Since the dawn
of humanity, we've had a complex
relationship with nature. We're obviously a part
of it, but often we view ourselves as
separate from nature or even working against it. Through the control of fire,
the rise of agriculture, and the growth of
our civilization, we've been molding the Earth's
environment to suit our needs. MATT WEBER: We
try to control it. We try to protect it. We depend upon it. And we try to understand it. But could we recreate it. Taking what we know
about the planet and what we need to
survive, could we replicate the
earth's ecosystems? Well, back in the late
1980s, a group of scientists attempted to do just that. In the middle of the Arizona
desert lies a 3.14-acre research facility that
was designed to mimic earth's complex natural systems. This cool-looking giant
greenhouse building is known as Biosphere 2. MATT WEBER: OK, but
where's Biosphere 1? That's a great question. It's one that were
commonly asked. So Biosphere 1 is the Earth. CRAIG BENZINE (VOICEOVER): This
is John Adams, deputy director of Biosphere 2, which is
currently owned and operated by the University of Arizona. Biosphere 2 was
really thought up in the early '80s
with this notion that there was a lot of
discussions about space travel, extended stays in space. And the recognition was, how
are you going to do that? CRAIG BENZINE (VOICEOVER): In
1987, a private organization, Space Biosphere Ventures,
headed by billionaire and environmentalist Ed Bass,
spearheaded and designed the construction of Biosphere 2. The project hoped to demonstrate
the feasibility of space colonization by recreating
the earth's ecological systems inside of an artificial habitat. JOHN ADAMS:
Inevitably, you would have to take some of
these biological processes that we're so
dependent here on Earth for into space and balance what
happens between them to support the existence of a
certain number of people for an extended period of time. No one really had tested
that on a large scale. CRAIG BENZINE (VOICEOVER):
And Space Biosphere Ventures would attempt that. They intended Biosphere 2
to be a completely closed, self-sufficient system, like
the earth's own biosphere, where plants, animals, and humans
could live indefinitely. MATT WEBER (VOICEOVER):
In fact, it was the largest closed
system ever constructed and one of the most ambitious
and complex earth science experiments ever conceived. And for the most part,
they got it right. MATT WEBER (VOICEOVER):
In September of 1991, eight people were
sealed in Biosphere 2. Known as Biospherians,
they would live inside the structure
for a full two years. All their food,
water, and amenities had to be obtained from the
habitats inside the biosphere. They would have
no direct contact with the outside world for the
entire length of their stay. And almost right
away, things started to go wrong on Biosphere 2. And one of the first
things they began to notice, the oxygen began to go
down and down and down. About halfway through this
first two-year mission, it got so low that they
had to add oxygen in, because they were concerned for
the safety of the individuals inside. This was a problem. The introduction of outside
air defeated the purpose of the closed system that
Space Biosphere Ventures was trying to achieve. This, along with the perception
that management wasn't being forthcoming with
their problems, led Biosphere to be losing
credibility as fast as it was losing oxygen. JOHN ADAMS: They were
very heavily scrutinized by the media and the press. And as they say, the wheels
came off the wagon at that time. CRAIG BENZINE (VOICEOVER):
Along with the oxygen loss, Biosphere 2 experienced a
number of other problems, including massive plant
and animal die-offs. The Biospherians had
difficulty raising enough food to feed themselves and
were constantly hungry. This contributed
to morale problems, causing a rift in the
group, splitting them into two factions. And these problems, along
with the abrupt resignation of the project's
scientific advisory board, seemed to confirm the view that
the biosphere was just for show and not actual science. A second mission was
attempted in March of 1994. This second crew was able
to fix some of the problems the first crew had. But because of management
disputes and dissension among the crew that culminated
in two Biospherians sabotaging the closed system, the mission
ended after only six months. Biosphere 2's managing body
dissolved at this point. And with its original purpose
seemingly invalidated, the fate of the
project was uncertain. Geez. It seems that they
failed big time. A lot of people
like to say because of this initial falling-out
and loss of credibility, that it was a failure. And no experiment is a failure. And that's what this was and is. It's an experiment
on a grand scale, had never been attempted before. And the engineering
is absolutely amazing. But what they did learn,
and probably in my opinion the single most
important lesson, is really how little we truly
understand Earth's systems. CRAIG BENZINE
(VOICEOVER): Biosphere 2 was designed to contain
five biomes or habitats-- a rainforest, an ocean, a
savanna, a mangrove wetland, and a fog desert, along
with an agricultural area and living quarters. Although people don't live
