Biosphere 2 is in disarray. The three-acre glass and steel structure 20 miles north of Tucson on Arizona Highway 77 is still one of the technological wonders of the world, but it has fallen on hard times since the University of Arizona took it over a year ago. Built in the late ’90s at a cost of $150 million by entrepreneur and environmentalist Ed Bass, it first served as the world’s largest closed-loop life support system, simulating what life might be like in a human colony on Mars. Today, it is a U of A propaganda mill, but it’s still worth taking the $20 tour. Tours “under the glass” run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. Catch the last tour before 3 p.m. Be forewarned that the adventure requires some physical agility. Visitors climb stairs, duck through low passageways, and step through airlocks.
Before tours, which run for about 1.5 hours, participants watch a 10-minute documentary about the history and current ownership of Biosphere 2. There are some errors, most notable of which is the identification of ownership. CDO Ranching of Tucson no longer owns Biosphere 2, having donated it to the University of Arizona. Accordingly, the University no longer leases it. The public relations show is old. No telling when a new one will be made. To judge by comments overheard from the audience, and also monitored from travel sites on the Internet, the University manages to come off as arrogant and self-congratulatory.
At the assembly point in the lower level of what was the human habitat, one finds a collection of posters unrelated to the tour. Probably these change and are the products of other events that use the campus. What we saw was from a Physics conference that apparently dealt with quantum mechanics. For visitors, it was an impenetrable and off-putting display of hubris. The tour guide does not mention or explain them, at least ours didn’t.
The replacement cost of Biosphere 2 has been stated as $1 billion in the past photo editor, but others have reported it as closer to $4 billion to $8 billion. It may be impossible to duplicate at all, it is said, because of the advent of regulations to prevent the removal of some of the species inside the biosphere from their native places. This is especially true of the coral reef in the biosphere’s ocean. Coral reefs are endangered globally.
Whereas the Biosphere 2 apparatus, that 3-acre glass and steel space frame structure that dominates the campus and the view for miles, was originally built by Space Biospheres Ventures to simulate and study the characteristics and performance of then state-of-the-art closed-loop life support for a space colony, this fact is not mentioned, or barely mentioned. Some of the original contents have been swept away by new experimental setups. In most cases it is not clear that the experiments need to be performed inside a device like the Biosphere. Guides regularly acknowledge that they could be done in large greenhouses. So Biosphere 2 is underutilized, wasted, like any free thing. In the rain forest biome, experimentation threatens the continued existence of irreplaceable assets by testing their response to drought conditions as a demonstration of what is said to be expected of climate change within the next 100 years. Trees in the biome drop some of their leaves to conserve water and sink deeper roots in search of more. Surface roots die. If there is something new to be learned here, I haven’t heard about it.