OK--maybe not all of my childhood ambitions. There are the guitar duets with Bono and Tanya Donelly, as well as the vigilante hideout concealed beneath a neighborhood pond...but I digress.
How can you be a youngster reading 3-2-1 Contact! magazine and not want to dwell in a simulated spaceship environment whilst remaining within the full gravitational influence of spaceship earth?
(You know that Meg must really love me, not only for dragging herself out to the desert to give it a shot, but also for tagging along for my ultimate geekboy fantasy tour.)
I took two videos, which we may figure out how to upload in the near future. I also took over 60 photos, so the many that you see here are but a fraction of the treasure trove, as it were. Here's a Google satellite map, too. ("How many wonders can one cavern hold?"--Ariel)
While some, such as us, may think of it as the rich man's Arcosanti, Biosphere 2 was pretty cool. If you ever found geometric abstraction in the style of Buckminster Fuller to be striking or beautiful, feast your eyes on this:
Ever wonder what a million-gallon artificial ocean, complete with fish and coral reef, in the middle of the Sonoran desert looks like? How about how it might appear from a concrete ventilation shaft that leads to an artificial rain forest where unauthorized birds who surreptitiously entered the biosphere made an appearance?
And let's say your wife entered a low-ceilinged tunnel with a great tour guide named Lynn who happened to be a former chemist who worked in the mining and metallurgical industries prior to becoming a researcher at Biosphere 2. And let's say that the tunnel led to a gigantic aluminum disk that was suspended from the ceiling of a circular room by a membrane composed of artificial rubber made by DuPont.
And then we ascended to the temple to sacrifice our nerve energy to the diety Triangulus.
And it was good.
And then we descended to the aquarium/artifical ocean viewing level. The tanks looked much cooler through polaraized lenses.
Not bad for a tax-deduction that cost about $450 million of a Texas oil billionaire's private fortune. Unfortunately, however, the mission of the Biosphere 2 hit a bit close to home, what with the first inhabitants seeking to cut themselves off from the outside world for two years. Hermetically sealed behind layers of glass, they could communicate by phone and email but were otherwise self-sufficient and isolated from the rest of the world. :(
Also, their mission was something of a flop. The 100% human-controlled environment revealed itself to be a contradiction in terms as insects, microorganisms, unexpected shifts in the composition of atmospheric gasses, and a dearth of sunlight presented big hurdles to the "biosphereans." The tale reads more like Jurassic Park or Frankenstein than Silent Running.
With its Promethean talents and urges on full display, humanity reveals itself as more Icarus than Demiurge. When man tries to control nature, it can be a losing battle.
All of this space-age stuff and the question of the human-made reminded me of that touchstone, 2001: A Space Odessy. Through the lens of Biosphere 2, we can read it as a parable about the limits of human power, and specifically human potency as expressed through the production and use of artifacts. Whether regarded as "nature," "God," or a monolith from an alien civilization, something beyond the comprehension and control of humanity provides (perhaps gracefully and benevolently) the foundation and direction for our development and progress.
Our limited primate brains are capable of much greatness, but this can lead to hubris and our neglecting to revere that which is both provident and transcendent to us. Biosphere 2 reminds me of the deepest human longings and highest human achievements, dual as they may be. We can glimpse eternity and intelligence in geometry, and we can foolishly deny our connection to the world in which we are surrounded. We can strive to understand and serve as stewards of the richness of life, and we can overlook our own fallibility and fancy ourselves explorers when we are more so escapists.
It reminds me of that quote, "if you want to make God laugh, make plans!"
Posts
As a fellow geek, I express my envy of your entry into Biosphere 2. How wonderfully cool! I hadn't heard much of it for quite some time, but I recall being imptessed with the project when it began. There seems to be much that can be learned from it, for both Earthbound and spacefaring application. Of course, a key is a willingness to learn the lessons that are truly there, not just the lessons one might wish to see. This is the difficult heart of science.
ReplyDelete