Feo: NASA: Fall from Grace?
Posted by Feo Amante on Nov 03, 2003 at 13:15
(206.72.67.158)Re: NASA: Fall from Grace? (Cure for Gravity)
Biosphere 1 is planet earth. Biosphere 2 is the little greenhouse near Tucson, Arizona.
If you've never been on a tour of the place, it looks and feels like a very good idea very poorly executed. The people who conceived of it should have had basic engineering skills (Or at least should have had advisors). A major part of the problem (and they tell you this on the tour) for the first experiment was the fact that the people who put the research together were largely ingnorant of comon construction techniques involved in the building of the Biosphere. They had no clue - for instance - that concrete sets, not dries, via a chemical process (hydration) and not a thermal one (which is why you can pour concrete into water and have it set. In fact, if you use concrete on land you have to keep adding water to it so it can set properly). So the Biospherians were placed into a container where the concrete (which takes up to 8 months to fully "set") used up a lot of their oxygen. This was not newfound knowledge. Any on-the-job concrete pourer could have told them this.
Also, during the transfer of flora into the biosphere, they allowed an Arizona desert insect known as the Crazy Ant (Paratrechina longicornis) into the Biosphere. An incredibly adaptable varmint. It went about killing off all the insects needed for a sustainable biosphere as well as destroying some plants and making life difficult for some of the other animals.
http://www.wilderness.org.au/campaigns/marine/christmas_island/ants_ciThe crazy ant infestation remains to this day.
Biosphere 2 was destroyed, not from poor science, but from poorly *executed* science, ignorant in the various needs involved in building and maintaining an enclosed, fully sustainable system.
Lesson learned? Know Your Tools!
http://www.bio2.edu/So whether or not a sustainable artificial environment can actually work remains debatable, not a closed book. Theoretically, it can work.