Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Speaker 2: Charles w Chuck Bryant. Jerry's not here with us, but
Speaker 2: all of these beautiful people are at the Sherman Horne
Speaker 2: Symphony Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Man a lot. That was great.
Speaker 2: Like I literally can't hear right now? What?
Speaker 1: Oh, all right, everyone I want to talk about I
Speaker 1: can't believe, by the way, that this was earlier this year.
Speaker 1: Doesn't it seem like eight years ago?
Speaker 2: It seems like that Blue Oyster Roads.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was earlier this year. On the morning
Speaker 1: of January fifth, I met Josh at the airport in
Speaker 1: Atlanta at Hartsfield at a departure gate for what would
Speaker 1: be our very first ever research field trip after fifteen years,
Speaker 1: and we had a great time. By the way, spoiler,
Speaker 1: the flight was booked for Tucson, Arizona because Tucson is
Speaker 1: very close to Oracle, Arizona, specifically thirty two Biosphere Road
Speaker 1: in Oracle, Arizona.
Speaker 2: Nothing, okay, that's cool, we can work with that.
Speaker 1: If you don't know what happened at Biosphere Road, then
Speaker 1: strap in because you're about to hear the story of
Speaker 1: the biosphere to experiment. Yes, raise your hand if you
Speaker 1: have heard of this at all, Oh, a.
Speaker 2: Couple of people.
Speaker 1: That's good. That's about what we like. Has anyone seen
Speaker 1: the documentary Spaceship Earth. It's good you, Oh right, isn't
Speaker 1: it great?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Highly recommend the documentary. And I'll say this about twenty
Speaker 1: more times. Highly recommend you going to visit the biosphere today.
Speaker 1: It was really really great.
Speaker 2: If you haven't seen the documentary, most of the show
Speaker 2: probably won't make any sense to you, so we probably
Speaker 2: should have thought that through.
Speaker 1: We'll just talk to you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Biosphere two might make you think, like, wait
Speaker 2: a minute, what was Biosphere one? Hadn't heard of it?
Speaker 2: I missed it. Don't worry. You're actually on Biosphere one
Speaker 2: right now, because Biosphere one is planet Earth. Biosphere two
Speaker 2: was a highly ambitious project to seal off a little
Speaker 2: piece of Earth from the rest of it and see
Speaker 2: what happened. Basically, Yeah, and.
Speaker 1: It could have been a great many things, right depending
Speaker 1: on who you ask.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, I have that list right here. It could
Speaker 2: have been an incredibly expensive piece of performance.
Speaker 1: Art sort of.
Speaker 2: Okay, we'll take that, a massive hub for gathering scientific.
Speaker 1: Day, not as massive as they intended.
Speaker 2: Right, an audaciously ambitious attempt to replicate Earth for sure. Okay,
Speaker 2: the project that created the modern environmental movement.
Speaker 1: I like that. I'm the judge of all this. In
Speaker 1: part I will say, Okay, a fraud.
Speaker 2: No, that wasn't a fraud, A failure, sort of failure,
Speaker 2: a spectacular success.
Speaker 1: Not that either. No, definitely somewhere somewhere in the middle
Speaker 1: of those two.
Speaker 2: You guys can be the judge of all that yourselves,
Speaker 2: because we're going to tell you all about the Biosphere
Speaker 2: two project, which was born in the eighties. It debuted
Speaker 2: in the early nineties, but the whole thing was rooted
Speaker 2: in the sixties. And you will see that it was
Speaker 2: super duper rooted in the sixties. Because the people involved,
Speaker 2: we should just say out front they weren't a cult.
Speaker 2: It's going to seem at various turns that, yeah, guys,
Speaker 2: these people are a cult. They were not a cult.
Speaker 2: We did as much research as we possibly could. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they weren't a cult. It just seems like they
Speaker 2: were a cult.
Speaker 1: They were culty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, cult adjacent, cult adjacent.