in the biosphere anymore, the ecosystems are still
thriving and have been growing for over 20 years now. So we're walking
through what we call the lowland of the rain forest. And the rain forest
is a pretty cool area. I mean, if you can
believe it, we're standing in southern Arizona,
but look where we're standing. This is amazing. JOHN ADAMS: So all of
this growth that you see has taken place over
the past 23 years that this system has been
growing and establishing. It looks like you're
running out of room. The trees are hitting
the ceiling now. JOHN ADAMS: They are. And one of the things we
periodically have to do is we have to go in and trim
those upper canopy trees. Now, I think the most important
thing for people to remember is that you can never recreate
Earth in its entirety. It's impossible. There's just too
many complex things. Really? Really. Let's get out of here, guys. But what you have
now is you have plants that have been
growing for about 23 years. You have a soil column
that's confined and isolated from the outside world. So underneath, all the biosphere
is a big stainless steel liner. So there is no
exchange or interaction with the desert soil outside. So all of this is evolving
and able to grow inside of this system with very little
influence from the outside. CRAIG BENZINE: Yeah. It's warmer. JOHN ADAMS: So you can feel
almost an instant humidity change. CRAIG BENZINE: Yeah. Oh yeah, the
fogged-up camera lens. JOHN ADAMS: So every
rain forest has to have a waterfall and a pool
of water and we'll walk down and we'll see our stream. So this is our ocean. CRAIG BENZINE: We
going swimming? JOHN ADAMS: We are. Ready to go scuba diving? The tank itself is
about a million gallons. By the time you put in the rock
and the sand and everything else, the volume of water is
just under 700,000 gallons. CRAIG BENZINE: Cool. Seems like-- it
smells like a beach. We're on the beach. JOHN ADAMS: It's
pretty nice here. What a huge change from
sweating in the rain forest in the humidity to something
that's pretty cool. This feels like a
nice-- a perfect day. It's nice and cool, not
too hot, on the beach. In order to achieve these
environmental conditions, there is a suite of
mechanical equipment that sits below us in
a basement-like space that we call the technosphere. Biosphere itself, the footprint
is a little over three acres. And you have almost two acres
in this technosphere space where we have these
big units here. These are our workhorses. These are air handlers. So they circulate the air
as well as condition it. Up above, we can see all kinds
of pipes that are running. So these are going to move water
from one location to another. Electrical lines,
pumps, motors-- but it takes all of this to
recreate that which Earth is doing every day for us. CRAIG BENZINE
(VOICEOVER): In addition to controlling airflow,
there's another major issue that the biosphere
designers had to consider. Biosphere 2 has a volume
of 7.2 million cubic feet. As a closed system,
it's designed to lose very little of
the air it contains. But Biosphere 2 sits in the
middle of the Arizona desert and is subject to large
temperature changes from day to night. You heat the air
up, it expands. It's got to go somewhere. And the only where it can go
is to push out on the glass and eventually create enough
pressure to cause an explosion. Kablooey. Or at night as it
cools enough, you can have greater external
pressure than internal and you create an implosion. Backwards kablooey. To remedy this problem,
Biosphere's engineers had to help the
facility breathe, so they gave it a lung. A lung? Yep. A gigantic, 40,000-pound lung. So you're feeling strong today? Did you have your
Wheaties this morning? I didn't. OK. All right. I had coffee. We'll see if this
will work for you then. So we're in one of two
of these geodesic domes. Inside of that is
this large diaphragm. So this aluminum dish
here weighs about 16 tons. The rubber membrane
weighs about four tons. So combined weight
is about 20 tons, or approximately 40,000 pounds. Oh, my God. And so what happens is the
air expands inside Biosphere. It's got to go somewhere. It comes in here-- path
of least resistance. It pushes this up. And then at night, this
weight pushes down on the air and pushes it back
inside Biosphere. So by this structure
going up and down, it regulates air pressure
inside the facility, all while keeping the
pressure relatively constant. And the reason I asked you
if you had your Wheaties is-- so if we grab
this, we can pull down and you and I can
move 40,000 pounds. That's awesome. And all that's holding this up
is differential air pressure. There's no crane. There's no hoist. There's no big
winch that's moving. And so this thing will
just go up and down and just oscillates. That's amazing. OK, that's pretty sweet. But what do they use the
biosphere for these days? Are they going to seal in
another group of people? Well, no. At least there are
no plans right now. If the original Biosphere 2
mission's taught us anything, it's that there's
a huge blind spot in our understanding of Earth. So since the end of
the original mission, the facility has been used
as a gigantic earth sciences laboratory. So we can learn about
those blind spots. Most earth science experiments
