continued his round of preventive maintenance, which included cleaning filters in the water systems. He called the Energy Center to check on the status of repair of their backup generator and on our supply of chilled water. The higher the outside temperature, the colder the water had to be in order to cool down the Biosphere.
We had already cut the dry grasses in the dormant savannah in anticipation of the first rainfall to bring it out of dormancy. The timing of these seasonal climate changes were determined by the SBV research division which then required coordination between the Biosphere 2 crew and personnel in Mission Control to program the air handlers. Between our morning break and lunch, Roy re-calibrated sensors for atmospheric temperature and humidity.
At 11:30 Sally started a phone call with school children in Ohio. Seated in their school library, some sixty eighth graders listened on speaker as Sally talked about Biosphere 2 and then answered their questions. Hundreds of schools around the country have used educational materials from Biosphere 2 to learn about biomes and global ecology. Many grade-school students have designed and even constructed their own model Biospheres complete with plants and even insects. All eight of us frequently connected with schools in Arizona and around the country–one of the most enjoyable of our “jobs” while inside. When Biosphere 2 was first planned, it was not expected that it would be more than a quiet research endeavor in the somewhat remote, and seasonally quite hot, Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona. We expected to recoup the investment by building other biospheric laboratories in world cities which would double as eco-tourism destinations. But when Biosphere 2 struck a nerve and excited people around the world, people began coming–by the dozens, hundreds, then thousands, even before we had created a formal visitor’s program. Consequently, we realized that biospherics education had to be an important part of Biosphere 2’s program; and reaching and changing minds, especially young minds, was a major payback for the epic creation of the facility.
By noon, Gaie showered, changed, and returned to the kitchen to make final preparations for lunch. Like most of the Biosphere 2 cooks, she’d done much of the work the previous afternoon while fixing dinner. With the vegetables cut and the potatoes already baked, she only needed to finish the salad. She made a dressing (bananas blended with water and chopped herbs), popped her baked potato casserole into the oven to reheat, and salted the soup of beans, vegetables, and chicken broth which had been slowly cooking in a crock pot since the night before. She then sautéed Swiss chard and beet greens in the wok and mixed up another cold salad of sliced beets and papaya.
Jane and Sally were giving the goats and chickens their midday feed. The buck, Buffalo Bill, received a diet lower in protein than the milk goats and had to be locked into a side pen during each of the three daily feedings. The two kids normally kept Buffalo Bill company, but since they were now a week into being weaned, they also were fed a different diet in a separate pen. Buffalo Bill was a veritable Houdini at opening pen doors, so before leaving, Jane routinely double-locked them and tied them with a loop of baling wire.
Lunch time was 12:30. A couple of latecomers had let us know via radio that they’d be along soon, and we prepared plates for them. All our meals were either served on individual plates or put out in servers where it’s easy to see each one-eighth portion. Everything was eaten, a tribute both to the care with which the cooks prepared the meals, and to the appetite we brought to each meal.
Over lunch, we’d share more news. We were all especially interested in animal sightings in the wilderness, news from TV radio, or email, or what comes over the grapevine from friends or staff with whom we had recently been in touch with by phone. Jane brought up the coming arts festival we had planned and who on the outside would be sending in their music, paintings, or poems over the video system. Laser enthusiastically described his encounter with a baby galago in the orchard the previous night; Linda said it was a baby newly born to Topaz. One of our buddies in Mission Control took on the weekly task of renting the latest video releases for us. Laser announced that Lorenzo’s Oil and Malcolm X had just been piped in and we all let out a hearty cheer. ‘Piping in’ a movie means that Laser would place a blank tape into the VCR to record what had been transmitted through the video link with Mission Control.
For an hour and a half after lunch, we usually took an informal siesta. After the initial months of adjusting to the new diet, the heavy physical work, and the lower oxygen supply, not many of us actually used the time to take a nap, but instead relaxed in our rooms reading or phoning friends. It became a welcome break in the workday. Everyone in Mission Control knew our schedules, so there were no radio calls during that time, unless there was something urgent to attend to. This day Mark’s family came to visit him at the special window we use to meet with outsiders. His mother, who after closure, made the big move from Brooklyn to Tucson, his brother, and his sister-in-law, who lived just a few miles away, chatted with him at the window through a speaker phone.
Around 2:30, Sally would place the next allotment of food in large plastic tubs in the refrigerator. Taber, the next cook on the rotation, began his cooking duties by checking the blackboard in the back kitchen where Sally noted the available quantities of some of the staples. These changed from week to week depending on our harvests and on Sally’s calculations (assisted by computer) of our nutritional needs. Taber’s beans had already been soaked overnight, and since the morning they had been slowly cooking in a crock pot. Our foods included many whole foods, so there was more washing, peeling, and soaking than normally required in a typical American meal preparation.
Jane and Gaie put on loose-fitting work clothes for the messy, sweaty job of cleaning two rows of algae scrubbers. Gaie cleaned the Plexiglas containers and wave-buckets, while Jane scraped the old algae off the screens. The harvesting of the algae off the screens was labor-intensive, so the biospherians would alternate the job, each doing one to two hours every two weeks. Before they completed the job, Jane and Gaie placed the scraped-off algae in racks in the room’s drying ovens.
Now R2D2 had to be moved to its new location in the lower savannah. First Linda disconnected the long cable which carried its measurements to one of the large computer stations in the basement. Then Mark and Taber coiled the cable and extension cord and gently moved the ‘portable’ but awkward sixty-pound apparatus over the surprisingly rugged and varied Biosphere 2 terrain. They re-ran the cable and extension cords to the nearest side air vent that drops down to the basement and Linda later rewired the cable to the closest computer cabinet and electrical outlet. There were computers along with thousands of sensors all over the Biosphere: parts of the “Nerve System” that collected data so it would be available to us and Mission Control.
In each biome, a circular plastic ring had been fixed in the ground for R2D2 to sit on. A greased gasket ensured an airtight fit. The instrument had two sensors to measure both the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the carbon dioxide diffusing out from the soil. Before R2D2 was constructed by Mission Control staff at the end of our first year, Linda and Taber used to take the measurements manually, taking a syringe of air every six hours over twenty-four-hour periods and then running the air samples on a gas chromatograph in the Biosphere 2 laboratory. We’d occasionally use the manual method to check the accuracy of R2D2 and to take samples in other biomes if R2D2 was occupied elsewhere.
The weekly Mission Control meeting via video started at 3:00 PM. Sally and Laser joined Norberto Alvarez-Romo, head of Mission Control, Bill Dempster, in charge of engineering systems, and Bernd Zabel, operations manager for the Biospheric Research and Development Center (BRDC) to coordinate activities between the two worlds and review technical systems. Sally and Laser sat at the V-shaped table in the command room which was outfitted with both the video link and a document reader. They talked over the operational and research activities for the week and a few problems that needed Mission Control’s attention. Mission Control noted that vegetation was
