SYSK Live in Nashville: The Biosphere II Experiment

Published Jan 2, 2024, 10:00 AM

Hello, friends! Join us today for our annual live show release, recorded in beautiful Nashville. On the docket? The Biosphere II Experiment!

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. Jerry's not here with us, but all of these beautiful people are at the Sherman Horne Symphony Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Man a lot. That was great. Like I literally can't hear right now? What?

Oh, all right, everyone I want to talk about I can't believe, by the way, that this was earlier this year. Doesn't it seem like eight years ago?

It seems like that Blue Oyster Roads.

In fact, it was earlier this year. On the morning of January fifth, I met Josh at the airport in Atlanta at Hartsfield at a departure gate for what would be our very first ever research field trip after fifteen years, and we had a great time. By the way, spoiler, the flight was booked for Tucson, Arizona because Tucson is very close to Oracle, Arizona, specifically thirty two Biosphere Road in Oracle, Arizona.

Nothing, okay, that's cool, we can work with that.

If you don't know what happened at Biosphere Road, then strap in because you're about to hear the story of the biosphere to experiment. Yes, raise your hand if you have heard of this at all, Oh, a.

Couple of people.

That's good. That's about what we like. Has anyone seen the documentary Spaceship Earth. It's good you, Oh right, isn't it great?

Yeah?

Highly recommend the documentary. And I'll say this about twenty more times. Highly recommend you going to visit the biosphere today. It was really really great.

If you haven't seen the documentary, most of the show probably won't make any sense to you, so we probably should have thought that through.

We'll just talk to you.

Yeah, so Biosphere two might make you think, like, wait a minute, what was Biosphere one? Hadn't heard of it? I missed it. Don't worry. You're actually on Biosphere one right now, because Biosphere one is planet Earth. Biosphere two was a highly ambitious project to seal off a little piece of Earth from the rest of it and see what happened. Basically, Yeah, and.

It could have been a great many things, right depending on who you ask.

Oh, yes, I have that list right here. It could have been an incredibly expensive piece of performance.

Art sort of.

Okay, we'll take that, a massive hub for gathering scientific.

Day, not as massive as they intended.

Right, an audaciously ambitious attempt to replicate Earth for sure. Okay, the project that created the modern environmental movement.

I like that. I'm the judge of all this. In part I will say, Okay, a fraud.

No, that wasn't a fraud, A failure, sort of failure, a spectacular success.

Not that either. No, definitely somewhere somewhere in the middle of those two.

You guys can be the judge of all that yourselves, because we're going to tell you all about the Biosphere two project, which was born in the eighties. It debuted in the early nineties, but the whole thing was rooted in the sixties. And you will see that it was super duper rooted in the sixties. Because the people involved, we should just say out front they weren't a cult. It's going to seem at various turns that, yeah, guys, these people are a cult. They were not a cult. We did as much research as we possibly could. Yeah, and they weren't a cult. It just seems like they were a cult.

They were culty.

Yeah, cult adjacent, cult adjacent.

It's like when you're reading the real estate ads. It's like they're not in the cult neighborhood, but they're pretty close. So, like you said, it was rooted in the sixties, in particular in a city called San Francisco, California. And this was during one of their many summers of love that they've had over the years. A very charismatic hippie named John Allen. He went by the name Johnny Dolphin. I refuse to say that. Twice I call him John Allen. They had nicknames. I was about to say cute, but they really weren't that cute. But John Allen was kind of a magnet. He was a genius depending on who you talked to. Very smart guy, obviously, but he was a magnet for kind of like minded people at the time in sixties San Francisco, which is to say, super creative, very very smart, and as it turns out, also very ambitious, which could find the face of other sort of hippie dippy ish types out there at the time.

Right. And like you said, he was essentially a certified genius. He had a master's degree in business from Harvard. Not too shabby he had. If you don't mind, I have to read this, a certificate in Advanced Physiological Systems for Engineers from University of Michigan. Sounds made up, but apparently it's legit, and he had a four A driven.

I thought you were going to say he had a certificate in Advanced Physiological Systems for engineers from the back of his cereal, because that's what it owns.

It definitely sounds like the kind of thing you would get at a strip mall university, you know what I mean.

He was also trained as a metallurgist. He was a management consultant. He was, like I said, super smart guy.

He was.

He had a lot of kind of famous hippi dippy creative smart friends like Williams Burrows, Buckminster Fuller in particular, who had he would have a pretty outsized influence on John Allen and this project that we're going to talk about in a couple of ways. One was the idea of synergy that Bucky Fuller was really into, and as you will learn with Biosphere too, synergy was a big, big part of things, or that was supposed to be at least and the geodesic dome, which everyone knows is Bucky Fuller's sort of you know, pet design pipe dream that became a reality.

Yeah, for sure, they incorporated it into the biosphere, that's right. So this group that formed around John Allen, that was not a cult. They were hanging out in San Francisco. They were into creating art and doing performance pieces, and they would put on these odd plays under the name the Theater of All Possibilities. And I don't mean odd like as an occasional I mean like odd plays really tough to watch because you're watching adults use their imagination and that is just uncomfortable to watch. And they did it a lot like that was kind of their thing, so much so they took it on the road. The touring company was called the Caravan of Dreams. And you can't say either of those names without going like.

This, I know, because they're written in an arc on every poster of So they were they were doing these little and some of these are in the documentaries that show some of their little performance art pieces, and it's really something they really they say things like free movement and stuff like that, you know. But they were in San Francisco in the sixties and then left San Francisco, California, and like nineteen sixty eight because it had gotten too commercial. They were a hard core Okay that these are how sort of out there that these people were. And they moved to New Mexico out in the middle of nowhere and formed a little not a cult, they formed a sort of a communeish kind of thing called the Synergia Ranch.

Yeah, and so they're they kind of expanded their horizons. They still put on odd performance pieces and plays.

They also not.

Do that, No, they it was really in their stay.

They felt the call.

Yeah. They also started building things too, like they got interested in just making things with their own hands. And a really good example of what they could do is called the research vessel Heraclitis.

