Those suits were reminiscent of the uniforms of the V- series aliens or perhaps those of the Kraftwerk electronics group. Dressed in them, four men and four women began a feat in September 1991 that played with the imaginary pop and sprinkled it with scientific epic. Two years were to be confined to their own will in a hermetic structure. They wanted to simulate the living conditions of a future human colony in space. They were "a small group that literally tried to reimagine the world", in the words of Matt Wolf, director of the documentary Spaceship Earth, which tells the peculiar story of the group, presented in January at the Sundance Festival.
There is a huge expectation that September 26, 1991. The stands that line one side of Biosphere 2 are overflowing, in Oracle, Arizona. The structure has a kind of huge greenhouse in the shape of a truncated pyramid. If instead of glazed it was opaque, one of the Blade Runner would be said. Elsewhere a polyhedral turret rises, a perfect setting for any other science fiction shoot. The youth of the time have grown intoxicated by the fast-paced adventures of Star Trek, Galactica or Logan's Escape.
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But what the Biosphere 2 contains is not cardboard stone. It houses a real 1,900-square-meter rain forest, an 850-ocean, with included coral reef, mangroves, and deserts. With their animals and plants. A miniature double of Earth perched on the original planet. Nothing and nobody should enter the time that the experiment will last, which wants to analyze whether it is possible for a living community to be self-sufficient during that long time, as they will one day have to do in the first human colonies on other worlds. "Eight scientists are going to lock themselves in a terrarium," opens a live television program. The eight inmates look like astronauts, but instead of traveling to the stars they are not going to move from the walls of Biosphere 2. "What you are going to see here is how eight biospheres are going to be locked up for two years," stresses a journalist.
The Truman show would still take seven years to premiere. And although Big Brother was just a character from Orwell, the first origin of the idea goes back to the readings of some idealistic young people in the California of the sixties. Kathelin Gray, Salty, is holding Mount Analog, by the French René Daumal, an unfinished work in which a wise man gathers a diverse group of people to take them to a mountain that curves the space that surrounds it. Within it, there is a parallel world. "I want to do what this book says," she asks herself.
His charismatic friend John Allen draws friends from different parts of the US to create the Theater of All Possibilities together: a perfect name for an idea born in San Francisco in 1967. “He was the person you wanted to go with to the unknown ”, he remembers now in the documentary Salty. Allen had worked at a meat-packing plant, then in the Army, then earned an MBA at Harvard. But I just knew that I wanted to do something different, unusual.
Go if it did. In 1969, the group moved away from the city of the jipis, which increasingly seemed like a stereotype. They bought cheap land in New Mexico. They named it Synergia Ranch. "We will call ourselves the synergists," they proclaim. They will live in a place designed to unleash their theatrical creativity and grow their own food. They are self-sufficient and read Artaud, Burroughs, who warns that humanity is heading for an ecological disaster. They pass each other a book on whose cover the Earth seen from the Moon appears, the photo of Apollo XI, which a few months earlier has put Man on the satellite. Come Mysterious Ships, a movie that shows a floating colony in space with plants, animals and humans.
And they are fascinated by a Buckminster Fuller work, Spaceship Earth . Fuller, a visionary scientist, has coined the concept of ephemeralization: doing the maximum from the minimum. Its huge but lightweight geodesic domes are one of his greatest finds. The inhabitants of the Synergy ranch, another word wanted by Fuller, will build one of those structures on it.
But the ranch is too small for their ideas. They decide to go to Oakland, to make a boat. Without having previous naval knowledge. "Construction was like a performance," recalls Salty. They threw it out, crossed under the Golden Gate, and traveled through South America, Africa, Europe.
A commune or a company?
“We were not a commune, we were a corporation. We started businesses around the world to get money, ”says a team member, who is nicknamed - without giving the viewer a clue as to why - Shit Horse . "We were quite capitalist," he adds. The group finds Ed Bass, a millionaire heir to Texas oil, from one of the richest families in the United States, perhaps the most different thing from a jipi you can imagine. They open an art gallery in London, they put on a play in Antarctica, there are no limits to their inventiveness.
They take seriously what they have read in fantastic literature books. To explore the relationship between man and Earth, they create the so-called Eco-Technique Institute, with Bass's money, and gather a group of scientists in the south of France. There are also artists, explorers, entrepreneurs, and of course the synergians are present. There is talk of global warming and one of them plans to make a microplane, which includes a bank with thousands of living species, the human among them. The first colony in space would be tested on Earth. Science fiction, non-fiction.
If they have made a ship from scratch, why not a biosphere? In 1986 they begin to build Biosphera 2 in Arizona. Number 2 comes from being the second; the first was already created: it is Earth. Allen warns them that the experiment will probably not work the first time, and maybe the seventh time either. But they will get closer and closer to simulating life in space. They have advisers from the University of Arizona, the Smithsonian, and the Botanical Garden of New York. You have to unite knowledge of agriculture, engineering, ecology. To mount it they have about 150 million dollars of the time (135 million euros). The investor, the rich Bass, hopes to license his biospheres to conquer space.
In 1990, 15 people reach the final selection to be biospheres. They enter a module that serves as a test. The media approaches Oracle to record images. Is it science or a show with an environmental pretext? Are they a sect? Some media describe them as members of a commune. Shortly before the eight chosen are confined, the synergists perform a play: The wrong stuff, something like "things wrong". Like a psychodrama, they stage everything that can go wrong within Biosphere 2.
