Hi, I'm Lovar Burton and this is Lovar Burton Reads.

In every episode, I handpick a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.

The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope you will too.

If you read or watch Sci-Fi, you're probably familiar with the concept of the generation

ship.

It's the idea that if you wanted to send humans to a distant star and you didn't have

a spacecraft that could travel fast enough to get them there in their lifetime, you could

plan for that crew to live on board for multiple generations before the spacecraft finally

reaches its destination.

It's kind of like a Noah's Ark traveling between stars.

You need to set up the crew with a closed system that can sustain them with food, water,

air for many years.

We're far from making the generation ship a reality, but we are experimenting quite a bit

with these closed systems and what exactly we need to live and thrive, how we can replicate

this in places other than Earth.

A couple of years ago, I moderated a conversation about the documentary Spaceship Earth, which

was about the Biosphere 2 project.

Biosphere 2 was originally intended to show how a closed ecological system, a bubble,

if you will, with its own water, an air, dirt, and crops and animals, how that could support

human life.

How if you plopped that bubble down in outer space, you could survive.

The protagonist of today's story is living in a closed system on a generation ship moving

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