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SPEAKER_04: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
SPEAKER_08: 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 Shermer Horn Symphony Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Man alive. That was great. Like I literally can't hear right now.
What? What? Oh no.
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?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. It seems like that blue oyster coat rodeo is still alive.
SPEAKER_08: That's right. In fact, it was earlier this year on the morning of January 5th.
SPEAKER_10: 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 15 years.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_10: Specifically, 32540 Biosphere Road in Oracle, Arizona.
Nothing? Okay. That's good. That's cool. We can work with that.
SPEAKER_10: If you don't know what happened at Biosphere Road, then strap in, because you're about to hear the story of the Biosphere 2 experiment.
SPEAKER_10: Yes. Raise your hand if you have heard of this at all.
A couple of people. That's good. That's about what we like. Has anyone seen the documentary, Spaceship Earth?
It's very good. Oh, right? Isn't it great?
SPEAKER_09:
Highly recommend the documentary, and I'll say this about 20 more times, highly recommend you going to visit the Biosphere today.
SPEAKER_10: It was really, really great. If you haven't seen the documentary, most of the show probably won't make any sense to you.
SPEAKER_08:
Right. We probably should have thought that through. We'll just talk to you.
SPEAKER_08: So, Biosphere 2 might make you think, like, wait a minute. What was Biosphere 1? Hadn't heard of it. I missed it. Don't worry. You're actually on Biosphere 1 right now, because Biosphere 1 is planet Earth. Biosphere 2 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 data.
Not as massive as they intended. An audaciously ambitious attempt to replicate Earth. For sure.
SPEAKER_09: Okay. The project that created the modern environmental movement. I like that I'm the judge of all this. In part, I will say.
SPEAKER_08: Okay. A fraud? No, it wasn't a fraud. A failure? Sort of a failure. A spectacular success.
SPEAKER_08:
Not that either. No, definitely. Somewhere in the middle of those two.
SPEAKER_08: You guys can be the judge of all that yourselves, because we're going to tell you about the Biosphere 2 project, which was born in the 80s. It debuted in the early 90s, but the whole thing was rooted in the 60s. And you will see that it was super duper rooted in the 60s, because the people involved, we should just say out front, they weren't a cult.
SPEAKER_08:
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, and they weren't a cult. It just seems like they were a cult.
They were culty. Yeah. Cult adjacent, maybe. Not a cult. 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.
SPEAKER_10:
Cult adjacent. So, like you said, it was rooted in the 60s, in particular in a city called San Francisco, California.
SPEAKER_10:
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 all 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 talk to. Very smart guy, obviously. But he was a magnet for kind of like-minded people at the time in 60s San Francisco, which is to say super creative, very, very smart. And as it turns out, also very ambitious, which could fly in the face of other sort of hippie-dippie-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.
SPEAKER_08:
He had, if you don't mind, I have to read this, a certificate in advanced physiological systems for engineers from the University of Michigan.
Sounds made up, but apparently it's legit. And he had a 4-H ribbon.
SPEAKER_10: I thought you were going to say he had a certificate in advanced physiological systems for engineers from the back of a cereal box. Because that's what it sounds like. It definitely sounds like the kind of thing you would get at a strip mall at university.
SPEAKER_08: He was also trained as a metallurgist. He was a management consultant. He was, like I said, a super smart guy.
SPEAKER_10:
He had a lot of kind of famous hippie-dippie creative smart friends like William S. Burroughs, Buckminster Fuller in particular. 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 2, synergy was a big, big part of things, or it was supposed to be at least. And the geodesic dome, which everyone knows, is Bucky Fuller's sort of pet design pipe dream that became a reality.
Yeah, for sure. They incorporated it into the biosphere.
SPEAKER_08: That's right.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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. Those are written in an arc on every poster probably.
SPEAKER_10:
So 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. It really is.
SPEAKER_10:
They say things like free movement and stuff like that, you know.
But they were in San Francisco in the 60s and then left San Francisco, California in like 1968 because it had gotten too commercial.
They were hardcore. Okay. 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 communish kind of thing called the Synergia Ranch.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And so there they kind of expanded their horizons.
SPEAKER_08: They still put on odd performance pieces and plays. They can't not do that. No. It was really in their skin.
SPEAKER_08: They felt the call. Yeah. They also started building things too.