Speaker 1: It's like when you're reading the real estate ads. It's
Speaker 1: like they're not in the cult neighborhood, but they're pretty close. So,
Speaker 1: like you said, it was rooted in the sixties, in
Speaker 1: particular in a city called San Francisco, California. And this
Speaker 1: was during one of their many summers of love that
Speaker 1: they've had over the years. A very charismatic hippie named
Speaker 1: John Allen. He went by the name Johnny Dolphin. I
Speaker 1: refuse to say that. Twice I call him John Allen.
Speaker 1: They had nicknames. I was about to say cute, but
Speaker 1: they really weren't that cute. But John Allen was kind
Speaker 1: of a magnet. He was a genius depending on who
Speaker 1: you talked to. Very smart guy, obviously, but he was
Speaker 1: a magnet for kind of like minded people at the
Speaker 1: time in sixties San Francisco, which is to say, super creative,
Speaker 1: very very smart, and as it turns out, also very ambitious,
Speaker 1: which could find the face of other sort of hippie
Speaker 1: dippy ish types out there at the time.
Speaker 2: Right. And like you said, he was essentially a certified genius.
Speaker 2: He had a master's degree in business from Harvard. Not
Speaker 2: too shabby he had. If you don't mind, I have
Speaker 2: to read this, a certificate in Advanced Physiological Systems for
Speaker 2: Engineers from University of Michigan. Sounds made up, but apparently
Speaker 2: it's legit, and he had a four A driven.
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to say he had a
Speaker 1: certificate in Advanced Physiological Systems for engineers from the back
Speaker 1: of his cereal, because that's what it owns.
Speaker 2: It definitely sounds like the kind of thing you would
Speaker 2: get at a strip mall university, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: He was also trained as a metallurgist. He was a
Speaker 1: management consultant. He was, like I said, super smart guy.
Speaker 2: He was.
Speaker 1: He had a lot of kind of famous hippi dippy
Speaker 1: creative smart friends like Williams Burrows, Buckminster Fuller in particular,
Speaker 1: who had he would have a pretty outsized influence on
Speaker 1: John Allen and this project that we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about in a couple of ways. One was the idea
Speaker 1: of synergy that Bucky Fuller was really into, and as
Speaker 1: you will learn with Biosphere too, synergy was a big,
Speaker 1: big part of things, or that was supposed to be
Speaker 1: at least and the geodesic dome, which everyone knows is
Speaker 1: Bucky Fuller's sort of you know, pet design pipe dream
Speaker 1: that became a reality.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, they incorporated it into the biosphere, that's right.
Speaker 2: So this group that formed around John Allen, that was
Speaker 2: not a cult. They were hanging out in San Francisco.
Speaker 2: They were into creating art and doing performance pieces, and
Speaker 2: they would put on these odd plays under the name
Speaker 2: the Theater of All Possibilities. And I don't mean odd
Speaker 2: like as an occasional I mean like odd plays really
Speaker 2: tough to watch because you're watching adults use their imagination
Speaker 2: and that is just uncomfortable to watch. And they did
Speaker 2: it a lot like that was kind of their thing,
Speaker 2: so much so they took it on the road. The
Speaker 2: touring company was called the Caravan of Dreams. And you
Speaker 2: can't say either of those names without going like.
Speaker 1: This, I know, because they're written in an arc on
Speaker 1: every poster of So they were they were doing these
Speaker 1: little and some of these are in the documentaries that
Speaker 1: show some of their little performance art pieces, and it's
Speaker 1: really something they really they say things like free movement
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, you know. But they were in
Speaker 1: San Francisco in the sixties and then left San Francisco, California,
Speaker 1: and like nineteen sixty eight because it had gotten too commercial.
Speaker 1: They were a hard core Okay that these are how
Speaker 1: sort of out there that these people were. And they
Speaker 1: moved to New Mexico out in the middle of nowhere
Speaker 1: and formed a little not a cult, they formed a
Speaker 1: sort of a communeish kind of thing called the Synergia Ranch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so they're they kind of expanded their horizons.
