the time to understand how to use it, to discover the kind of questions we should ask, and to scale up from there.”
– Dr. Christopher Langton, Santa Fe Institute
June 2, 1992
INTERVIEWERS AND VISITORS always ask us what a typical day was like inside Biosphere 2. What did you do on February 10 or June 2? Did you mark your calendar with any special event that day? Or was it just another Monday or Tuesday?
Even if we didn’t check our logbook or diaries, we could say that we spent Tuesday, June 2, 1992 in a way that was unquestionably different from anyone else on Earth. But to us it was a fairly typical day. Here is a look at what filled our hours that day; the explanations of events are brief, because many of these daily tasks were a continuous part of the much larger challenges and research studies which the remainder of this book will detail.
Dawn broke over the Santa Catalina Mountains at 5:35 AM that morning. No activities were scheduled at that hour, but the crew’s early birds were already stirring. Linda got up to do her early morning check of the wilderness areas, including observations on how much had been eaten of the ‘monkey chow’ put out in bowls for the galagos (the small primates also known as bush babies) in the lowland rainforest. Sally made her early morning cup of mint tea and was already on her way to work in the vegetable patch of the agriculture system. Mark, who had also gotten up early, was hand-watering the supplemental crop boxes on the agriculture balcony, and cutting fresh mint and herbs for the kitchen. He would soon log into his email to review the weather report of the last twenty-four hours and record it in his notebook.
By 6:30, Gaie, the breakfast cook of the day, sounded the official wakeup call. She phoned each apartment, allowing the crew a half-hour to shower and dress before the hour of work that precedes breakfast.
There was one major difference between the bathrooms you’re familiar with and the ones inside Biosphere 2: we had no toilet paper. There was no way that our recycling system could handle the amount of toilet paper that eight people would produce in two years. Instead, we used a water spray that hung next to the toilet. We found it in a plumbing catalogue designed for Saudi Arabian customers; the Arabs (as well as many other cultures) consider toilet paper far less effective for hygiene and have used water for the purpose for centuries.
Flushing the toilet, of course, didn’t mean that ‘it went somewhere’ to be forgotten. All of the water that comes from the human habitat area—from toilets, showers, kitchens, laundries—went to the basement of the agricultural area and into the waste recycling system. Since we monitored the system every day, we could often tell if a faucet had been left open or a toilet was malfunctioning, because a suspiciously large amount of water would have entered the tanks.
After the wakeup call, Gaie headed for the kitchen to get breakfast going. She pre-heated the oven, boiled water for porridge and tea, and then stopped in at the command room to get the twenty-four-hour report on carbon dioxide to bring to the morning meeting.
By 7 AM, work had begun. Sally was milking the four she-goats, and Jane was feeding them. The buck and two bleating kids got their feed, too. Sally fed the chickens their portions of worms and azolla, a high-protein fern that grew on the surface of the water in the rice paddies. Later they’d bring the milk, plus eggs collected from the chickens, up to the breakfast table.
Jane checked the status of the irrigation tanks in the agriculture basement and the fields to ensure that the computer-programmed watering system had been triggered successfully. Sally began her daily collection of fresh vegetables, and since it was a Tuesday, she also brought up the next week’s rations from the basement by elevator—burlap sacks of sweet potatoes, taro, flour, and beans. The supplies and the five-gallon buckets of vegetables Sally had picked had accumulated in the plaza outside the main double doors leading into the farm.
Linda, Taber, and Mark took pruning shears and sickles to the rainforest. Linda and Taber climbed into the space frame in the northeast corner to continue cutting back morning glory vines that were shading the trees. Mark was working by the varzea, the rainforest stream, cutting and bundling up morning glory vines that tangled the steep slopes of the banks and waded into the stream to cut and haul out their roots. By the end of the hour, Linda and Taber gathered twenty-five pounds of the most edible morning glory leaves and vines for the fodder storage bins in the animal bay, our enclosed barnyard area.
Laser logged on to his computer program in the command room to check the technical systems around the Biosphere. A special vibration analysis program gave early warnings of potential breakdowns. He studied the analysis report, completed the weekly maintenance report, then took a quick trip to the basement below the savannah to check on the tanks of water that had been condensed out of the air which passed through the wilderness biomes. Laser was in charge of the rain for the wilderness area (both terrestrial and marine) and had to mix the water which drained through each biome (its leachate water) with an appropriate amount of condensed water to make acceptable irrigation water for each area.
Meanwhile, Roy was completing the laboratory workups from the last set of biospherian medical checks. He was also in the process of conducting a stress hormone study, which requires the collection of daily urine samples. He added the fixative agent to the next day’s collecting bottle and stored the previous day’s samples in the freezers in the genetic and tissue culture laboratory on the mezzanine above the analytical laboratory.
By then, Gaie had finished fixing breakfast. Porridge was standard for every breakfast, and that day she made it with a mix of sorghum and wheat flour, sweetened with ripe bananas and papayas, topped with goat’s milk. The rest of the menu depended on the cook’s allotments of food. On special holidays and birthday mornings there might have been omelets or banana-filled crepes or even a cup of coffee from beans grown on one of the dozen young coffee trees. (The few beans we grew in the Biosphere were never enough for daily cups of coffee.) That morning, along with the porridge, Gaie served a carrot-cake loaf topped with an icing of milk, banana, and passion fruit; there was also a side dish of beans and sweet potatoes stir-fried with chilies.
At 8:00 AM, the kitchen chimes would finally sound on our two-way radios, and we assembled for breakfast. Our breakfast started off with the usual joking and social conversation, but it also served as our morning staff meeting, updating everyone on the progress of the experiment. Sally called the meeting to order and went over who was on the day’s watch and who had cooking duty. She also asked Mark for the weather report, which included key environmental data: high and low temperatures in all the biomes for the previous day, the relative humidity in the agriculture area, outside temperatures (needed for gauging how to program our air handlers for cooling and heating), outside and inside total light received, and high and low carbon dioxide values at various sensors. Gaie then added the high and mid-point CO2 for the previous day, which was followed by a discussion about various options to deal with CO2 levels, tactics which had to conform with the SBV research strategy of minimizing the impact of elevated CO2 on the overall system, and specifically to the ecology of each biome. Should temperatures be lowered in the biomes to lower soil respiration? What was the status of compost making which releases CO2? When would the dormant desert and savannah receive their first activating ‘monsoonal’ rain, setting off an extra release of CO2? Finally, Sally outlined the tasks for the morning agriculture crew, and each crew member outlined his or her day to make sure that all activities were coordinated.
After Sally adjourned the meeting, the 24 hour watch duties (similar to a ship’s officer watch) was officially handed over from Gaie, who was on every Monday, to Mark, the Tuesday watch. Seven biospherians share the watch duties because Laser, as technical manager, has to be on back-up call for all of the others. If anything unusual had happened on Monday, or if there were any alarms during the day,
