In 1991, eight people entered Biosphere 2.

You may have heard of Biosphere 2.

There was a Pauly Shore movie, sort of based on Biosphere in the 90s.

And as a child of the 90s, I of course watched it and learned so much about the value of friendship.

But Biosphere 2 was a 3.14 acre enclosure out in the Arizona desert that was meant to

replicate Biosphere 1, which is the Earth. So they had a rainforest, a marsh, an ocean with

the coral reef, a desert, a savannah,

agricultural fields, and human habitats.

And the people who started this giant experiment had future settlements in space in mind.

If you could figure out how our Earth works and you can miniaturize that, maybe you can take that out with you into space and create sustainable

habitats for humans in space. But during this first run, the men lost 18% of their body weight

and the women lost 10%. They just were not able to create enough food to keep themselves going.

And this was despite the fact that they were spending an average of eight to ten hours a day,

five and a half hours a week, doing this kind of stuff. And that doesn't even include the other kinds of things

that you would have to do if you were, you know, trying to make a living on Mars, like running a power plant.

Biosphere 2 was running off of the grid. So on Mars there'd be all this extra stuff, like crewing the solar panels that you'd have to worry about.

But we need more experiments like these.

Probably it would be better to start on a smaller scale and then sort of scale up so we can understand the systems better.

But we need these kinds of experiments where you're in a closed environment,

the amount of plants that you're growing determine

how much oxygen you get and how much carbon dioxide is extracted from the atmosphere.

We need to prove to ourselves that we can live in these systems while growing sustainable amounts

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