Speaker 2: They still put on odd performance pieces and plays.
Speaker 1: They also not.
Speaker 2: Do that, No, they it was really in their stay.
Speaker 1: They felt the call.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They also started building things too, like they got
Speaker 2: interested in just making things with their own hands. And
Speaker 2: a really good example of what they could do is
Speaker 2: called the research vessel Heraclitis.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So here's the thing with the synergy Ins. They
Speaker 1: were all really smart. But it's not like they took
Speaker 1: an old boat to make this research vessel and they
Speaker 1: sand it down the deck and restained it and kind
Speaker 1: of spruced it up a bit like I could. Well
Speaker 1: I couldn't do that either, Actually I could try to.
Speaker 1: They built from scratch a ship, not a boat like
Speaker 1: a ship, and they weren't shipbuilders, they weren't architects. They
Speaker 1: figured out how to do it like this is kind
Speaker 1: of how ambitious and smart they were. There was a
Speaker 1: woman there who led the I guess architectural side of things,
Speaker 1: who was not an architect, named Margaret Augustine, who's going
Speaker 1: to come come back to not haunts, but she'll come
Speaker 1: back a couple of times. Is she the one back there?
Speaker 1: But they were super smart and they built this ship
Speaker 1: that is like still sailing today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it has been for fifty years basically,
Speaker 2: and they again they built it from scratch, no knowledge
Speaker 2: of shipbuilding. And it was in that kind of like
Speaker 2: can do spirit that the biosphere project was born. And
Speaker 2: the whole idea was to build this self sustaining habitat
Speaker 2: that was closed off from the rest of Earth that
Speaker 2: could sustain human life, very important, and to use it
Speaker 2: to study this new field called biospherics, which is creating
Speaker 2: closed systems to study Earth's ecosystems in kind of minute detail.
Speaker 2: And it was new because they had essentially made it up,
Speaker 2: but the whole thing had merit because at this time,
Speaker 2: in like the early eighties, scientists around the world were
Speaker 2: starting to notice that Earth was getting out of whack
Speaker 2: in a lot of unsettling ways and had kind of
Speaker 2: concluded that if we didn't figure out what to do
Speaker 2: about that, things would be very bad for life on
Speaker 2: Earth very soon. And spoiler alert, we did figure out
Speaker 2: what to do about it, we didn't do it, and
Speaker 2: now we're all doomed. Just FYI.
Speaker 1: So to study something like Earth's ecosystem, like very complex stuff,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of ways you can go about it.
Speaker 1: You can get in a lab and you can bring
Speaker 1: stuff in and you can study it there, and in
Speaker 1: that case you're going to get really precise measurements and
Speaker 1: really precise data, but it's not out in the real world,
Speaker 1: so it's you sort of get what you get. The
Speaker 1: other way to do is to go out in the
Speaker 1: real world and study stuff, and people had been doing
Speaker 1: both for a very long time, and it's always been
Speaker 1: that trade off for science, Like you go out in
Speaker 1: the real world and you're going to get real, like
Speaker 1: more natural results, but the data is not going to
Speaker 1: be as accurate because you don't have all your toys
Speaker 1: out there necessarily sure, And what bios sphere offered was
Speaker 1: basically the chance to kind of take the best of
Speaker 1: both worlds and do both all that once.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also because it was kind of compact in size,
Speaker 2: stuff that happened out on biosphere one over the course
Speaker 2: of very long time scales happened much shorter in biosphere
Speaker 2: two because it was tiny, so you could actually track
Speaker 2: carbon isotopes as it made it through the carbon cycle,
Speaker 2: which is kind of useful, and it would make a
Speaker 2: bitch and test bed for offerth habitation on Mars. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which they predicted what happen by two thousand and five.