SPEAKER_08: 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 Heraclitus. Yeah. So here's the thing with the Synergians.
SPEAKER_10: They were all really smart, but it's not like they took an old boat to make this research vessel and they they sanded down the deck and re-stained 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
He was not an architect named Margaret Augustine, who's going to come back to, not haunt us, but she'll come back a couple of times.
SPEAKER_10: Is she the one back there?
But they were super smart and they built this ship that is like still sailing today.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. I mean, it has been for 50 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 80s, 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.
SPEAKER_10:
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 it 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 tradeoff 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. And what Biosphere offered was basically the chance to kind of take the best of both worlds and do both all at once. Yeah. And also because it was kind of compact in size, stuff that happened out on Biosphere 1 over the course of very long time scales happened much shorter.
SPEAKER_08: And much shorter in Biosphere 2 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 bitchin' testbed for off-Earth habitation on Mars.
Oh yeah. Which they predicted would happen by 2005. A little bit off. Not quite there yet.
SPEAKER_10:
SPEAKER_08: But like here's one example of sort of the ideas that they think could spring from this was they thought,
SPEAKER_10:
and we'll meet all the Biospherians soon enough. Spoiler alert, that's what they were called. They went from Synergians 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 few 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, you know, like jets and stuff,
SPEAKER_10: like add water and you get a jungle kind of thing. Yeah, she even brought her own shoebox inside.
SPEAKER_08: It being 1991, it was an LA Gear shoebox.
SPEAKER_08: Did you?
Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_10: LA Gear.
SPEAKER_08: That was a nice surprise. I haven't heard that one yet.
SPEAKER_10:
I thought of that this morning.
SPEAKER_10:
I thought that was off the dome. It's still great. Thanks.
SPEAKER_08:
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 20s.
He joined in 1974. And the reason he was so important is because he was a billionaire. Yeah.
Specifically, because, you know, this thing was going to require a lot of money, as we'll learn.
SPEAKER_10: 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?
SPEAKER_02:
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?
SPEAKER_10: And that's Perry Bass, everybody. That was a great Perry Bass, everybody.
SPEAKER_10: Indeed.
Ed Bass was in and he funded this thing to the tune of between 150 and 200 million dollars.
Nineteen, what, 80 something dollars?
Yeah, it's like double that now.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, all right, double.
SPEAKER_08: So we're usually more accurate in our updated inflation conversions.
SPEAKER_10: Doublish.
SPEAKER_08: 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 Vera in Kathmandu.
It's a hotel they own. There's the October Gallery in London. Art 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.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, because he thought, all right, here's what we're going to do.
SPEAKER_10: We're going to 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 cheese.
SPEAKER_10: What do you kids say these days? What else? Bread? I think they say bread. Is bread back? A little bread?
A little bread?
A little Samolians? Sure.
A little nashie?
Yeah, nashtag. Nashtag?
Nashtag Ecopreneurial.
Nice. Nailed it.
SPEAKER_10:
Jerry, cut that out.
Did not nail it. So his idea was, here's what we're going to do. We're going to start this big project and we're going to 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's going to go, hey guys, how much to license that jungle in a box you came up with?
And Ed Bass would 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 $12.95 to come gawk at the people who were sealed off in the biosphere facility.
SPEAKER_08:
And they did. That'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 synergy and fashion, all these hippies who had no experience being CEOs and directors of a large multimillion dollar corporation were now exactly that.
That's right.
SPEAKER_10: And they set about getting to work.
SPEAKER_08: There was an architect named Phil Hawes. And I believe he pulled out every tacky 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 80s. It totally does.
That's what it's always struck me as, you know? That's exactly what it looks 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 shiny powder coated aluminum tubing that really locks it into like 1990.
SPEAKER_08:
And that's exactly what it looks like still today. It's like Buck Rogers in the 20th century.
SPEAKER_10:
Or Disney's vision of Tomorrowland, basically.
Very much so. It's very much like that. Except moldy.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: Put a pin in that. So the plan, the original plan was for Biosphere 2 to run for 100 years.
SPEAKER_10: And like every couple of years or so, just cycling a new team of Biospherians to take the place of the old.
SPEAKER_10:
They would go into some like airlock. They would swap places. They would keep it sealed. Because we'll stress that a bunch. The whole point was to keep this thing sealed. Like if the problem happened, they couldn't be like, 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 100 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 could think of is I was in early college at the time. Sure. I wasn't sitting around watching the news, you know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: How do you think it's going? Good?
