Biospheres, Controlled Ecosystems, and Life Support Systems

March 2000 Newsgroup Discussion

Participants:
• Checkmate © <LunaticFringe@The.Edge>
• jhertzli@ix.netcom.com
• Ian Stirling <Inquisitor@I.am>
• Bill Bonde <stderr@mail.com>
• Larry Osborne <larrybo@idirect.com>
• J05H <javaninja@my-deja.com>
• Matthew Montchalin <mmontcha@OregonVOS.net>
• Derek Lyons <elde@hurricane.net>

It takes more than elbow room to support a population... it takes natural resources, and plenty of them. As low as the population density is in Africa, people are still starving. Before you can grow enough food to feed 30 billion people, you're going to need a few things... like way more water than the area gets naturally,

We've got oceans full of it. The water has to be purified, but the natural resources necessary to provide the energy needed to purify the water are also available.

If you put down a few billion biosphere II's, then you get a population of around 200 billion. 600 billion if you cover the seas too.

Gee... why didn't I think of that...?

I'm not advocating that exact method, of course. I was just pointing out that a population 10-50 times it's current size may well be supportable, given relatively "soft" technologies. Yes, it would involve enormous investments, and enormous disruption of what areas remain somewhat natural today.

Leaving aside that you can't get sufficient raw material to do this construction job, let alone sufficient energy and you've just destroyed the Earth's biosphere to do this, what I've read about the biosphere experiment says it didn't really work. Where is your failsafe?

Where's our fail-safe now?

Multiple regional ecologies and seasons. A failure in one and the others continue (more or less). If you build over the planet where are any ecologies outside the buildings going to exist other than perhaps a largely bacterial septic ecology at the bottom of the oceans. (go back 3 billion years)

You would have multiple biospheres, wouldn't you? If one goes bad, just flush it out and reintroduce creatures.

You could try but I suspect that if it is happening in one it may be happening in all of them.

If you have millions of seperate habitats, you can prop up ones that have problems, simply by importing from ones that don't.

If there were arcologies spanning the planet, even if they were all physically connected, there would be huge distances, internal weather phenomenon, and some maintenance/management to keep it all working. This would be a significant barrier to any runaway imbalances. An arcology-based ecosystem, by design, is going to have a diversity of life. A planetwide chain of arcologies would necessarily have diverse species. Never mind when genetic engineering is used...

The original (Biosphere II) required correction with the infusions of outside air to let the inhabitants survive.

If you cover the entire globe where are you going to get air produced to infuse the biospheres? Food produced was nutritionally adequate but very short on caloric requirements. You would end up with a population that was at best skin and bone, if they could still breathe. And then there are the runaway ecological instabilities that led to rapid increases in some organisms and equally rapid losses of other organisms.

Biosphere II was a first cut. You may well be able to get better efficiancy if you built Biospheres III thorough M

Wasn't that because it was too small and diversified enough to produce a self sustaining ecosystem?

As I understand it the concrete was removing the oxygen. They were probably producing enough oxygen to survive if it had stayed in the air but the concrete removed a good portion of it on them.

There was some sort of sink. Perhaps just coating the inside of the cement with plastic would've changed everything.

Was Biosphere II built on a foundation of concrete, or on bedrock, or was it laid out on a foundation of aluminum and steel? If they had avoided using concrete, naturally the expenses of building the thing would have been increased, but would they still have lost as much oxygen?

I am implying that the whole thing could have been fitted together using nothing more than glass and aluminum, and silicone sealant. I know, the problem with aluminum is that you can't weld it in an oxygen rich atmosphere without using helium... In order to avoid burning up aluminum (this particular metal has a peculiar affinity to oxygen), you find yourself resorting to something called heli-arc welding, and that might have driven up construction expenses much too far.

Your mention of a sink reminds me of a bacterial sink taking up a lot of oxygen too, now I begin to question if the concrete was a first guess as to the problem that may or may not have been a contributing factor. The soil was too rich and the bacteria broke down a lot of the organics in the soils using a lot of the oxygen.

This is the other half of the Biosphere II oxygen problem. The first part is that the concrete hadn't cured properly, and absorbed to much O2. The other part shows a certain lack of understanding on the part of the people that built the Biosphere. To make soil for all of the plants and simulated landscapes, they mixed local Arizona desert sand and cow manure, and called it soil. Now, this might have seemed sensible to the people doing it, but it shows that someone knew NOTHING about farming, and cow shit. The bovine feces was, as you would expect, filled with all kinds of bacteria, much much more than ordinary soil. This sand and manure mixture (I've seen photos of the crew wrestling in this stuff) proceeded to consume, once the Biosphere was sealed up, most of the rest of the oxygen. (I can find refs to this if someone requires.)

Okay, I too would probably have found myself pleading ignorance here. It's good to learn about this now, after the fact, so we don't repeat it a second time. :) Glad I'm not in a position of power like the original founders of Biosphere II were. :)

How *else* would one put together a soil of some kind, say, for a similar project? Arizona sand seems functional enough. Should the sand/feces mixture have weathered for a few months before using it inside the shelter? Can you suggest a better way of manufacturing arable soil for a structure like that? Should the sand have been kept separate from the bovine feces, right from the start? Was their mistake having a "rich" soil instead of a poor soil?

With more than one kind of organic material, and some mineral rich clays as well as sand. But they tried to be cheap. (Biosphere II overall spent like a drunken sailor in odd places, and skimped in odder places.)

Their mistake was that they were better ecological philosophers than scientists.

The whole point of the biosphere was that they were trying to duplicate in general the world ecology. They used several hundred varieties of plants and quite a few animals as well. They could probably have done as well(?) with a less diversified plant base and fewer animals than they did use but only try to emulate a single regional ecology rather than a world ecology. They thought that they were well diversified with sufficient checks and balances for it to work, they were wrong.

What else went wrong other than the O2?

I have a vague memory about some insect problems (ants being the worst). I have also some vague memories about another set of animals but I read this too long ago to remember anything well. This is better handled by looking it up and reading the summaries (unless you want to go thru in detail). My memory is failing at this point and so I am bowing out.

Ants? I hadn't heard about them, but wouldn't be surprised. I know they had a huge problem with some sparrows or robins that were local birds that they were never able to completely flush out of the structure before sealing it. 8) Apparently the local species flourished inside, to the detriment of some of the imported ones.