Yeah. So here's the thing with the synergy Ins. They were all really smart. But it's not like they took an old boat to make this research vessel and they sand it down the deck and restained it and kind of spruced it up a bit like I could. Well I couldn't do that either, Actually I could try to. They built from scratch a ship, not a boat like a ship, and they weren't shipbuilders, they weren't architects. They figured out how to do it like this is kind of how ambitious and smart they were. There was a woman there who led the I guess architectural side of things, who was not an architect, named Margaret Augustine, who's going to come come back to not haunts, but she'll come back a couple of times. Is she the one back there? But they were super smart and they built this ship that is like still sailing today.

Yeah, I mean it has been for fifty years basically, and they again they built it from scratch, no knowledge of shipbuilding. And it was in that kind of like can do spirit that the biosphere project was born. And the whole idea was to build this self sustaining habitat that was closed off from the rest of Earth that could sustain human life, very important, and to use it to study this new field called biospherics, which is creating closed systems to study Earth's ecosystems in kind of minute detail. And it was new because they had essentially made it up, but the whole thing had merit because at this time, in like the early eighties, scientists around the world were starting to notice that Earth was getting out of whack in a lot of unsettling ways and had kind of concluded that if we didn't figure out what to do about that, things would be very bad for life on Earth very soon. And spoiler alert, we did figure out what to do about it, we didn't do it, and now we're all doomed. Just FYI.

So to study something like Earth's ecosystem, like very complex stuff, there's a couple of ways you can go about it. You can get in a lab and you can bring stuff in and you can study it there, and in that case you're going to get really precise measurements and really precise data, but it's not out in the real world, so it's you sort of get what you get. The other way to do is to go out in the real world and study stuff, and people had been doing both for a very long time, and it's always been that trade off for science, Like you go out in the real world and you're going to get real, like more natural results, but the data is not going to be as accurate because you don't have all your toys out there necessarily sure, And what bios sphere offered was basically the chance to kind of take the best of both worlds and do both all that once.

Yeah, and also because it was kind of compact in size, stuff that happened out on biosphere one over the course of very long time scales happened much shorter in biosphere two because it was tiny, so you could actually track carbon isotopes as it made it through the carbon cycle, which is kind of useful, and it would make a bitch and test bed for offerth habitation on Mars. Yeah, which they predicted what happen by two thousand and five.

A little bit off right there yet, but like here's one example of sort of the ideas that they think could spring from this was they thought those and we'll meet all the biospherians soon enough. Spoiler alert, that's what they were called. They went from synergi ins to biospherians, but one was named Linda Lee. She was a botanist and what she wanted to accomplish there one of the things, at least was to figure out how little tissue that you could get, like how cells that you could collect and still yield a viable plant. And the idea being like, one day maybe we can have like a jungle in the size of a shoebox that like jets and stuff like add water and you get a jungle kind of thing.

Yeah, she even brought her own shoebox inside it. Being nineteen ninety one, it was an La Gear shoebox.

Did you okay, Gear? That was a nice surprise. I thought I thought that was off the dome. It's still great, thanks, okay.

So if you put all this stuff together, this is like a really good idea that the Synergians had, and they were just the kind of people to do it, as we've seen. But you can really argue that the project would not have happened had a guy named Ed Bass not been a member of the group, and he had been since I think his early twenty because he joined in nineteen seventy four. And the reason he was so important is because he was a billionaire.

Yeah, specifically because you know, this sing was going to require a lot of money, as we'll learn. But he was the son of a guy named Perry Bass, and Perry Bass was at the time one of the richest dudes in the United States. He was a billionaire. He was a Texas oil tycoon, and somehow had one son that became an environmentalist. I don't know if he was like the shame of the family. I do know that that Thanksgiving was probably a little awkward when he brought up this idea to Pops. I think Perry was probably like, son, you're going to do what you're going to get? How many millions for a bios something? Why can't you start a minor league baseball team like your brother Bobby? And that's Perry Mass.

That was a great Perry Bass.

Everybody indeed, but Ed Bass was in and he funded the thing to the tune of between one hundred and fifty and two hundred million dollars nineteen what eighty something dollars. Yeah, well it's like you're double that now, yeah, all right, double So we're usually more accurate in our updated inflation conversion.

So he was. Actually he'd financed a lot of projects for the group. They had this thing where he would buy like a plot of land somewhere in the world and they would like build something on it or improve it somehow, And there's still stuff around today. There's the Hotel Veyra in Katmandu. It's a hotel they own. There's the October Gallery in London.

Our gallery, yep.

And so they called it the ecopreneurial spirit, so like they were hippies, but they weren't shy about making money too, and that's what this whole biosphere project was in part to Ed bass.

For sure, Yeah, because he thought, all right, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna launch this massive science project, which I think ended up being at the time the single largest privately funded science project in human history. And he said, but here's how we can make a little scratch off this, A little little cheese. What do you kids say these days?

What else? Bread? I think they say bread.

Is bread back, little bread, Little Sosamolians. Sure, little Nashi, Yeah, nashtag, nashtag, nashtag, ecopreneurial nice, all right, nailed it. Jerry cut that out, did not nail it. So his idea was, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna start this big project and we're gonna eventually come up with all these all this great data and these science ideas that we can patent, and then one day when we need to live on Mars, NASA is going to go, hey, guys, how much to license that jungle in a box you came up with? And Ed bassa just sit back and cackle and make a ton of money. So that was one way to make money. And then they had another great idea to make money.

Right, Yeah, they were going to charge tourists twelve ninety five to come gawk at the people who are sealed off in the Biosphere facility. And they did.

It's right, it's all glass. You can just peer in and make fun of them all day long. Kids.

So they formed a venture or an LLC I guess, called Space Biosphere Ventures, And in true Synergian fashion, all these hippies who had no experience being CEOs and directors of a large, multi million dollar corporation were now exactly that that's right, and they set about getting to work like there was an architect named Phil Hawes, and I believe he pulled out every techie style he could think of to create this place. Chuck likes it.

It's amazing.

It looks like the headquarters to Heaven from a movie in the eighties. It's it's what it always struck me, as you know, that's exactly what it's like. There's like barrel roofs, there's that geodesic dome. The thing that really gets it for me is everything is made out of this like shiny powder coated aluminum tubing that really locks it into like nineteen ninety and that's exactly what it looks like still to It's.

