Biosphere 2 has stood amid the paloverde, mesquite, and ocotillo southwest of Oracle, Arizona, for less than 20 years, yet it looks decidedly aged. Its skin is mostly glass and lacks window-washing tracks, so the hundreds of panes had to be cleaned by workers hanging on ropes like rock climbers. At one time seven people were employed to do this; today there are none. The desert wind deposits dust on the structure and the rain washes it downward, forming parallel streaks. The rain forest inside pushes against the glass. In 2003 there were about 150 employees on the site. Less than a third remain. Dry leaves collect against the air handlers by the main doorway; whiptail lizards skitter over the concrete paths, and javelinas trot around the grounds at night. A note on a whiteboard in the operating engineer’s office tallies the number of poisonous reptiles encountered on the site, which is greater than the number of maintenance people left to encounter them: “Rattlesnakes: 17.”
The café is closed, the mission control building deserted, and inside the row of clear plastic sheds where plants were readied for installation in the main structure, towering exotics—Panama hat palm, angel’s trumpet—stand bleached and lifeless where they perished when the water was turned off. A monochrome monitor displays the last numbers it ever knew, burned into its dead screen. On the shelf below is the 1986 manual for the environmental monitoring system to which it was connected. Nothing ages faster than the future.
Constructed between 1987 and 1991, Biosphere 2 was a 3.14-acre sealed greenhouse containing a miniature rain forest, a desert, a little ocean, a mangrove swamp, a savanna, and a small farm. Its name gave homage to “Biosphere 1”—Earth—and signaled the project’s audacious ambition: to copy our planet’s life systems in a prototype for a future colony on Mars. A May 1987 article in DISCOVER called it “the most exciting scientific project to be undertaken in the U.S. since President Kennedy launched us toward the moon.” In 1991 a crew of eight sealed themselves inside. Over the next two years they grew 80 percent of their food, something NASA has never attempted. They recycled their sewage and effluent, drinking the same water countless times, totally purified by their plants, soil, atmosphere, and machines. It wasn’t until 18 years later, in 2009, that NASA announced total water recycling on the International Space Station. At the end of their stay, the Biospherians emerged thinner, but by a number of measures healthier.
Despite these successes, the media and the science establishment seized upon the ways in which the project had failed. Chief among these was an inability of Biosphere 2’s atmosphere to sustain human life. As was true outside, the problem was signaled by rising carbon dioxide. By 1996 Biosphere 2 had passed into the hands of Columbia University, and later the University of Arizona took over. Both used it to run scenarios of global climate and atmospheric change. In its later life, “instead of trying to model utopia, Biosphere 2 would actually model dystopia—a future plagued by high carbon dioxide levels,” wrote Rebecca Reider, author of a definitive history of the project. But while most research on impending environmental disaster relied on computer models, Biosphere 2 represented a fascinating alternative mode in which large-scale analog experiments employed real organisms, soil, seawater, and air.