Speaker 1: A little bit off right there yet, but like here's
Speaker 1: one example of sort of the ideas that they think
Speaker 1: could spring from this was they thought those and we'll
Speaker 1: meet all the biospherians soon enough. Spoiler alert, that's what
Speaker 1: they were called. They went from synergi ins to biospherians,
Speaker 1: but one was named Linda Lee. She was a botanist
Speaker 1: and what she wanted to accomplish there one of the things,
Speaker 1: at least was to figure out how little tissue that
Speaker 1: you could get, like how cells that you could collect
Speaker 1: and still yield a viable plant. And the idea being like,
Speaker 1: one day maybe we can have like a jungle in
Speaker 1: the size of a shoebox that like jets and stuff
Speaker 1: like add water and you get a jungle kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she even brought her own shoebox inside it. Being
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety one, it was an La Gear shoebox.
Speaker 1: Did you okay, Gear? That was a nice surprise. I
Speaker 1: thought I thought that was off the dome. It's still great, thanks, okay.
Speaker 2: So if you put all this stuff together, this is
Speaker 2: like a really good idea that the Synergians had, and
Speaker 2: they were just the kind of people to do it,
Speaker 2: as we've seen. But you can really argue that the
Speaker 2: project would not have happened had a guy named Ed
Speaker 2: Bass not been a member of the group, and he
Speaker 2: had been since I think his early twenty because he
Speaker 2: joined in nineteen seventy four. And the reason he was
Speaker 2: so important is because he was a billionaire.
Speaker 1: Yeah, specifically because you know, this sing was going to
Speaker 1: require a lot of money, as we'll learn. But he
Speaker 1: was the son of a guy named Perry Bass, and
Speaker 1: Perry Bass was at the time one of the richest
Speaker 1: dudes in the United States. He was a billionaire. He
Speaker 1: was a Texas oil tycoon, and somehow had one son
Speaker 1: that became an environmentalist. I don't know if he was
Speaker 1: like the shame of the family. I do know that
Speaker 1: that Thanksgiving was probably a little awkward when he brought
Speaker 1: up this idea to Pops. I think Perry was probably like, son,
Speaker 1: you're going to do what you're going to get? How
Speaker 1: many millions for a bios something? Why can't you start
Speaker 1: a minor league baseball team like your brother Bobby? And
Speaker 1: that's Perry Mass.
Speaker 2: That was a great Perry Bass.
Speaker 1: Everybody indeed, but Ed Bass was in and he funded
Speaker 1: the thing to the tune of between one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty and two hundred million dollars nineteen what eighty something dollars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's like you're double that now, yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: double So we're usually more accurate in our updated inflation conversion.
Speaker 2: So he was. Actually he'd financed a lot of projects
Speaker 2: for the group. They had this thing where he would
Speaker 2: buy like a plot of land somewhere in the world
Speaker 2: and they would like build something on it or improve
Speaker 2: it somehow, And there's still stuff around today. There's the
Speaker 2: Hotel Veyra in Katmandu. It's a hotel they own. There's
Speaker 2: the October Gallery in London.
Speaker 1: Our gallery, yep.
Speaker 2: And so they called it the ecopreneurial spirit, so like
Speaker 2: they were hippies, but they weren't shy about making money too,
Speaker 2: and that's what this whole biosphere project was in part
Speaker 2: to Ed bass.
Speaker 1: For sure, Yeah, because he thought, all right, here's what
Speaker 1: we're gonna do. We're gonna launch this massive science project,
Speaker 1: which I think ended up being at the time the
Speaker 1: single largest privately funded science project in human history. And
Speaker 1: he said, but here's how we can make a little
Speaker 1: scratch off this, A little little cheese. What do you
Speaker 1: kids say these days?
Speaker 2: What else? Bread? I think they say bread.
Speaker 1: Is bread back, little bread, Little Sosamolians. Sure, little Nashi, Yeah, nashtag, nashtag, nashtag,
Speaker 1: ecopreneurial nice, all right, nailed it. Jerry cut that out,
Speaker 1: did not nail it. So his idea was, here's what
Speaker 1: we're gonna do. We're gonna start this big project and
Speaker 1: we're gonna eventually come up with all these all this
Speaker 1: great data and these science ideas that we can patent,
Speaker 1: and then one day when we need to live on Mars,
Speaker 1: NASA is going to go, hey, guys, how much to
Speaker 1: license that jungle in a box you came up with?