Like Buck Rogers in the twentieth century or their Disney's vision of you know, of tomorrow Land, basically.

Very much so it's very much like that. That stuff moldy.

Yeah, put a pin in that. So the plan, the original plan was for Biosphere two to run for one hundred years, and like every couple of years or so, just cycling a new team of Biasparians to take the place of the old They would go into some like airlock, they would swap places. They would keep it sealed because we'll stress out a bunch. The whole point was to keep this thing sealed, like if the problem happened, they couldn't be like, well, let's just open up the doors and bring some stuff in to help us along. They really wanted to see what it would be like, and the only way to do that was to seal it up tight. So one hundred years was the original goal. News spread around the world. People were seriously jazzed. I have no idea how I missed this because I was like early college at the time. I knew nothing about it somehow, except my only thing I can think. As I was in early college at the time, I wasn't center around watching the news. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, how do you think it's going good?

I think he's going quite well so far. Oh yeah, okay, Well then that means we have to take a message break, so please bear with us. That's right, because we'll be right back.

Sish, stuffy jaws, shop soft your s.

We're back, everybody.

You guys can thank Jerry for that.

You go to don't buy your stuff at the post office, sleep on this mattress or buy the was it the twenty twelve Camra?

Yes?

Oh oh you guys still hear that one?

Anyone? Some of the old ones? Are you?

I don't know what salesperson made that forever deal?

That was quite a deal.

Yeah, that won't go away, all right? So finally we're back everyone, Thanks for coming. Finally, finally, finally, On September twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one, eight people, four men and four women who we will meet very shortly called the Biospherians, began their first what was to be a two year mission of the one hundred year Experiment and were sealed off this big press thing they wore, these Mork from Orc spacesuit.

Jumpsuit things, very very weird.

For real, like broad shoulders, cinched at the waist.

They're like, don't forget we left San Francisco for New Mexico in the late sixties. That's how hardcore we are. That's right. I just want to drive that home. And I think also somebody who's playing the flute.

As these so floutist if I'm not mistaken, the kind of when you watch the it's kind of funny because they couldn't get the door to seal it first, and everyone was like, oh, that's the whole point now, that they couldn't open it. That's what it was. Yeah, it was two sealed and they were all just standing there kind of like this. But they got in. They sealed themselves in, and here were the eight biosperians.

Oh me, uh, I knew it was me. I'm just teething. First up is Mark Nelson. We mentioned him first because he was, I guess considered the captain of the team, mostly because he was the truest believer of this group of true believers, because they had selected from the group of synergians they didn't like go find the greatest scientists in the world or like astronauts or anything. They just said, Hey, you seem enthusiastic. I like the way you do the free body movement stuff. Get in there, Get in this red jumpsuit. That is seriously, who this group of eight people were.

That's right, you could be our Ryan Tannehill. He's not here, There's no way, no, he's got football to play this weekend. Abigail Alling was the next person we're gonna mention. She was a marine biologist. Jane Pointer is next. She was in charge of the farm and the farm equipment and stuff like that, and she was in the documentary. You will see. It's very controversial because Jane Pointer actually is the only Bisparian to leave what you weren't supposed to do. During the experiment. She had an accident where she cut off part of her finger in a rice huller.

I think I'll do it.

Whatever that is apparently got a whole rice and I just thought it came in a.

Bag with a little piece of finger in it.

Yeah, exactly.

It's the lucky bag. That means you get a million dollars.

Don't add too much water because that thing becomes a full finger.

It turns into a Dinosaurs preface.

But it was very controversial when it happened, because you know, she had to leave because she needed, you know, a hospital to take care of her briefly. But here's the deal. She came back in carrying these two large Duffel bags that she didn't leave with, and they weren't supposed to do, like, oh, by the way, we forgot all these things, go get them. The whole point of this whole thing, once again was this seal yourself in to see if it was possible not to cheat a little bit, because it would render the results kind of moot. So she comes in these Duffel bags will come back later. I don't know what was in them. I don't even think they ever found out. I think it was probably fifteen pounds a weed. That's what I might have brought back in. I'm just saying.

The upshot is there's no hospitals or Duffel bags on Mars. So people weren't really super happy.

About it, you know, like the old song goes sure.

So the next guy's Roy Walford. He was the crew physician, who's the oldest one, super old. He was like sixty five, right, But he was in great shape because his scientific interest was at the intersection of anti aging and nutrition, and he had come up with his own diet, called it the calorie restricted optimal nutrition diet or Krone diet. Terrible name for a diet.

They're like, you know, that's the same name as a bowel disease.

He said, oh, I know. So he really wanted to get his chance at like experimenting with these people with the Krone diet, and my goodness, he got his chance, as we'll see.

That's right. Next up we have Mark van Fillow. He was a Belgian scientist and he operated the life support equipment, including what you'll hear a little bit more about this giant lung in the bottom of this facility that breathes for the facility. And here's a little tip. If you ever go to buy a Sphere two again, you can still go there. It's amazing. Take the time to take the tour, sort of the underneath tour. It's like twelve twelve bucks extra, which Josh sprang for by the way, paid my way in like a like a good date.

Never even asked for it back.

Appreciate that yet at the end of everything, At the end of stuff, you should know you're gonna be like, and here's this twelve dollars please, plus inflation. So he was dating Abigail Auling. There were two couples among this group of eight, which can get a little thorny. The reason we know that they were a couple was a couple of reasons. One they mentioned it in the documentary, but two, even if they headn't have said that. There is a shot sort of in the background at one point where he feeds her a banana on camera and not like peel a banana and like, would you like, here's how I would do it with you. Would you like to break off a piece of banana Josh? Why no, he stuck it in her mouth with his hand.

Thank you for not demonstrating that on me too.

Yeah, I mean things have changed. I know the workplace has changed, but even in nineteen ninety one, you don't do that to a female coworker. You don't do that. It's never been okay the first office you did not feed did someone a banana like that?

