An Odd Spaceity

My childhood ambitions have been fulfilled--I have been within Biosphere 2.

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!"

The good news is that we love Michael Phelps :)

Our past few days have been filled with highs and lows. The highs (the astonishing temperature; the height of the towering Catalina mountains surrounded by menacing clouds; the excitement of our cross-country adventure) haven't fully outweighed the lows. Thankfully, we have enough Twizzlers to last us for the time being! :)

We are mourning the loss of our possessions, but, more importantly, we're feeling isolated and estranged from this place. We learned Friday--an eventful day!--that the University really means they pay their graduate students in sunshine; they are giving Ben $10,000 less than we'd been originally told. $10,000 is a whole lot of money to be wrong about!

We've had some long, long days spent in this rented apartment considering all our options. We've driven through the heat of the day downtown, seeing the crevices we'd missed in previous visits, and we've been searching our souls about why we chose to come here and if the benefits are truly worth the extremes of living here.

Needless to say, there is much ambivalence and uncertainty. Having left Amherst, we are confident that even if we returned geographically, we could not recapture our particular brand of comfort there. Not that we are particularly inclined that way; as great as our time there was, we were unfulfilled and sought to attain much of what the Valley in our experience was not--its "shadow," if you will.

For Ben, it was upward career mobility and financial success; For Meg, it was a higher material standard of living and greater health. Arizona does have these things for us, which made it attractive in the first place. But we have learned that we took for granted some of the things that Arizona doesn't seem to have, like connections to people and place.

We recognize that, whatever we do next, it is up to us to make it happen. Having liberated ourselves from routine and obligation, we are well positioned to re-envision, re-create, and dream again anew the life that we want to lead. While this optimism is mostly Ben's, Meg is on board in her heart.

We've learned something important about sunshine, too, the theme of this blog; sometimes, there is too much of a good thing. And the best light is the one that radiates from within, shining upon friends and family.

So, we're seriously considering packing it in here and returning to NJ for a few months where we'll use this clarity of focus to plan a better, integrated and holistic life, one not so glaringly devoid of what we care about.

--Love from Ben and Meg

So many roads I tell you
New York to San Francisco
All I want is one
to take me home
From the high road to the low
So many roads I know
So many roads to ease my soul