I think it's going quite well.
SPEAKER_08: So far?
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Thanks for joining us. We'll be right back. Thanks for having us. We'll be right back. Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_10: Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_08: Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_10: Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_05: Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_07: Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_02: We're back everybody.
You guys can thank Jerry for that.
Go to... don't buy your stuff at the post office.
SPEAKER_10: Sleep on this mattress.
Or, buy the...
was it the 2012 Camry?
SPEAKER_10: Yes. Ohhh, do you guys still hear that one anyone? Are you?
SPEAKER_10: I don't know what salesperson made that forever deal.
That was quite a deal.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, that won't go away.
SPEAKER_10: All right, so finally, we're back everyone. Thanks for coming.
Finally, finally, finally, on September 26, 1991, 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 100-year experiment and were sealed off.
It was a big press thing.
They wore these Mork from Mork 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 60s.
SPEAKER_08: That's how hardcore we are. That's right. Just want to drive that home. And I think also somebody was playing the flute as they entered. So flautist, if I'm not mistaken.
SPEAKER_10:
When you watch the doc, 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. No, no, they couldn't open it. That's what it was. Yeah. It was too sealed, and they were all just standing there kind of like this.
SPEAKER_10: But they got in. They sealed themselves in. And here were the eight Biospherians.
SPEAKER_08: Oh, me?
I knew it was me. I'm just teasing.
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 go find the greatest scientists in the world or 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 can be our Ryan Tannehill.
SPEAKER_10: He's not here. There's no way.
No, he's got football to play this weekend.
Abigail Olling was the next person we're going to mention. She was a marine biologist.
SPEAKER_10: Jane Poynter 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 Poynter actually is the only Viseperian to leave, which 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.
They'll do it. Whatever that is. Apparently, you got to hull rice.
SPEAKER_10: And I just thought it came in a bag.
SPEAKER_08: With a little piece of finger in it.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, exactly. That's the lucky bag.
SPEAKER_10: That means you get a million dollars.
Don't add too much water because that thing becomes a full finger. It turns into a dinosaur sponge. It does.
But it was very controversial when it happened because she had to leave because she needed 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 to seal yourself in to see if it was possible, not to cheat a little bit because it would render the results kind of moot.
SPEAKER_10: 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 15 pounds of weed.
That's what I might have brought back in. I'm just saying.
SPEAKER_08: The upshot is there's no hospitals or duffel bags on Mars. So people weren't really super happy about it.
SPEAKER_10:
You know, like the old Tom goes. Sure.
SPEAKER_08: So the next guy is Roy Walford. He was the crew physician. He was the oldest one, super old. He was like 65. Right.
SPEAKER_09: But he was in great shape because his scientific interest was at the intersection of anti-aging
SPEAKER_08: and nutrition. And he had come up with his own diet. He called it the calorie restricted optimal nutrition diet or crone diet.
SPEAKER_08: Terrible name for a diet. You know that's the same name as a bowel disease.
SPEAKER_10: He said, oh, I know.
SPEAKER_08:
So he really wanted to get his chance at like experimenting with these people with the crone diet and by goodness, he got his chances.
We'll see. That's right.
SPEAKER_10: Next up, we have Marc Van Thilo. 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 Biosphere 2, again, you can still go there. It's amazing. Take the time to take the tour, sort of the underneath tour. It's like 12 bucks extra, which Josh sprang for, by the way.
SPEAKER_10:
Paid my way in.
Like a good date.
SPEAKER_08: Never even asked for it back. I appreciate that.
SPEAKER_10: Yet.
SPEAKER_08: At the end of everything, at the end of stuff, you should know you're going to be like, and
SPEAKER_10: I said, here's this.
SPEAKER_10: $12, please. Plus inflation.
So he was dating Abigail Olling. 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 hadn't 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. I'm like, would you like, here's how I would do with you.
Would you like to break off a piece of banana, Josh?
SPEAKER_10: No, he stuck it in her mouth with his hand.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you for not demonstrating that on me.
SPEAKER_10: I mean, things have changed. I know the workplace has changed, but even in 1991, 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 someone a banana like that.
SPEAKER_08: For sure.
It'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?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, she was the chef. She made banana everything out of bananas.