For sure? That's true. That's what it says on the T shirt. There was Sally Silverstone who was the most widely liked of the group. We get the impression she got along with everyone. She was an English social studies teacher, and I think she was in charge of the food basically, right.

Yeah, she was the chef. I mean she made banana everything out of bananas. We'll see. She ended up writing a book afterward called Eating In Thank You Colan From the Field to the Kitchen the Recipes from Visca too. She originally called it eating in Colon guys, I mean really eating in, but they changed the title.

He's next Tavera mccallums. Next, he was in charge of the analytical chemistry lab. He was one half of the other couple with Jane Pointer. And they're actually still involved in this kind of stuff today. They're like, that's right. They formed some company that is exploring how to live off of earth.

That's cool, you know why because he never fed her a banana on camera, That's right. And then there's where was he from? He was from? He was European too, I think, No, okay, he was from US a all right music city. Sure, he was a little Nashian. So the last person is Linda Lee, and Linda Lee was the biome design manager of the Desert Rainforest in Savannah, and she was the one who was looking for that jungle in a box idea, right, all right, So that's the eight.

Of them, that's the eight people. There are also thirty eight hundred species of plants and animals in there. They put in everything from cockroaches to kind of till the soil and make it even richer. They put in these these little primates that look kind of cat like, they have huge eyes. They're adorable. They're called bush babies. Anyone ever seen a bush baby? Super cute. We want to take out your phone right now and look, we won't be mad. They're so cute that we're pretty sure that they were just put in there just because they're so cute.

They had to have something, right sure. And here was the idea, is you know, they were gonna it was all about synergy. And we talked a lot about synergy on our show, how in nature, like everything is working together ideally to help everyone out. And that was the idea here in a shrunken version of Earth, is you're gonna have plants that are pollinated by these specific very specific because it can bring in everything. It's not Noah's Ark for goodness sakes, because you know that was real. I'm not sure if you knew that they brought in things to pollinate those specific plants, like here, we need these insects, We need these plants because they're going to maximize oxygen for us, and we're going to breed stuff out and they're going to breed stuff in and it's going to be a beautiful exchange of CO two and oxygen and everything's going to be working in synergy with each other to make this a grand success.

Exactly. Because it was a sealed facility, everything had to be recycled, Like you said, their breaths were recycled with the plants, their wastewater was put through this marsh, and then they ended up drinking their own pea. Essentially. It was and that's the appropriate response to that. It was pretty amazing. It was like the whole design was pretty great, and all of this was in five different biomes. And a biome is a type of ecosystem that is a really specific type of ecosystem that's made up from the interactions of all like the every rock and rain drop and rubber tree and reindeer all interacting and all sorts of difficult to be a weird, weird biome, but they're all interacting in all sorts of complex ways, and all of those complexities formed the characteristics of that biome.

In elementary school, when they said, Josh, what are the four ours? And you should have? I said, well, blurted out eating writing, arithmetic. You said, rainbows, reindeer, and what else.

I like yours? I said, rain drops, rocks, rubber trees, and reindeers. Yeah.

Thanks, man, Man, that's a That's a Carpenter song if I've ever heard one. You know, she was a hell of a drummer, Karen Carpentery.

That right.

There are videos of Karen Carpenter just get singing down on the drums, which I never knew.

Great, she was the Neil Pert of your day.

All right, where are we here? Should I put on my glasses? Now? I shouldn't put on my glasses? All right, let's talk about these biomes. There were five of them in total. Each, like you said, each ecosystem had a very specific set of interactions supposedly within it. But as we'll see, there were variables that didn't let that happen. One was the and we walked through each of these. They're still there today. The tropical Amazonian rainforest has a twenty foot waterfall. Pretty cool, it's amazing. There was a savannah, very useful. There was a coastal fog desert, kind of like the west coast of Mexico, like south of California. What else was there? There was a freshwater marsh and get this, you guys, there was a mangrove marsh. They had saltwater mangroves there, my favorite plant on planet Earth. They had on little Earth out there, and that flowed into the showstopper, which was a nearly seven hundred thousand gallon ocean. It had a coral reef, It had a one hundred and fifty foot stretch of beach, and it was operated by vacuum pumps. And we know this because we were in the Underneath tour and I was like, Josh, look of this. They're just a random pole that had a button that said Ocean on, Ocean off. And I've never wanted to press something more in my life.

Then the humans they lived in their own little biome, the anthropogenic biome wing and for some reason, they decked it out in the purplest purple you've ever seen.

It's so cool.

I suspect it was some sort of emotional experiment. They wanted to crack them because there's no explanation where I was like, was purple big in nineteen ninety I was like, no, no, it's never been big because.

It's tied to print somehow. But I can't.

Only Prince could pull off purple, you know what I mean. So in the alongside that, the purple wing that they lived in was a agro forestry plot where they grew their food and for a short time it was probably the most productive quarter acre of crop land in the entire world.

Short time. It's just a hint of where things going. And then beneath it all, like we said, was the tour that you can take now. Had all the computers and stuff, which if you go, it's kind of funny to laugh at the stuff now, these you know, late eighties computer systems, But they did the job back then. At this giant lung that you can still stand over. It's very intense, very cool.

So the whole thing was put together in a three acre facility. It sounds pretty big until you stop and think about it. And because this is nineteen ninety one. The best measurement that we can put it in is SMU's standard mall units. So if you had gone to Rivergate Mall in nineteen ninety one and walked around the seers there, you would be walking around a Sears that was a little less than four acres in size, which means that these people were stuck for two years inside a facility smaller than a sears as. I'm sorry, are they still around at all?

Is there still seiers or that completely go away? Now?

I don't think so.

I got it maybe from front rogue. That doesn't tell me much, by the way. No, all right, so life inside the biosphere was pretty interesting. They're sealed off again, smaller.

Than a what sears.

Oh, and anger management is really paying off. That was such a quick twitch.

It slips out here or there. Good.

So obviously, you know, all this stuff is very obvious, but we just want to kind of drive it home. You're not going out for coffee, you're not ordering a pizza, You're not there's there's nothing you can bring in. It's just you. You can't go have a drink at the bar if you want one, like you were in there with what you got, what you can grow. There's a lot of small animals. There's a lot of insects, there's cockroaches. There's a bunch of hippie tippy science types all living together and more for more. Actually, they didn't wear those jumps. It's like, you know, because they had to work really hard. As soon as they left that that press conference the beginning, they're like, let me get out.