are done on a very small scale, in beakers and small lab setups. MATT WEBER
(VOICEOVER): Not always a great model for
something as massive and complex as the Earth. CRAIG BENZINE
(VOICEOVER): The only way to test Earth's systems is
to use the Earth itself. MATT WEBER (VOICEOVER):
But that must be pretty hard,
if not impossible, to control all the variables. JOHN ADAMS: But Biosphere
is this intermediate step, where you have these established
biological communities. And you can come
in and say, hey, I to increase the
temperature and look at how the system behaves. Or, I want to cause
a drought, or I want to change the atmospheric
concentration, whether it's CO2 or some other gas and
look at collectively how this whole system responds. And there's no other place
in the world at this scale that you can do those
types of experiments. Some of the earliest
research at Biosphere focused on manipulating CO2
levels in the atmosphere-- To model projected CO2
levels in our own atmosphere and see what happens. JOHN ADAMS: So we've
heard about carbon dioxide going up in the atmosphere. And we hear a lot of the
debate centering around how that's going to change
the temperature of the Earth. But one thing we
know for sure is that as you increase
atmospheric CO2, it's a gas that's
soluble in water. And what ends up happening as
it diffuses into the water, it begins to lower the pH. CRAIG BENZINE (VOICEOVER): This
is called ocean acidification. It was theorized
for a long time, but was first demonstrated
on a large scale by researchers from Columbia
University at Biosphere 2. They were the first
institution, the first research institution, to really
manage Biosphere and sort of kick the tires and see what
it could be used ecologically. Increasing the acidity of the
ocean environment in Biosphere 2 had detrimental effects on
the growth of its coral reef. And this doesn't bode
well for the Earth's oceans if this happens to them,
since coral reefs provide a habitat for a quarter
of all the marine species on the planet. At this moment, the
University of Arizona is getting set to conduct the
world's largest earth sciences experiment at Biosphere 2. The world's largest? The world's largest. It's called the Landscape
Evolution Observatory, and its main purpose is to study
how water flows through soil. They built three artificial
sloping landscapes housed in a 5000
square meter facility. It's pretty big. That's a very wide water slide. It is, and this
is the top view. And a lot of people say,
is this the water slide or the ski slope
inside Biosphere? But all kidding aside, this
is the world's largest earth science experiment. And it took many different
disciplines coming together to ultimately come
up with questions and what you see here,
the design of this. We think of water
as something that we will understand very well. But a lot of the
hydrologists will tell you that the principles that we
use to describe its behavior, especially as it moves
below the surface, they were all developed in
the 19th and 20th century. And we're still
using them today. CRAIG BENZINE
(VOICEOVER): Because of our limited knowledge of how
water moves through a terrain, it's very unpredictable. JOHN ADAMS: I mean, we
hear about it all the time. There's either too little
water, for example, in Southern California,
or there's too much water, like Texas is getting. There's never this happy medium. And so water is one of
those resources that is going to be most
significantly impacted by a change in our climate. But understanding its
behavior is critical for us, understanding as it rains
in the mountains how much is going to end up
downstream for societal needs. MATT WEBER (VOICEOVER):
Layer by layer, they'll build a replica
landscape by first laying bare soil and then
slowly adding plant life so they can see how the
flow of water through soil changes as you
change the landscape. JOHN ADAMS: The other
really cool thing-- and maybe it's not
cool when I mention it to you right now-- but we're
standing underneath a structure that weighs 2 million pounds. But it's on-- these columns
right here, each one of them has a scale. And they tell you exactly what
the weight of the structure is. And as you add water, you
can see that weight go up. And as water leaves
the system, you can see that weight go down. And what we can do is it allows
us to mass balance the system. Where is every droplet
of water going? And the hope will be
is this will give us a better idea of the
behavior so that we can make more informed decisions. Biosphere's
original purpose was to model what it would take
to keep people alive in space for an extended period of time. Are they ever going to get
back to that kind of research? Matt, I'm glad you asked. The University of Arizona
is doing just that. JOHN ADAMS: How can we take
what we learned in Biosphere and potentially create
bioregenerative life support systems? Biosphere was
extremely ambitious. And they tried to put in
as much diversity and all of those natural systems
that you find outside. Well, they quickly
learned that it was very difficult to
balance all of that. So the next generation,
if you want to say, was to go with really
a hydroponic setup. What you've got
here now is a system that's growing and recycling