SPEAKER_10: She ended up writing a book afterward called Eating In.
Thank you, Colin. From the field to the kitchen, the recipe is from Biosphere 2.
SPEAKER_10: She originally called it Eating In, Colin.
Guys, I mean, really eating in, but they changed the title.
SPEAKER_08: Who's next?
Tabra McCallum's 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 formed some company that is exploring how to live off of Earth. That's cool.
SPEAKER_10:
You know why? Because he never fed her a banana on camera.
That's right. Where was he from? He was European, too, I think.
SPEAKER_10:
No. He was from USA. Oh, all right. Music City?
Sure.
He was a little Nashian.
The last person is Linda Lee. Linda Lee was the biome design manager of the Desert Rainforest in Savannah. She was the one who was looking for that jungle in a box idea. Right. All right.
SPEAKER_08: So that's the eight of them. That's the eight people. There are also 3,800 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 little primates that look kind of cat-like.
They have huge eyes. They're adorable. They're called bush babies. Has anyone ever seen a bush baby?
Super cute. If you 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.
SPEAKER_10: They had to have something, right?
Sure. Here was the idea. It was all about synergy. We talked a lot about synergy on our show, how in nature, everything is working together
ideally to help everyone out. That was the idea here in a shrunken version of earth is you're going to 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 that was real.
I'm not sure if you knew that.
They brought in things to pollinate those specific plants. We need these insects. We need these plants because they're going to maximize oxygen for us. We're going to breathe stuff out, and they're going to breathe stuff in. It's going to be a beautiful exchange of CO2 and oxygen. Everyone's going to be working in synergy with each other to make this a grand success.
SPEAKER_08: 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 pee essentially. That's the appropriate response to that.
It was pretty amazing. The whole design was pretty great. All of this was in five different biomes.
A biome is a type of ecosystem that is a really specific type of ecosystem that's made up from the interactions of every rock and raindrop and rubber tree and reindeer all interacting in all sorts of different ... The four Rs. I know that would be a weird biome.
SPEAKER_08: They're all interacting in all sorts of complex ways, and all of those complexities form the characteristics of that biome.
In elementary school when they said, Josh, what are the four Rs?
SPEAKER_10: You should have blurted out reading, writing, arithmetic.
SPEAKER_10: You said rainbows, reindeer. What else?
SPEAKER_08: I like yours. I said raindrops, rocks, rubber trees, and reindeer.
Thanks, man.
SPEAKER_10: Man, that's a carpenter song if I've ever heard one.
She was a hell of a drummer, Karen Carpenter.
SPEAKER_08: I think I've seen old footage. You guys know that, right?
SPEAKER_10:
There are the videos of Karen Carpenter just getting down on the drums, which I never knew.
SPEAKER_08:
She was the Neil Peart of her day.
SPEAKER_10: All right. Where are we here?
Should I put on my glasses? No, I shouldn't put on my glasses. All right, let's talk about these biomes.
There were five of them in total.
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 20-foot waterfall. Pretty cool. It's amazing. There was a savanna, 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 700,000-gallon ocean.
It had a coral reef.
It had a 150-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 at this.
There's 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.
SPEAKER_08: Pretty great.
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.
SPEAKER_08: I suspect it was some sort of emotional experiment. They wanted to crack them.
Because there's no explanation for it. I was like, was purple big in 1990? I was like, no, no, it's never been big. Because it's purple. I'm trying to tie it to print somehow, but I can't.
Only prints could pull off purple, you know what I mean?
So alongside the purple wing that they lived in was an agroforestry plot where they grew their food. And for a short time, it was probably the most productive quarter acre of cropland in the entire world.
SPEAKER_10: Short time.
That'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 this stuff now, these late 80s computer systems.
But they did the job back then, this giant lung that you can still stand over. It's very intense, very cool.
SPEAKER_08: So the whole thing was put together in a three acre facility.
Sounds pretty big until you stop and think about it.
And because this is 1991, the best measurement that we can put it in is SMUs, standard mall units.
So if you had gone to Rivergate Mall in 1991 and walked around the Sears 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.
A Sears!
SPEAKER_09: I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_08:
Are they still around at all?
SPEAKER_10: Is there still Sears or did that completely go away? No, I don't think so.
I got a maybe from front row guy.
Did you get one of these?
That doesn't tell me much by the way.