Of this stuff.

Of course it was all glass. So they all saw them change clothes.

Right, but no Chinese food.

They couldn't get ramen delivered. None of that stuff. I would not be. All they had was what they had, what they could grow, and that the fourteen pounds of weed in those duffies.

And don't forget the tour bus after tour bus of gawkers and school kids who paid thirteen dollars to come look at them. So, in addition to being sealed off from the rest of earth for two years, they were exhibits in a human zoo essentially. And there's a there's a little shot in the documentary where some guy is like trying to take a picture of one of them, and he stops and he's like he did that and it's documented, and I think he's a jerk.

So if all this sounds awesome, and it does to you in the audience, and you don't know what happens next, you're thinking, guys, this is amazing, is ambitious. They're trying to do real science. They put all this money into it. They got a geodesic dome, they got those duffies full of whatever. You're right, it sounds amazing, And if you're wondering did it go wrong? It did. There were a number of real design flaws in this thing. And I don't think it was necessarily because they weren't. I hadn't done this kind of thing before. Because they had, besides themselves figuring all this out, they had teams and teams of you know, legit scientists from all over the world like contributing, so everyone was kind of pitching in and involving themselves with their expertise. So I don't think it was a lack of that. It was just maybe not the most thought out thing to begin with, like the whole idea that you could I mean, the biggest problem was it couldn't carry out the science they wanted to because Earth doesn't have five biomes in a three acre space. They didn't seal them off from each other. Now, and you go and visit their doors. Between all these they built walls and stuff, and you go from the rainforest and shut the door behind you and you go into the desert. And that, you know, kind of works in a way. When it's all right next to each other. It's not natural and nothing is going to work. And they just didn't think of that, I guess.

So pretty much any like actual science they were trying to do as far as BIOSPHERICX went, was moot from the beginning, because again they didn't seal the biomes off from one another. You had an Amazon rainforest thirty feet away from a coastal fog, right And as a result, the desert actually didn't stay desert because the more rain you made in the jungle to increase plant production and then you know, boost oxygen, it meant more fog roll than every day in the desert, and so the cacti got choked off by all the moisture and it turned into like scrub land. And Linda Lee came in at one point, I was like, what the hell.

This place is very moist by the way, if you go to visit. I know that word triggers some people. I'm sorry, No, the way to describe it it is moist, not cool, moist, moist moist moist, moist, so moist, like you've been to greenhouses and stuff that kind of moisture. Amplify this because there's waterfalls and jungles and stuff.

So moist.

Sorry. What else happened? There was a massive influx of nutrients from that mangrove marsh that I love, right into the ocean, such that you know, there's these great shots at the beginning of them, like scuba diving next to the reef, like this is amazing, and you know, a year later, it's just so choked with algae because it's so nutrient dense that scuba diving dried up pretty quickly.

Yeah, it turned into a green, slimy ocean. And we keep using the word nutrients, but you could also replace that with poop, right, that's true. And then the trees, hmm, the tree it's just weird. So they grew really really tall, but they were too weak to stand up under their own power, their own structure. And they figured out that that was because there was no wind inside of the bikeiosphere. Outside on biosphere one, the wind pushes on trees and in response, trees grow something called stress wood, which gives it a lot of structure. The trees inside a biosphere too, didn't have any winds, so they didn't grow that stress wood, which meant they had to be lashed to the inside of the geodesic dome eighty feet up like a giant piece of cooked asparagus. Just sad to see.

I didn't know about this part, and in fact, I went out when I went in January, I had purposely, I think I watched the documentary, but I purposely didn't look at the stuff you put together because I just kind of wanted to experience it for the first time. But on the plane, Josh was like, you know, I heard that they lashed these trees to the tube because they're so weak, and he was really kind of not obsessed, but you were really sort of into this idea, like a like an encyclopedia Brown Sleuth. And we got there and Josh was so funny. He was like, look, look they're still lashed. And he looked up there and sure enough, there's like you know, vinyl chord tying these you know, what is it again, Yeah, it's week Dresa, and you were just you were so discussed.

I cracked the case.

Uh so we mentioned they start out with thirty one hundred species of plants and animals forty percent when extinct, which I know that sounds like a lot, but that was actually better than they thought they were gonna do.

Right, yeah, let me put that in a background extinction rate real quick though, Right, according to background extinction rates, they should have expected to lose point zero five to one to two species out of thirty eight hundred over two years. They lost one five hundred and twenty species over two years.

That's on biosphere one, is what you would expect.

Yeah, okay, yeah, but like Chuck said, it was still better than what they predicted, which was seventy percent extinction rate. So forty percent is like a triumph compared to that.

That's true. And here's the weird thing that happened in Biosphere two was that some of the things back, many of the things ended up really really thriving, were things that they didn't even bring in and intend to thrive. For instance, morning glory vines. They can be lovely, We all love them. They grew so extensively. They basically, and this will become a recurring theme, is they had to spend so much of their time doing other stuff rather than what each of them had their own little expertise in. They didn't get to do the things that they had expertise. And so they're out there, as we will see later, farming all day, weeding all day, chopping this morning glory vine. And that's going to build resentment when you can't do your little chrone projects.

Or Linda Lee didn't even get to take the stuffing out of her La Gear shoe box.

She didn't because he's chopping back those morning glory vine.

Right. There was a species of ant called the crazy ant that took over the place. It actually out competed the eleven species of ants that were introduced purposely. No one knows how the crazy ant got.

In, but not show probably probably.

Yeah, it took over though, and they're still there today. When we were sitting there looking out over the ocean, kind of holding on this railing, our hands were just covered and unfortunately don't bite or anything, but we were like, oh my god, we've heard about you guys. Yeah, I can't believe if we were a little starstruck. Actually it was pretty neat.