Fear of CO2
The long-awaited day arrives and cameras crowd around the structure planted in the reddish Arizona terrain. The eight greet the public and the cameras. "Isn't it as if they went to the moon?" Says a journalist. “This is an incredible moment. The future is here, ”says one of the confined women. The last of them tries to close behind him a white metal hatch with a porthole. It doesn't fit very well. After two or three tries, it closes. They're inside. It is assumed that no more air, water, or food will enter in two years. The only thing outside will be sunlight, electricity - they argue that in space electricity could be obtained by other means - and the voice and image that reaches them by phone or videoconference. They will have to live off what the land and animals give, breathe recycled air and drink water. The biggest fear is that carbon dioxide will suffocate them, but there is now a lot of work to do to keep the biosphere alive. They say to launch 64 scientific projects.
Oxygen is as scarce as that of more than 4,000 meters of altitude. In the end, 10% of the total atmosphere must be injected from the outside. The promise of totally confined life falls apart
The first problem is neither lack of air nor water or food, but an accident. One of the biospheres loses the tip of a finger in a threshing machine. They decide that she can leave the structure to undergo surgery. They operate it and go back inside. That exception, serious as the reason may be, increases doubts about the seriousness of the project, because it is later known that it puts in provisions from abroad. The rest of his colleagues have to take care of planting and the farm, their work, and they lose time to investigate. Complaints arise. Good meals soften conflict. Provisions continue to arrive, as a cover. To want to live like on Mars, dependence on the outside is excessive.
The biggest fear comes true: the level of carbon dioxide is increasing. With a couple of steps going up, they notice they drown. The plantations bear little fruit. Various species die, but the spoons are heaped out of the pipes. They have to focus on some crops that hold up better. They eat beets even in the soup. The group's doctor, Roy Walford, convinced that a hypocaloric diet lengthens life, and in this sense a precursor to what science will prove years later, is in his sauce. The oxygen level is so low that they fear it will damage their brains. Poorly fed, half-suffocated, the fights and resentment against John Allen begin, oh, great creator of the idea, oh, great guru of Rancho Sinergia.
Watching a doc about that Biosphere 2 project in the 1990s (aka “Bio-Dome” to us millennials) and was fully not expecting an unrecognizable Steve Bannon to show up in the end as the money-hungry antagonist of the story — because of course . pic.twitter.com/aWq98Q9khL
- Ms. Taffy Lee Fubbins (@lotsofnope) May 26, 2020It turns out that the project has a catch: They have installed a CO2 scrubber, like on submarines. An apparatus that would not serve for a long-term project off the planet. Investigators are resigning. How to explain that trick is hidden from public opinion? "What we have now is a submarine with plants inside," grumbles a computer scientist who had left the project some time ago. They also amend the flat Lynn Margulis, eminence of biological evolution, which the Biospherians adore. Instead, Thomas Lovejoy, a great name in the study of biodiversity, supports them from the Smithsonian. Critics blame the project that it is not under peer review and that a control biosphere has not been prepared for comparison. What they do is not science, it is entertainment they are told. But the facilities do not stop receiving tourists, who fascinated view the four men and four women as if they were exotic fish swimming in a tropical aquarium.
In 1993, the entrepreneur who started the project uses an investment bank to revive it: Steve Bannon
The documentary seems to want to clean up the image of the project at this point. Collect the testimony of one of the biospheres who assures that the CO2 scrubber was hardly used. But at the time the media stalk John Allen, who does not want to respond. A scientific advisory committee is created to relegitimize the project, but it leads to a hotbed of conflicts, which are also transmitted to the interior: Allan has paranoid illusions, one of the committee's researchers tells Biospheres. The inmates want me to show my face. They feel cheated. They live in a kind of continuous altitude sickness. Oxygen is as scarce as that of more than 4,000 meters of altitude. In the end, 10% of the total atmosphere must be injected from the outside. The promise of totally confined life falls apart, but Biospheres can run and take a deep breath for the first time in a long time.
Steve Bannon enters the scene
Financial difficulties are added to technical difficulties. At the beginning of 1993, a few months before the biospheres exited to the outside world, Ed Bass had to inject 50 million dollars (45 million euros) because the project did not stop losing money. And to refinance it, it uses, among others, an old acquaintance, an investment banker, who has worked and escalated within Goldman Sachs to get venture capital funds: Steve Bannon. Isn't it ironic that a project designed to study the viability of human life mounted by some idealists from San Francisco fell into the hands of a climate change denialist, apostle of the new extreme right and former adviser to Trump? Synergists working for the Biosphere from the outside see Bannon appear accompanied by a group of marshals from the United States Marshals Corps, to conquer, almost literally, the facilities.
In September 1993, just as it was two years old, the door, almost a hatch, of Biosphere 2 opens. Not all eight inhabitants want to leave. Some have fallen in love with that life outside the world, but in a place so similar to the world. Primate ethologist Jane Goodall waits for them outside and gives them a welcome speech.
In 1996 Biosphere 2, now in the hands of the University of Arizona, was opened to the public. Ed Bass has once again donated $ 30 million (€ 27 million) to the project. Of those eight pioneers, seven are still alive. The only one who has died was curiously the doctor, who hoped to reach 120 years thanks to his diet and exercise, but who died of ALS at 79. Some synergists lived again, and continue to this day, in a corner of the only biosphere that continues to operate with complete autonomy, in Rancho Sinergia.
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