No. All right. So life inside the biosphere was pretty interesting. You're sealed off again, smaller than a what?
Sears. Oh.
Oh. Sears. That anger management is really paying off. Thanks. That was such a quick switch. It slips out here. That's 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 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 dippie science types all living together and work for more. Actually, they didn't wear those jumpsuits. Like you know, because they had to work really hard. As soon as they left that press conference at 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.
SPEAKER_10: But no Chinese food. They couldn't get ramen delivered. None of that stuff. All they had was what they had, what they could grow, and that 14 pounds of weed in those duffies.
SPEAKER_08: And don't forget the tour bus after tour bus of gawkers and school kids who paid $13 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 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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, God, this is amazing.
It's 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 hadn't done this kind of thing before. Because they had, besides themselves, figuring all this out, they had teams and teams of legit scientists from all over the world 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.
The whole idea that you could, I mean, the biggest problem was they couldn't carry out
the science they wanted to because Earth doesn't have five biomes in a three acre space.
That's one thing. They didn't seal them off from each other. Now when you go and visit, there are 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 kind of works in a way. But 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.
SPEAKER_08: So pretty much any actual science they were trying to do as far as biospherics went was moot from the beginning because, again, they didn't seal the biomes off from one another. You had an Amazon rainforest 30 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 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 and was like, what the hell?
SPEAKER_10: This place is very moist, by the way, if you go to visit. I know that word triggers some people.
I'm sorry. No other way to describe it. It is moist.
SPEAKER_10:
Not cool. Moist, moist, moist, moist, moist.
SPEAKER_10: 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. You're 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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. The trees.
SPEAKER_10: It's just weird.
SPEAKER_08: 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 biosphere. 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 of biosphere two didn't have any wind, so they didn't grow that stress
wood, which meant they had to be lashed to the inside of the geodesic dome 80 feet up,
like a giant piece of cooked asparagus.
Just sad. Sad to see.
SPEAKER_10:
I didn't know about this part. And in fact, 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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
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 cord tying these, you know, what is it again?
Yeah, these weak trees.
And you were just, oh, you were so disgusted. I cracked the case.
SPEAKER_10: So we mentioned they started out with 3800 species of plants and animals.
40% went extinct, which I know that sounds like a lot, but that was actually better than
they thought they were going to do, right?
SPEAKER_08: 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 .0512 species
out of 3800 over two years. They lost 1520 species over two years. That's in biosphere one is what you would expect?
SPEAKER_08: Yes.
SPEAKER_08:
Okay. Yeah. But they were still better than what they predicted, which was 70% extinction rate. So 40% is like a triumph compared to that.
SPEAKER_10: That's true.
SPEAKER_10: And here's the weird thing that happened in biosphere two was that some of the things,
in fact, 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 in. 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 crone project.
SPEAKER_08: Or Linda Lee didn't even get to take the stuffing out of her LA Gear shoebox. She didn't, because she's chopping back those morning glory vines.
There was a species of ant called the crazy ant that took over the place. It actually outcompeted the 11 species of ants that were introduced purposely. No one knows how the crazy ant got in. On that shoe, probably.
SPEAKER_08: Probably.
SPEAKER_08:
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. Unfortunately, they don't bite or anything, but we were like, oh my God, we've heard about you guys. I can't believe, we were a little starstruck, actually. It was pretty neat.
SPEAKER_10: It made up for the last trees, I think, for 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 going to talk about the bush babies.
You talk about the bush babies.
SPEAKER_08: You're going to make me do this? I can't do it.
So, remember the bush babies, the super, super cute little primates?
SPEAKER_08: One of them got into a wiring panel and was electrocuted, which is just, that's got to
be a bummer day in Biosphere 2, you know?
Like, I'm sure you could smell it throughout the whole facility. I bet they're like, mmm.
SPEAKER_08: I bet they ate the hell out of that bush baby.
SPEAKER_08: They did make lemonades out of lemons, though.
For example, they found that salamanders played a disproportionate role in trapping carbon in soil because it eats a lot of the leaf-eating insects that release the carbon.
They hadn't introduced salamanders, but they made the observation all the same.
SPEAKER_10: 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. This energy wasn't happening, you guys.
SPEAKER_10: 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. You think it's going pretty good?
