deep-sea diver and Manager of the Analytical Laboratory while inside Biosphere 2, but, so far as we know, he had never planned to practice dentistry.
Those with medical problems brought in special equipment. Mark, working on strengthening leg muscles following a knee injury a few years prior, split the cost of a piece of gym equipment for leg presses with Roy. Roy also brought a stationary bicycle, a rowing machine, weights, some isometric equipment, and a couple of braces for a neck problem. Mark included knee braces, heating pads, and electric massagers in his kit. At forty-four the second oldest member of our crew, Mark found that he was beginning to become farsighted. So he came in with two sets of reading glasses—one to start with, and one for his eye doctor’s best guess as to what his eyesight might be after two years.
Since the Biosphere is covered with glass that excludes almost all ultraviolet light, there was no need for sunblock. In fact, we had to take vitamin D pills to make up for the lack of sunlight that the body normally uses to produce its own. We did bring sunglasses, however, because the light could be extremely bright inside; and of course, some used them to look cool.
Another useless item inside was money, although some of it floated in inadvertently in wallets or pockets. There was no money economy inside Biosphere 2. In time, other items came to be used for barter. Eventually, we bartered clothes, time, tools, but not food. Everyone ate their own as food was too precious to trade! Though, sometimes high-stake poker games amongst the crew were played for a handful of shelled peanuts.
ROOM FOR EIGHT
The eight of us were selected from an original group of fourteen biospherian candidates. We were a motley group: five Americans, two Brits, and a Belgian; four men and four women. When Mission One began, our ages ranged from twenty-seven (Taber) to sixty-seven (Roy). We were engineers, scientists, gardeners, and explorers.
Although many of us worked together for several years building the Biosphere, we still came in as eight individuals with unique histories. Gaie Alling, raised on the coasts of Maine and Georgia, experienced sailor and expedition chief, was one of the first marine ecologists to swim with sperm whales. Roy Walford, from California, was a world traveler and avid diver in addition to being the well-known author of The 120 Year Diet and a professor of pathology at UCLA who created four transgenic strains of mice and was one of the world’s authorities on aging. Linda Leigh, raised in Wisconsin, a field ecologist as familiar with temperate ecology as she is with tropical, was our “wild woman naturalist” whose favorite comic book character is Swamp Thing. Laser Van Thillo from Antwerp, Belgium, was trained in industrial mechanics and engineering before heading off to work in India and Central America. Eventually he would board the research vessel Heraclitus; first as diver, and then as Chief Engineer. Jane Poynter’s passion for gardening led her to range and crop studies in the remote Australian outback, where she began to work with domestic farm animals—unusual interests for someone born to the English upper classes. Mark Nelson, originally from Brooklyn, is a founder and Chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics, a small think-tank organization devoted to harmonizing ecology and technology. One of his main concerns for many years has been to bring together space researchers, medical scientists, physical scientists, natural scientists, technologists, and agriculturists from all over the world to work together addressing environmental problems. Sally Silverstone was the resourceful English co-captain whose background, both academic and practical, in social and agricultural problems of underdeveloped countries probably helped us more than we may have ever predicted when the doors first shut behind us. Taber MacCallum, raised in New Mexico, had also been a world traveler, lived in Japan and Egypt, and had been the Chief Diver on the RV Heraclitus during expeditions to explore coral reefs and island cultures around Australia and the Red Sea.
Of course, aside from the differences in experience and professional background, we were all different in temperament, a very ordinary mix of ‘night people’ and ‘day people,’ extroverts and introverts, theorists and practitioners, doers and dreamers—all thrown in together to make ourselves into one unified crew with one unified goal. Each of us had our own unexpressed hopes and fears about the commitment we’d just undertaken. Perhaps some of us longed for the scientific joys to be found in this new world, or the special intimacy in living closely coupled to the life forms of an intriguingly complex, dynamic system. Some crewmembers visualized this world as an opportunity for personal transformation—but in what form, who could say?
There were the dark fears, too, which we could scarcely admit to ourselves, let alone to the others. Would Biosphere 2 go disastrously wrong? After all, we were stepping into unknown territory. Maybe there was a reason why no one had ever built a biosphere before, practical reasons that we didn’t know about. The air could be poisoned by any one of the hundreds of trace gases; dangerous fungi might multiply and invade our bloodstreams. Plagues, locusts, fire, loneliness—we didn’t know what really lay ahead.
Although SBV included redundancy and what were hoped were fail-safe backups in the technical designs, we all knew the infallible rule of machines: they break down. If the cooling systems failed, temperatures could rise above 150 degrees under the glass roof in just a few hours, a biospheric oven. And dozens, no hundreds, of other disasters could easily be imagined, including the crew being run ragged working from dawn to dusk to keep everything going. Murphy’s Law could undoubtedly apply here as it does everywhere else: if nothing can go wrong, something will; if something goes wrong, everything will. This new world contained hundreds of machines, pumps, motors that could break down, tens of thousands of feet of cable and wiring ready to short-circuit. Were the eight of us heroes or fools for stepping in there?
We knew the world wanted to follow the experiment and how we eight were faring in our new world. The original idea that Biosphere 2 might be a quiet research and development project had evaporated when the US and international media began to run high-profile stories about what was happening in quiet, remote, Oracle, Arizona. None of us were prepared for an ever-increasing level of media attention. Thankfully, realizing we’d have to quickly learn the basics of dealing with the media, project management called in Carole Hemingway, of the Hemingway Media Group, to work with us. All eight of us had sessions with Carole and her partner Fred Harris, who became key parts of the Biosphere 2 media department throughout the year prior to closure. We learned how to effectively tell our stories and keep people informed about the progress of this “real time science” experiment which had captured the world’s imagination.
When we crossed the threshold, we couldn’t actually know if we would make it, although we were determined to do so and did not even admit the possibility of failure. From the Russian research in closed ecological systems, the less developed U.S. research, and SBV’s own studies, we were confident that it was possible. But not only did we not have all the answers—we didn’t even have all of the questions yet! This two-year experiment was the maiden voyage, the massive shakedown cruise for the most complex ecological experimental apparatus ever devised. If the system worked, Biosphere 2 would provide a powerful new experimental tool for the multidisciplinary science of biospherics, a controlled mesocosm in which to study global ecological processes both in detail and at a systems level, as a whole. The usually unmeasurable would become measurable.
Up with the crack of dawn, the first part of every morning is spent in the farm.
“Biosphere 2 is a new kind of telescope which can be used
