Biosphere 1 is the Earth. The founders chose the name, Mark Nelson and William Dempster wrote, “to emphasize that the Earth’s biosphere (Biosphere 1) is the only biosphere known to science,” and that theirs would be the second. It was a claim and a confession in one: to copy a thing, you have to believe you understand it, and the concept of a biosphere, as they also noted, was then scarcely a hundred years old.

The word

The word is Austrian. The geologist Eduard Suess coined Biosphäre in 1875, in a book on the origin of the Alps, for the thin envelope at the planet’s surface where life occurs, by analogy with the lithosphere of rock and the atmosphere of air. For fifty years it was a term of geography.

The Russian mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky made it an idea. In The Biosphere, published in 1926, he argued that life is not a passenger on the planet’s chemistry but one of its principal forces: that the composition of the air, the oceans and the rocks has been made, over geological time, by living things, and that the biosphere is best understood as a single system that turns sunlight into the ordered chemistry of the planet. The field he founded, biogeochemistry, is the one Wallace Broecker practised when he came to Oracle to find the missing oxygen. Vernadsky’s book was translated into English late and read by few in the West; one place it was read closely was Synergia Ranch, where John Allen’s group made it something like a founding text.

The flasks

The first person to prove that a biosphere could be made small was a microbiologist in Hawaii. Beginning in 1968, Clair Folsome at the University of Hawaii scooped water and sediment from a Pacific beach, with everything living in it, into glass flasks, and sealed them permanently. Nothing went in or out but light. The microbes inside went on eating, growing, dying and being eaten, and many of the flasks were still alive decades later, as long as the community sealed in had been diverse enough and the light kept coming. Dempster called it the simple but enormously significant step: proof that a self-sustaining closed ecological system could exist at a scale vastly different from the planet’s. The sealed glass globes with shrimp and algae sold as desk ornaments since the 1980s descend from Folsome’s flasks. So, in ambition, did a building in Arizona.

The basement in Krasnoyarsk

Between the flask and the building came the Soviet Union, which had a reason to care. Tsiolkovsky, the theorist of Russian rocketry, had written at the start of the century of “closed ecocycles” as the condition of living in space, and the Soviet programme took it literally; the slogan Nelson quotes is “We must grow our own apples on Mars!” The early work, in Moscow in the 1960s, paired humans with tanks of the alga Chlorella, which regenerated air and water well enough but could not be eaten in quantity without making people ill.

The step to higher plants was taken at the Institute of Biophysics in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, under Josef Gitelson. After two smaller systems, BIOS-1 and BIOS-2, the institute built BIOS-3, a 315-cubic-metre steel structure in a basement, finished in 1972 and used until 1984. Crews of two and three lived in it for up to 180 days under artificial light, growing wheat, vegetables, oilseed and root crops on about 400 square metres of hydroponic beds that met roughly half their food; the air was almost fully regenerated, though catalytic burners were needed to burn off trace gases, and the water was purified by the plants’ own transpiration. Human waste, apart from some urine, was dried and stored rather than recycled, and dried meat was brought in for protein.

The crews were doctors, engineers and agronomists, and when the carbon dioxide fell too low for the plants they burned straw to raise it. They stayed healthy. It was, Nelson and Dempster wrote, the first system in which a human being was not just a unit of mass exchange but the active manager of his own life support.

NASA came to the problem later and from the other direction. Its calculations were about mass: a person, by one 1980 estimate, consumes three times their body weight in food every year, four times in oxygen and eight times in drinking water, more than a thousand times an adult’s weight over a lifetime, and none of that can be carried to Mars. The agency’s closed-system programme began in 1978, and its most ambitious facility, the Biomass Production Chamber at Kennedy Space Center, opened in 1986. It exchanged between two and ten percent of its air with the outside every day. BIOS-3 and the chamber were both, in the end, farms with a bunk room: one kind of ecosystem, agricultural, plus the humans. Nobody had tried to seal in a wilderness.

The claim

That was the step Allen and Nelson proposed in Space Biospheres, published in 1986, two years before the Test Module’s first human closure and five before the big one. Their argument ran from Vernadsky: if the Earth’s living envelope is a single self-regulating system, then the life-support system humans will need beyond Earth is not a machine with plants in it but a biosphere, several ecosystems in a sealed envelope with the people inside as one species among many. Folsome had shown it worked in a flask. Krasnoyarsk had shown that higher plants could feed people for half a year in a basement. The question was whether it would work with rainforest and ocean and desert at three acres, and the only way to find out was to build it.

Dempster’s own introduction to the engineering, years later, began with the same thought: that the planet is “essentially a materially closed self-sustaining ecological system traveling in a void of space hostile to life,” and that it had been demonstrated that such a system could be created on a vastly different scale.

The name, then, was less grandiose than it sounded and more exposed. Biosphere 2 was not a claim to have equalled the Earth. It was a claim that the Earth was the kind of thing of which there could be a second instance, and a bet, with Bass’s money, that the second instance would teach something about the first. The oxygen in the concrete, the soil that out-breathed the air by a factor of a thousand, the pollinators that died and the ant that ruled: each was a lesson about Biosphere 1 that no one had been able to run as an experiment before, because no one had a second one to run it in. Donella Meadows, who liked the project and despaired of its managers, wrote that its lessons would be useful “not just for Biosphere 2, but for Biosphere 1 as well.” That was the founders’ claim too. For once the critic and the crew agreed on what the building was for.

Sources

• Mark Nelson and William F. Dempster, “Living in space: results from Biosphere 2’s initial closure, an early testbed for closed ecological systems on Mars,” in Strategies for Mars, 1996. The name’s rationale, the Soviet and NASA history, Tsiolkovsky, the apples, the mass calculations, and BIOS-3’s operation.
• William F. Dempster, “Biosphere 2 engineering design,” Ecological Engineering 13 (1999), 31–42. Folsome’s flasks, BIOS-3’s size and crews, and the opening sentence on the planet as a closed system. ecotechnics.edu
• Eduard Suess, Die Entstehung der Alpen, Vienna, 1875, where the word first appears; Vladimir I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, Leningrad, 1926, English edition Copernicus, 1998.
• Clair E. Folsome and Joe A. Hanson, “The emergence of materially closed system ecology,” in Nicholas Polunin (ed.), Ecosystem Theory and Application, Wiley, 1986.
• I. A. Terskov, J. I. Gitelson and colleagues, Closed System: Man–Higher Plants (Four Month Experiment), Nauka, Novosibirsk, 1979 (NASA translation TM-76452); Raymond M. Wheeler, “Bios-3 project in Krasnoyarsk, Russia,” NASA Technical Reports, 2004.
• John Allen and Mark Nelson, Space Biospheres, Synergetic Press, 1986.
• Donella Meadows, “Biosphere as theater,” October 28, 1993. donellameadows.org