SPEAKER_08: Still going pretty good? I think so. You guys still enjoying yourself? Well, if I'm not mistaken, Chuck just set us up with a cliffhanger, which means we're
SPEAKER_08: going to take one more message break. That's right.
SPEAKER_08: Every person living with a rare autoimmune condition navigates their own unique journey. That's why in season two of Untold Stories, life with a severe autoimmune condition, a new series of videos, and a new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about the new series of videos about
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SPEAKER_10:
that rose to about 2,000 at one point when the farm was going pretty good. Again, you're fine, you're probably hungry on 2,000 calories. 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.
SPEAKER_08: But Dr. Walford was like, yes.
SPEAKER_10: Because he had a captive sample for two years
SPEAKER_08: to study his crone diet and he actually was vindicated. Everybody dropped a shocking amount of weight. I think the average was 21% of their body weight for men, 14% 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 was like, isn't this great everyone?
SPEAKER_10: Screw you, Walford.
They did the cartoon thing where he's like taking a nap and they look at him and he turns into a roasted turkey
in his bed. The point is everyone, they were hungry all the time.
SPEAKER_10: 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 eat that whole peanut.
Why are we even shelling 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 orange. Yeah.
They ate a ton of beets.
SPEAKER_10: They grew a lot of beets. They grew a lot of bananas. You know what happens to beets 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.
SPEAKER_08:
But I just, just for a second, like let's all get in the mindset of living for two years on sweet potatoes and beets.
That is cruel.
SPEAKER_08: That's like somebody saying moist over and over again. What about the coffee though?
SPEAKER_10:
They thought of coffee ahead of time.
SPEAKER_08: This is where I would have signed out. I would have been like, mission's 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,
SPEAKER_08: which meant everybody got six cups over the entire two years.
SPEAKER_10: Not one cup each. That's even bad.
SPEAKER_10: They got three cups of coffee per year each.
SPEAKER_08:
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, beets, sweet potatoes and goat milk.
SPEAKER_08: 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 goat milk together?
Like they're fine on their own in normal amounts, but you put them all together for two years. Guys.
This is Nashville. They're back to the land. They're real Americans. Hey, I'm a real American. I can get back to the land, but I don't want to live on sweet potatoes and beets and goats milk for two years. Can we not all agree on that? All right.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, thank you.
SPEAKER_08: We can finally move on from that part.
SPEAKER_10:
Whatever, socialist, fascist, communist,
because those are all the same thing.
I wasn't going to 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, because John Allen was kind of running the show from the outside. They were following John Allen's words still and sort of John Allenites. And then there was another faction that were 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 hear you. And they all looked and right outside the glass, John Allen was like, I had a burrito. And he was like, oh, me?
SPEAKER_10: So like a real division grew within the ranks and it got kind of ugly interpersonally between them.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, Abigail Allen said she was spit at twice. And Roy Walford later said, that's how I thought. That's how I thought.
SPEAKER_10: That's how I thought. That's how I thought. That's how I thought. That's how I thought. That's how I thought. That's a new one too.
SPEAKER_08: That's good.
SPEAKER_08: That's a new one too.
That's good. Thank you, thank you.
SPEAKER_10: Well, man.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_08: It's okay, you can use it once in a while. Thank you, appreciate that.
SPEAKER_08: Anger management is really working.
SPEAKER_10: So that's the hungriness. Number two is the breathing trouble.
SPEAKER_08: Yes.
So about a year, I guess, into the mission, they started to notice that their oxygen levels were going down, their CO2 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 Cusco, Peru,
which is way up in the Andes.
And 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 CO2. That was problem one.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and that one's a little frustrating because you know at the beginning they were 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, we should bring in Realistic Soil.
Great band name, by the way.
Realistic Soil? Sure.
SPEAKER_08: I don't know, no, I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, this is Nashville, they know.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, okay.
You know what, that's my band with nine other guys.
SPEAKER_08: Oh, it's funny you say that because I had thought of one, the Dimes of Dozens.
That's the name of our band?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
You thought of that when I was saying that?
Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_08: Wow. Oh wait, just now? No, no, no, earlier. Yeah, I was gonna say this was like an hour ago.
I just still, the way your brain works always surprises me.
Thanks, man.
SPEAKER_10: After all these years. The fuck is being sold? The Dime of Dozens?
SPEAKER_08:
Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: That's probably a real band here.
SPEAKER_08: Probably.