It made up for the last trees I think for sure, a little bit all. I mean not all, but most of the pollinating things they brought in to pollinate these specific plants died off, so they ended up having to hand pollinate crops, which I don't know why that sounds dirty to me, but that's what they did. And to top it all off, well I'm not gonna talk about the bush babies.

You talk about they're.

Gonna make me do this, I can't do it.

So remember the bush baby's, the super super cute little primates. Well, one of them got into a wiring panel and was electrocuting, which is just that's got to be a bummer day in biosphere too, you know, Like, I'm sure you could smell it throughout the whole facility.

I bet they're like, hmm, I'll bet they ate hell out of that bush baby.

Right, They did make lemonades out of lemons, though. For example, they found that salamanders played a disproportionate role in trapping carbon and soil because it eats a lot of the leaf eating insects that released the carbon. They hadn't introduced salamanders. But they made the observation all the same.

So that's all well, and good. Things aren't going great. There's a domino effect happening in nature because things aren't, you know, helping each other out. S yenergy wasn't happening, you guys. But there were two really big giant hurdles that would affect the entire outcome of this experiment. Both things they didn't count on. Both things are very important. And they are eating and breathing.

Yeah, going pretty good.

Still going pretty.

Good, I think so, you guys, still enjoying ourself. Well, if I'm not mistaken, Chuck just set us up with a cliffhanger, which means we're gonna take one more message break.

That's right, stuffish, softy jawsh shop, soft.

Your shal We're back, everybody, Hi, Nashville. All right, never gets old. All right, We're gonna take these one in time. Hunger number one. They initially calculated that we're gonna live on about twenty five hundred calories a day. Not too bad. They never got very close to that. They had to farm their own food, like we said. They had farm some on the ranch in New Mexico, like sort of like we farm. Actually, there may be some lechit farmers here, God bless you, that's right. But like I farm in my backyard a little bit. I farm. Yeah, this is a kind of farming they did. They weren't like professional farmers, so they did an okay job growing stuff.

Well in true synergy and fashion. None of them had any experience with subsistence farming, and I guess they hadn't thought that through when they sealed themselves off for two years tried to grow their own crops.

At first they got about eighteen hundred calories a day, not terrible, you're pretty hungry, but you're living. That rose to about two thousand at one point when the farm was going pretty good. Again, you're fine, you're probably hungry on two thousand galleries. But again, these people are working really, really hard every day, so they're burning through those calories very very quickly. And again they have to spend all their time now weeding and farming and doing all these things that they thought that Linda Lee was probably primarily doing. And they're not able to run their experiment. So again tension is increasing as they go.

But doctor Walford was like, yes, yeah, that God because he had a captive sample for two years to study his chron diet, and he actually was vindicated. Everybody dropped a shocking amount of weight. I think the average was twenty one percent of their body weight for men, fourteen percent for the women. And the thing is, their blood markers started to show improvement, like their cholesterol levels were actually good, and their weight finally stabilized, and they actually got to this weird level of healthy from that calorie restricted optimal nutrition diet. And Walford was he was pretty happy about that.

He's like, isn't as great? Everyone screw you, Walford. They did the cartoon thing where they look he's like taking a nap and they look at him and he's like a he turns into a roasted turkey in his bed. The point is, everyone they were hungry all the time. They were hungry. They lost the enzymes that they formerly had to digest meat. They didn't have a lot of meat to begin with, but they certainly couldn't digest it anymore in their guts. They ate peanut shells just you know, like let's just just eat that whole peanut. Weren't even showing these things to get more calories. They ate things that grew. They ate tons of sweet potatoes because they grew sweet potatoes pretty successfully, so their skin turned to orange. Yeah, they ate ut beats. They grew a lot of beats. They grew a lot of bananas. You know what happens to beats the next day in the bathroom. So can you imagine these people are all subsisting. They've got orange skin. Their bathrooms look like a crime scene, and they are eating so many bananas. They made banana wine, and in the documentary they talk about how awful it tasted and how quickly they drank it.

But I just just a second, like, let's all get in the mindset of living for two years on sweet potatoes and beats. That is cruel. Yeah, that's like somebody saying moist over and over each.

What about the coffee? Though they thought of coffee ahead.

Of time, This is where I would have signed out. I would been like missions over for me. They were planning. They actually did grow coffee upland in the rainforest, but they miscalculated, and it turns out they could put together one cup of coffee every two weeks, which meant everybody got to six cups over the entire two years.

Yeah, not one cup each, Like that's even bad. Yeah, they got three cups of coffee per year each.

It took four months to make a pizza because they had to start by growing the wheat. They harvested their salt from the ocean, and then their only source of milk came from three goats stardust division and milky way okay, beats, sweet potatoes and goat milk. Yeah, yeah, I don't understand why you guys aren't more grossed out by that. Do you guys eat a lot of beets and sweet potatoes and go milk together.

I mean, like they're.

Fine on their own and you know, normal amounts, but you put them all together for two years.

Guys, this is Nashville. They're back to the land. They're real American.

Hey, I'm a real American. I can get back to the land, but I don't want to live on sweet potatoes and beats and goats milk for two years. Can we not all agree on that?

All right?

Okay, thank you? We can finally move on from that part.

Whatever socialist fascist communists, because those are all the same thing. I wasn't gonna get political. Sorry, hangriness is a real situation here though, like it became a real problem. The group starts to divide a little bit. There is one faction because you know, things aren't going well. So there's one faction that's still very much following Becausejohn Allen was kind of running the show from the outside. They were following John Allen's word still and sort of John Allen Knight's. And then there was another faction that we're like, I don't think we should listen to this guy anymore, Like he's not even in here, and they went, he's right on the other side of the glass. He can now looked in right outside the glass. John Allen's like I had a burrito and was like, oh me. So like a real division grew within the ranks, and it got kind of ugly interpersonally between them.

Yeah, Abigail Allen said she was spit at twice, and Roy Walford later said, that's that's.

How I thought it's a new one too.

That's good, thank you, thank you man well man. Poor Roy.

Things got worse for him by the way. Game Night dried up pretty quickly, though. Is the upshot of all that?

For sure?

I'm sorry you're the upshot guy.

That's okay, you can use it once in a while.

I thank you. I appreciate that the anger management is really working. So that's the hungriness. Number two is the breathing trouble.