nutrients, carbon, oxygen in a way that in theory,
it could potentially support a person for one year. This is how much would
be needed for one person? Yes. You'd start out with the
appropriate amount of water. And it would just
recycle that water. It would eventually
be able to recycle. There are components
to recycle your waste and to produce enough oxygen
as well as caloric intake. CRAIG BENZINE (VOICEOVER):
This is just a model. But the idea is that eventually
a lunar greenhouse like this would be sufficient
to provide all the food, water, and oxygen for
one astronaut on a daily basis. JOHN ADAMS: So we really now
have a unique opportunity to leverage this one of a kind,
world's largest earth science laboratory in ways that
no one could have even envisioned early on. We only have Earth, and we're
dependent on these systems and the processes. And so figuring out
a way in which we're able to continue to
have those resources and exist in a way that's
favorable for us is crucial. So what do you guys think? The Earth is a giant mystery. Will we ever unlock all of its
secrets through experiments like Biosphere 2, or will it
be forever out of our reach? Let us know in the comments. And we'll reach down
there with our eyes and read those comments. And understand the
complexity of your words. Thanks for watching. If you like our show and you'd
like to help it continue, you can go over to Patreon
to become a supporter. Last video, you
went skydiving and we talked about thrill seeking. And this is what
you guys had to say. After seeing me go
skydiving, many of you commented that you now
want to go skydiving. I can only attribute that
to how good I made it look. I looked good. But I think that's great. When the dudes asked me
or made me go skydiving, I kind of wasn't really
excited about-- I was nervous, as I've said many
times in the video. I thought maybe I'd go skydiving
someday when I'm, like, really old. But I'm glad they made me do
it, because it was so much fun. It helped me get out
of my comfort zone and into the danger zone, but
it's not actually dangerous at all. I looked up the statistics. You're way more likely
to have something bad happen to you in a
car than falling out of an airplane with a parachute
and a trained professional. One issue I had that
I didn't mention in the video was
the strap on my leg wasn't on correctly,
necessarily. And it had some bruising and
it kind of hurt afterwards. But it was fine. Flintstoned and samramdebest
expressed some doubt about the number of
jumps that Rook Nelson has taken in his life, which
is somewhere above 20,000. Flintstoned was saying that
he'd have to do two jumps a day, 365 days a year to be able to
do 22,000 jumps in 29 years. In actuality, being
an instructor, he does way more
than two jumps a day. Probably does up
to 10 on average. So at 10 jumps per
day, you can see how he could get to over 22,000 jumps. He also lives, like, there. He lives right next to
it, so he's probably jumping all the time. For some reason,
Kamila N. asked, how do vending machines work. Well, how they work, Matt? I think the reason she asked
is because a vending machine is basically a place where
food goes to skydive. Ah, but it doesn't
have a parachute. That's dangerous living. But food isn't alive, so
it doesn't need a parachute. Well, some food is alive. Not usually the food
that's in a vending machine. I read somewhere, I think
it's either Japan or Hong Kong, you can buy live crabs
from a vending machine. Live crabs? Live crab. Look it up. Well, do they have parachutes? No, no parachutes. That seems dangerous. It does. Good question, Kamila. Did we answer that question? I think we did. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week. With an all-new video. Second video of the human
versus nature playlist. Check it out. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Viva los biosphere!
Biodome, everyone member?
I've been there twice. The tour is great. It's a little like being in a science fiction movie. Gives you a real sense of how hard it would be to build, maintain and sustain a livable environment on Mars or in space.
This place houses the highest elevated ocean in the world, and the only ocean in AZ—of course. My office got a behind the scenes tour of this place and it’s amazing. The “lungs” are trippy.
PBS Digital Studios is amazing.
Many amazing channels like PBS Space Time, It's Ok to be Smart, Deep Look, America from Scratch and my favourite PBS Eons
I love this channel
I particularly like The rise and fall of the BONECRUSHING DOGS which taught me there were 2 other dog lineages not just the one that survive today.
Or how Yellowstone responsible for some of the continent’s most amazing fossil deposits. Death by ash glass in their lungs sounds like it would suck.
Or how some tiny living thing started to live inside another living thing never left, and became the powerhouse of the cell.
Or the simple question. What was the ancestor of EVERYTHING
Also the ones where the title just lays it all out there. The croc that ran on hooves,When We were prey, When Hobbits Were Real
Time for biodome 2
Guy looks like Weezy Waiter
Can't watch the video rn, do they go into how Steve Bannon bizarrely helped ruin the project?
Stubby!! Squirrely!!
I wanna live there