SPEAKER_10:
They're backstage right now.
Yeah. So the soil, yes, we did the soil. So normally the plant life in Biosphere 2 would have sort of reckoned with this and they would have worked overtime, they would have stepped up and sucked that CO2 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.
SPEAKER_08: No, because there's a lot of CO2 that should have been in the atmosphere that was mysteriously missing. So they looked around again, 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 2 happened to have 110,000 square feet of exposed concrete and that concrete was out competing the plants for that CO2.
SPEAKER_08: So the plants couldn't pump out oxygen and yet the CO2 levels were still higher than they should be, which meant the biospherians were in trouble. And it wasn't immediately apparent what they should do about the whole thing.
SPEAKER_10:
Yeah, they weren't sure. I mean, there 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 moot, or we can leave and they didn't want to leave. So in the end, they decided they're gonna bring in oxygen.
SPEAKER_08: 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?
SPEAKER_08: Just a few years later, Time Magazine named it as one of its 100 worst ideas of the 20th century. Alongside the Titanic, DDT, and sailing the Exxon Valdezan
of Prince William Sound. Man.
Bad stuff. They really turned on them in the press.
SPEAKER_10: Not only that, reports start to come out of some other things. They had a CO2 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 in the press. They were like, what was in those duffies? We have the camera footage, you left with nothing, you came back with these two big duffies.
And she was like, I don't know.
Not really sure what that was.
SPEAKER_10: It's cool, man, like don't be a drag.
Man, you sold that. I was like, oh God, Chuck's choking.
SPEAKER_10: So sentiment started to turn publicly on them,
and then the very scientist that helped them started to turn on them. Yeah, because word got out that the trees were lashed
SPEAKER_08: to the geodesic dome in the ocean and turned into 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
SPEAKER_08: give themselves an alibi. And so the media turned on it, the scientific community turned on it, and the public turned on it as well.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, it was not a good scene. Years later, a few years later, in 1996, that original OG Synergy and Biospheria, 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 worked, 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 what didn't. And it's a 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, is they had chances time and time again to come out with PR, basically, that talked about this 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, no, I don't know what you're talking about, that everything's going great.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, because any time something came up, like the duffel bags or the CO2 scrub or whatever, John Allen and his inner circle decided the best route was to cover it up, or lie, or obfuscate.
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 sh**.
SPEAKER_08: Yes.
SPEAKER_08: Saltwater marsh poo poo. 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.
SPEAKER_10: That's right, but regardless of what the world thought and what the press thought, they brought in that oxygen,
it sustained them, it 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 this place. Yeah, it's pretty great. Brought in some house music.
SPEAKER_10: 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 23rd, 1993, as Mark Nelson would say, profoundly changed.
SPEAKER_08: And then as scheduled, Mission 2 went in after Mission 1, I think a few months afterward. Mission 2 was slated to just stay in for a year,
but it didn't last nearly as long.
SPEAKER_10: Well, also Mission 2 only had three people, Pauly Shore, Brendan Fraser, and Stephen Baldwin. So.
Has anyone seen Biodome?
SPEAKER_10:
Whoa! That is a, it's a genuinely good movie. This is my takeaway from Nashville.
Beets, sweet potatoes, Biodome. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10:
Huge town for that stuff.
SPEAKER_08: Right. I watched it for research, seriously.
I still didn't, I still haven't watched it.
I may be the only person on the planet who's ever watched Biodome for research purposes.
But it paid off, because they actually captured a lot of the spirit of everything that went wrong in there. They probably did. It just never went right, like Pauly Shore got it to in the end.
SPEAKER_10:
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's really become pretty ugly at this point. So he said, all right, you know what? I'm gonna 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 freeform dancing we did over the years. All the crazy, creative kid stuff that we dreamed up. Apparently not under the influence of drugs, which was highly surprising.
They were kind of straight edge, right?
SPEAKER_08:
Just weirder and weirder.
SPEAKER_10: I just don't believe it.
And it became way more preneur and less eco after this point. Went in a more twisted direction when they brought in a new board and a new CEO named Steve Bannon.
SPEAKER_10:
Yes. For real.
SPEAKER_10: And in the documentary, they said the name Steve Bannon. I went, well, that's a coincidence.
SPEAKER_09: And in Waltz's end, younger Steve Bannon.