Yes. So about a year I guess into the mission, they started to notice that their oxygen levels were going down, their CO two levels were going up, and either one of those is bad, but them working in conjunction, that's really not good. And it turned out that the atmosphere grew to about a level somewhere around Cousco Peru, which is way up in the andes An. In true synergy and fashion, none of them had any experience living in Cusco Peru, so they were suffering like big time. They reported having to take breaks walking up the one flight of stairs. They were hurting for sure. And they looked around and they figured out that at least part of the problem was that the soil was about five times richer than you'd find out on biosphere one, which meant there were tons of little microbes that were sucking up the oxygen as they did their thing and releasing a lot of CO two. That was problem one.

Yeah, and that one's a little frustrating because you know, at the beginning, they're like, we really need to grow stuff, so let's get the best soil and bring that stuff in. And no one ever was like, but wait a minute, that's not how it is, like, we should bring in realistic soil. Great band name, by the way.

Realistic soil.

Sure, I don't know, No, I'm not sure. Yeah, this is Nashville, they know. Yeah, okay, oh you know what, that's my band with a nine other guys.

Oh that's funny you say that because I had thought of when the dimes a dozens.

Oh that's the name of our band.

Yeah, you thought of that.

When I was saying that, Wow, oh wait just now, no, no, no, earlier.

Yeah, I was gonna say, it's like an hour ago.

I just still the way your brain works always surprises me. Thanks man for all these years. Is being the dime a Dozens? Yeah, that's probably a real band here.

Probably they're backstage right now.

So the soil, Yes, we did this soil. So normally the plant life and biosphere two would have sort of reckoned with this and they would have worked over time. They would have stepped up and sucked that CO two out of the air and burped up oxygen and everyone it would have been tenable at least, but that wasn't happening. The plants were working hard and the levels just weren't changing, and they could not figure out why.

No, because there's a lot of CO two that should have been in the atmosphere that was mysteriously missing. So they looked around again, they said, what is going on? And they discovered that concrete is an excellent carbon sink. It just sucks it right out of the air faster than plants, and Biosphere two happened to have one hundred and ten thousand square feet of exposed concrete, and that concrete was out competing the plants for that CO two, So the plants couldn't pump out oxygen. And yet the CO two levels were still higher than they should be, which meant the biospheres were in trouble, and it wasn't immediately apparent what they should do about the whole thing.

Yeah, they weren't sure. I mean, they were basically two decisions. They were like, well, listen, we can sort of blow the spirit of this whole thing, and we can bring in oxygen and pump in oxygen and stay in here and probably risk the scorn of the media and the scientific community and stuff like that render most of the science mood, or we can leave, and they didn't want to leave. So in the end they decided they're going to bring in oxygen.

Yeah, and they did. It saved the day. Initially, when the biosphere project got underway, the media was super duper on board. Somebody actually wrote that it was the greatest scientific endeavor since humans landed on the Moon. It's a pretty amazing thing to call it right. Just a few years later, Time magazine named it as one of its hundred worst ideas of the twentieth century, alongside the Titanic DDT and sailing the exon Valdi's into Prince William sound Man. Bad stuff.

They really turned on them in the press. Not only that reports start to come out of some other things. They had a CO two scrubber in there to help out that they didn't tell anyone about it. Obviously wasn't enough to and that was kind of how they talk about it later, was like it wasn't even enough to solve our problem. So it's not like we were cheating that much, just a little bit. We were still in really bad shape, if that makes you feel any better. But they didn't tell anyone, They didn't disclose this, so that was a problem. Those two duffies that she brought back in from the hospital, those came back up put in the press. They were like, what was in those duffies? We had the camera footage. You left with nothing, you came back with these two big duffies. And she was like, I don't know, I'm not really sure whether that was It's cool. Man, like, don't be.

A drag man. You sold that. I was like, oh, goo choking.

So sentiment started to turn publicly on them, and then the very scientists that helped them started to turn on them.

Yeah, because word got out that the trees were like lashed to the geodesic dome in the ocean, like a sea of green slime. So these mainstream scientists that had helped design the place really started to distance themselves, and they figured out that if they criticized the way it was executed, they could kind of give themselves an alibi. And so the media turned on it, the scientific community turned on it, and so the public turned on it as well.

Yeah, it was not a good scene. Years later, a few years later, in nineteen ninety six, that original og Synergy and biospherian Mark Nelson, he came out and wrote about it and said, listen, the whole purpose of this thing, it was like a beta test. We were supposed to go in there, see what didn't work as you would expect, and then the second team would come in in year three and rectify some of these and then see what worked and one didn't. And it's one hundred year experience, you guys. It's a long game. The problem was they painted it like it wasn't a beta test, like it was kind of this perfect, amazing thing out of the box. And they had chances. And that's what's so frustrating about this whole thing, as they had chances time and time again to come out and with pr basically that talked about the stuff and was up front, and they would have had a much better time selling it to the public when things started going bad than if they stood their ground, which is what they did and were like, nah, I know what you're talking about, that everything's going great.

Yeah, Because anytime something came up, like the Duffel bags or the CO two scover or whatever. John Allen and his inner circle decided the best route was to cover it up or lie or obfuse skate. And it was very obvious because, in true synergy and fashion, none of them had any experience lying to the press, so it was really kind of obvious that they were full of full.

Of yes, saltwater marsh poo pooh.

Sure, So the whole there was like this two year ongoing pr disaster, and really, more than anything, that's probably what sunk the project.

That's right. But regardless of what the world thought and what the press thought, they brought in that oxygen. It sustain them. Is actually kind of a fun moment because they were very despondent at this point in the documentary. They're weak, they can't breathe, They're walking around just like slugging around, and then that oxygen gets pumped in and they're like almost dancing around in this place. Yes, pretty great, brought in some house music, and you know, they brought it in for better or for worse, and finished the experiment. They did stay in there, to their credit, for the entire two years, and emerged on September twenty third, nineteen ninety three. As Mark Nelson would say, profoundly changed.

Right, and then as scheduled, Mission two went in after Mission one, I think like a few months afterward Mission I was slated to just stay in for a year, but it didn't last nearly as long.

