a trip, Biosphere 2 escaped, momentarily, from the atmosphere of earth.
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Precarious Stability Biosphere 2 was built as the world’s most airtight building, designed to leak no more than 10% of its air per year (half the rate of the Space Shuttle). Without 1970s advancements in her| 15 metic enclosure, it was sealed to tolerances only dreamed of by machine-age architects. Facade consultant Peter Pearce patented the “Multihinge” node-less space frame triangulated to minimize thermal flexing. Structural silicone was factory bonded to two layers of glass and plastic laminate.13 Sealant was applied in two colors (white and gray) to make redundant enclosure legible. A skin of welded stainless steel plates lined concrete slabs and foundations beneath two to six meters of soil. Neoprene spanned 158foot diameter steel drums housed in geodesic domes to create “lungs” that expand and contract as Biosphere 2’s interior air heats and cools. Hunting for leaks, installers waved incense under the glass and shot compressed air through “sniffer tunnels” to verify welds. Equilibrium was engineered by instrumentalizing two distinct ecological theories: Darwinian competition and cybernetic regulation. In addition to the “Intensive Agriculture Biome” and the humans’ “Habitat,” there were five “Wilderness” biomes, with some species grown in greenhouses and others trucked in as entire landscapes. Swaths of tropical rain forest were sampled from Venezuela, savanna from
French Guyana, desert from Baja, marsh from the Everglades, and the ocean from the Yucatan. At the suggestion of William S. Burroughs, bushbabies were introduced to supply companion primates.14 Biosphere 2 designers included “more species than the scientists thought might finally survive, so that if one species failed, another would thrive, finally reaching self-organized stability.”15 Unlike those of the prevailing reductionist science, this would be a new kind of lab: operating with a large number of variables to study systems at the scale of the earth’s ecosystems, while (in theory) being able to track “every atom in the Biosphere’s systems.”16 Ultimately, however, the atmosphere seeped back in. Biosphere 2’s sixty-mile long, termiteproof, silicone seal was eventually penetrated by ants, creating an insect network that united its biomes with the Sonoran Desert outside. Due to unforeseen oxygen absorption by the raw concrete, oxygen plummeted from 20.9% of the atmosphere to 14% (equivalent to respiration above 10,000 feet) in six months.17 A measured amount of air had to be added for survival. If Biosphere 2 was headed towards homeostasis, it was not the Arcadia imagined at the outset. Biospherians soon went hungry, lost an average of 14% of their body weight and reported caffeine A hot-dog stand [was set up] not far from the Biosphere... Sometimes we lined up …and took turns peering through binoculars at fat people who were spurting ketchup on sausages and shoveling them into their mouths. We were culinary voyeurs.18 Few imagined that their Eden would be overrun by ants, roaches and morning glories. Five species of roaches were included to recycle dead leaves, but a stowaway species from Australia multiplied into the millions. The person on night watch had the chore of creeping into the kitchen to catch them unawares. Armed with