Carolyn N. Kinder
The self-contained sealed environment known as Biosphere 2 is located in the Sonoran desert in Arizona. The four men and four women inside it at the beginning of 1991 are committed to a two year experiment in life and living. This project is designed to be a hundred-year experiment. The future is unknown and in science it is not certain as to what might happen. There is no way of predicting exactly which and how many of the thirty-eight hundred species Biosphere 2 contains will survive. What Biosphere 2 will mean, will reveal and will prove in the end we can only guess at.
The story of Biosphere 2 begins ten thousand years ago with the origins of agriculture, when man first began making human-controlled ecosystems and exploited the surplus energy thus made available to create cities and develop technology. People’s impact on the natural world has increased since that time at what seems to be an ever accelerating rate.
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Biosphere 1, Earth, solar powered, 3.8 billion years old, two trillion living tons networked through thirty million species contains our past, present and destiny. Biosphere 2, scientific model and symbol, helps us understand life and, therefore, ourselves.
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Biosphere 2 is open to energy inputs: sunlight provides the basic energy for ecological systems and electrical energy for technical systems. Heating and cooling would be generated outside the Biosphere and delivered to the inside. Just as Earth sends and receives radio waves, light beams, and communications to and from vehicles in space, the Biosphere would also be open to information exchange.
A significant purpose of the experiment is to create a dialogue between the biosphere and Earth and another biosphere and make comparisons which had never before been possible.
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The rules of the house of Biosphere 2 are much the same as those for ecosystems of the Earth. People living in Biosphere 2 must earn their keep, performing some useful functions in the ecosystem. All the work of the ecosystem has to get done and all the functional niches must be filled.
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