Well. Also, Mission two only had three people, Polly Shore, Brendan Fraser, and Stephen Baldwin.

So has anyone seen Biote? WHOA that is A It's a genuinely good movie.

This is my takeaway from Nashville beats Sweet Potatoes. Biodome. Yeah, huge town for that stuff, right, it's I watched it for research. Seriously, I still didn't. I saw him to watch it, and may be.

The only person on the planet who's ever watched Biodome for reach purposes. But it paid off because they actually captured a lot of the spirit of everything that went wrong in there. It just never went right like Polly Shore got it to in the end.

So Ed Bass you remember Ed he was the billionaire son who funded this thing. He sort of fed up with all this bad press, the divided factions. It has really become pretty ugly at this point. So he said, all right, you know what, I'm going to stage a hostile takeover of my own company. And John Allen you're out of here. I'm sorry. I love you, man. I love all the preform dancing we did over the years, all the crazy creative kids stuff that we dreamed up. Apparently not under the influence of drugs, which was highly surprising.

Uh.

They were kind of straight, straight edge, right.

Supposedly, just weirder and weirder.

I just don't believe it. And uh, it became way more preneur and less eco after this point. I went in a more twisted direction when they brought in a new board and a new CEO named Steve Bannon. Yes, really, And in the documentary they said the name Steve Bannon. I went, well, that's a coincidence. And then Waltz's in Younger Steve Bannon. I was like, really, yeah, they put a villain to introduce in that three exactly.

It was very surprising. The guy used to be able to buy coke off of on air Force one. That's who they put in charge a Biosphere two at the end.

That's right, he was only wearing one collared shirt at the time.

You're right, did not.

Get into that. Whatever that look is where you wear two, it's I don't know what we have seen that all right, I'm wearing this shirt. Imagine if I had like like an eyesod polo underneath it with another collar that's up. That's Steve Bannon's look. Sure, he's the only guy that does that, so maybe credit to him.

No, okay, no.

Two collar shirts anyway.

So Mark van Pillow and Abigail Alling were rightfully concerned about this new direction. They were worried about the safety of the Mission two crew, so they went in and broke the seal to the facility. They gave it a bunch of beer until it pete and then opened up, then opened up the air and let it in.

Really beats sweet potatoes, biodome and breaking the seal.

Breaking the seal at the bar, Little Nashy, Little Nashy trends. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping You ever nicknamed the city and it worked?

No? Not in all the times I've tried.

I'm pretty good at it. You ever heard of the Big Apple?

Holy Cow?

Is it?

That was a mean wow? I called it the old cow Pasture.

Just didn't take, so they busted them out. I like to think it happened like in the dead of night. I'm not sure if it was that dramatic, but that's how it plays out of my head at least. And that was the end of Biosphere too, as far as that project goes, No. One hundred years. That one hundred and fifty to two hundred million dollars closed system lasted for less than three years total, and it would never be a closed system again. Like you can visit it now, so it's obviously not a closed system. It's very cool. But you can walk in that door and through lots of other doors now, yeah, and then visit all those biomes and it is still legitimately amazing.

Yeah, it is amazing. But because it was never closed off again, the spirit of the project was really lost forever. And because the press turned on it and scientific community turned on it, we still today have this idea of Biosphere two just being a complete clue g mess, kind of a laughing stock that some hippies tried that really didn't work out. And that's all true, but there's a lot of stuff that gets overlooked too. Apparently hundreds of papers came out of the Biosphere project and some genuine scientific discoveries did as well. That low tech wastewater system that didn't really work for them because of their ocean turning slimy actually has worked in other developing parts of the world.

It's used all over, that's right, which is great.

Yeah, there's also the discovery that ocean acidification bleaches coral and kills it off. That came out of biosphere too as well.

That's right. That's a big problem these days. And then all started there. Well the bush babies, Sure, what happened to them? They became extinct.

Yes, they went extinct. The bush babies went extinct. Everybody, I don't know why you keep giving these This is a silver lining. At least there is a silver lining is that while they were there before they went extinct, they actually managed to reproduce. And if you were creating this test bed for off earth habitation, like, that's a really big deal. They got some mammals to reproduce and a closed off system, so good things did actually happen. But probably the biggest contribution that Biosphere two gave us was it reinvigorated humanity's love of Earth. I guess it kind of peaked previously in about nineteen seventy with the First Earth Day. Then everybody was like, oh, I hadn't heard of cocaine before, let me start doing that. Instead went that way for a couple of decades, and then the biosperience came back and like blue, everybody's coke right off their table and got them focused again on on thebandon jumped on the floor right.

So yeah, I mean it fascinated the world with environmentalism again, and it kind of kickstarted that next wave of environmentalism in a real way. It really jumps started things on the welfare of the planet and for a little while least. And the thing that's frustrating is to think about, like, where would we be if it hadn't gone that way? Like we would be I think last year would have been year thirty of this amazing experiment. How much further and we've made some pretty great strides, but how much further would we have been along in terms of caring for our planet had Biosphere to just really solved everything to begin with and just kicked as much ass as everyone thought I was going to kick. Sure, it's sad to think about.

It's also possible that it was just too it actually was too clue you to produce any scientific value. But we'll never know ed.

Bask got Columbia University to take it on as an annex at one point for their science departments. That dissolved eventually, and now when you go and visit, you will see a University of Arizona and a branding everywhere because they run it now and that's one of their research facilities and they still carry out science there, real science. If you ever decide to go, and again I recommend you do, you're gonna be staying there. In Tucson, not too far away, there's a great Mexican restaurant downtown Tucson called Pinka that we ate and it is delicious and wonderful. It really is great cocktails.

And then today they say that if you do go take the tour, there's a legend that goes that you should hang back and get out of sight of the tour guide, especially in the rainforest biome, and just duck behind some bushes and hide there for the rest of the night after they lock up. If you're really really quiet, you look around, you might just catch the ghosts of the bush babies. And if you look really really closely, you'll see that one of them has its hair standing on end.

And that's the story by his fear too, everybody. Thank you, Nashville, thank you very much. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Should Know

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