial ecosystem. The fact that we haven't been able to do so needs to be taken much more seriously. The Earth's natural biosphere is still the only functioning one we have; all our eggs are currently residing in one basket.
It's time to revive the biosphere projects of the early 1990s. Given the private sector's recent enthusiasm to develop space tourism technologies, perhaps another X Prize is in order.
BIOS-3 and Biosphere 2
Our inability to create a closed ecosystem is not for a lack of trying. To date there have been two major biosphere projects, both of them failures.
The Soviets conducted a number of experiments in BIOS-3 from 1972 to 1984. Technically speaking it was not a completely isolated biosphere as it pulled energy from a nearby power source and dried meat was imported into the facility. BIOS-3 facilities were used to conduct 10 manned closure experiments with the longest experiment lasting for 180 days. Among its successes, the Soviets were able to produce oxygen from chlorella algae and recycle up to 85% of their water.
More recently there was the Biosphere 2 project in Oracle, Arizona. At a cost of US$200 million, Biosphere 2 was an attempt to create a closed artificial ecological system to test if and how people could live and work in an independent biosphere. It was a three-acre Earth in miniature complete with a desert, rainforest and ocean. Organizers conducted two sealed missions: the first for 2 years from 1991 to 1993 and the second for six months in 1994.
Article comments
1 - Matt
I agree. I tried to make my own small scale biosphere- tried to keep it very simple, just moss, woodlice and some earth in a small sealed glass container. In theory all the components for a closed loop system were there but there was nothing even remotely scientific in my method. I suppose I was thinking along the lines of 'well the earth manages to keep itself ticking along nicely, surely my system will sort itself out in the same way.'
Result: nothing moving after 5 days. Even the moss looks on its last legs 2 weeks later.
Cobbled together in a quiet afternoon as a should-have-grown-up-by-now schoolboy project I was surprisingly taken aback by the totality of the failure. It was sobering in the extreme.
Commercial 'ecospheres' are available which pull off the sealed ecosystem trick for several years at a time but the prospect of anything coming along capable of keeping humans alive for a sinilar period seems remote. I'd be strongly in favour of a biosphere X prize- for the insights it would provide into the workings of earth systems as much as any benefits for space travel or the design of defeatist 'refuges' (I'd like to think that if our society develops sufficient knowledge and motivation to make a successful self-sustaining artificial biosphere -which I'm sure will be no easy feat- it would also develop the know-how to avoid the need for temporary 'biosphere refuges' in the first place)