SPEAKER_10:
Was like, really?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, they put the guy. What a villain to introduce in act three.
SPEAKER_08: Exactly. It was very surprising. The guy who used to be able to buy coke off of an Air Force One. That's who they put in charge of Biosphere 2 at the end. That's right.
SPEAKER_08: He was only wearing one collared shirt at the time.
SPEAKER_10: You're right.
SPEAKER_10: Did not get into that, whatever that look is, where you wear two.
SPEAKER_10: I don't know what that is. Have you guys seen that?
SPEAKER_10: All right, I'm wearing this shirt. Imagine if I had like an Izod Polo underneath it
with another collar that's up.
That's Steve Bannon's look. He's the only guy that does that.
So maybe credit to him?
SPEAKER_10: No. Okay.
SPEAKER_08: No.
SPEAKER_10:
Two-colored shirts. Anyway.
SPEAKER_08: So Mark Van Tillo and Abigail Alling were rightfully concerned about this new direction. They were worried about the safety of the Mission 2 crew.
So they went in and broke the seal to the facility.
They gave it a bunch of beer until it peed.
And that opened up the air and let it in.
Really?
SPEAKER_10: Beets, sweet potatoes, biodome,
and breaking the seal at the bar.
Little gnashy.
Little gnashy trends.
SPEAKER_10: That's what I'm hoping.
You ever nicknamed a city and it worked?
SPEAKER_08: No.
Not in all the times I've tried. I'm pretty good at it.
You ever heard of the Big Apple?
SPEAKER_08:
Holy cow, is that you? That was me. Wowee.
SPEAKER_08: I called it the old cow pasture.
Just intake.
SPEAKER_10: 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 in my head at least. And that was the end of Biosphere 2 as far as that project goes. No 100 years.
That 150 to $200 million 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
SPEAKER_10: and visit all those biomes. And it is still legitimately amazing.
SPEAKER_08: 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 the scientific community turned on it, we still today have this idea of Biosphere 2 just being a complete kludgy 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.
SPEAKER_10: That's right, which is great.
SPEAKER_08:
Yeah, there's also the discovery that ocean acidification
bleaches coral and kills it off. That came out of Biosphere 2 as well. That's right, that's a big problem these days. And that all started there.
SPEAKER_10: Well, the bush babies. Sure.
What happened to them? They became extinct. Yes, they went extinct.
SPEAKER_08: The bush babies went extinct, everybody. I don't know why you keep giving these to me. Well, this is a silver lining at least.
SPEAKER_08: 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, that's a really big deal. They got some mammals to reproduce in a closed off system. So good things did actually happen, but probably the biggest contribution
SPEAKER_08: that Biosphere 2 gave us was it reinvigorated humanity's love of earth, I guess. It had kind of peaked previously in about 1970 with the first Earth Day. Then everybody was like, oh, I hadn't heard of cocaine before, let me start doing that instead.
SPEAKER_08: Went that way for a couple of decades. And then the biospheres came back and like blew
everybody's coke right off their table and got them focused again on earth. Steve Bannon jumped on the floor.
SPEAKER_09: Right.
SPEAKER_10: So yeah, I mean, it fascinated the world
with environmentalism again. It kind of kick started that next wave of environmentalism in a real way. It really jump started things on the welfare of the planet and for a little while at 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 30 of this amazing experiment.
SPEAKER_10: How much further, and we made some pretty great strides, but how much further would we have been along
in terms of caring for our planet had biosphere 2 just really solved everything to begin with
and just kicked as much ass as everyone thought it was gonna kick. Sure.
It's sad to think about.
SPEAKER_08: It's also possible that it was just too, it actually was too kludgy to produce any scientific value, but we'll never know.
SPEAKER_10: Ed Baskett, 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 University of Arizona 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
SPEAKER_10: not too far away.
There's a great Mexican restaurant downtown Tucson
called Pinca that we ate and it is delicious and wonderful. It really is.
SPEAKER_08: Great cocktails.
SPEAKER_08: 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 it.
And that's the story of Biosphere 2, everybody.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, Nashville. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_09: Thank you.
SPEAKER_05: Thank you.
SPEAKER_08: and Argenics is exploring the challenges and triumphs of life within autoimmune disorder. Host Martine Hackett shares these powerful perspectives from real people living with conditions like myasthenia gravis and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy. Tune in to find strength and community on your journey on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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