Speaker 1: And Ed bassa just sit back and cackle and make
Speaker 1: a ton of money. So that was one way to
Speaker 1: make money. And then they had another great idea to
Speaker 1: make money.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, they were going to charge tourists twelve ninety
Speaker 2: five to come gawk at the people who are sealed
Speaker 2: off in the Biosphere facility. And they did.
Speaker 1: It's right, it's all glass. You can just peer in
Speaker 1: and make fun of them all day long. Kids.
Speaker 2: So they formed a venture or an LLC I guess,
Speaker 2: called Space Biosphere Ventures, And in true Synergian fashion, all
Speaker 2: these hippies who had no experience being CEOs and directors
Speaker 2: of a large, multi million dollar corporation were now exactly
Speaker 2: that that's right, and they set about getting to work
Speaker 2: like there was an architect named Phil Hawes, and I
Speaker 2: believe he pulled out every techie style he could think
Speaker 2: of to create this place. Chuck likes it.
Speaker 1: It's amazing.
Speaker 2: It looks like the headquarters to Heaven from a movie
Speaker 2: in the eighties. It's it's what it always struck me,
Speaker 2: as you know, that's exactly what it's like. There's like
Speaker 2: barrel roofs, there's that geodesic dome. The thing that really
Speaker 2: gets it for me is everything is made out of
Speaker 2: this like shiny powder coated aluminum tubing that really locks
Speaker 2: it into like nineteen ninety and that's exactly what it
Speaker 2: looks like still to It's.
Speaker 1: Like Buck Rogers in the twentieth century or their Disney's
Speaker 1: vision of you know, of tomorrow Land, basically.
Speaker 2: Very much so it's very much like that. That stuff moldy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, put a pin in that. So the plan, the
Speaker 1: original plan was for Biosphere two to run for one
Speaker 1: hundred years, and like every couple of years or so,
Speaker 1: just cycling a new team of Biasparians to take the
Speaker 1: place of the old They would go into some like airlock,
Speaker 1: they would swap places. They would keep it sealed because
Speaker 1: we'll stress out a bunch. The whole point was to
Speaker 1: keep this thing sealed, like if the problem happened, they
Speaker 1: couldn't be like, well, let's just open up the doors
Speaker 1: and bring some stuff in to help us along. They
Speaker 1: really wanted to see what it would be like, and
Speaker 1: the only way to do that was to seal it
Speaker 1: up tight. So one hundred years was the original goal.
Speaker 1: News spread around the world. People were seriously jazzed. I
Speaker 1: have no idea how I missed this because I was
Speaker 1: like early college at the time. I knew nothing about
Speaker 1: it somehow, except my only thing I can think. As
Speaker 1: I was in early college at the time, I wasn't
Speaker 1: center around watching the news. You know what I'm saying? Yeah,
Speaker 1: how do you think it's going good?
Speaker 2: I think he's going quite well so far. Oh yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: Well then that means we have to take a message break,
Speaker 2: so please bear with us. That's right, because we'll be
Speaker 2: right back.
Speaker 3: Sish, stuffy jaws, shop soft your s.
Speaker 1: We're back, everybody.
Speaker 2: You guys can thank Jerry for that.
Speaker 4: You go to don't buy your stuff at the post office,
Speaker 4: sleep on this mattress or buy the was it the
Speaker 4: twenty twelve Camra?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Oh oh you guys still hear that one?
Speaker 2: Anyone? Some of the old ones? Are you?
Speaker 1: I don't know what salesperson made that forever deal?
Speaker 2: That was quite a deal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that won't go away, all right? So finally we're
Speaker 1: back everyone, Thanks for coming. Finally, finally, finally, On September
Speaker 1: twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one, eight people, four men and
Speaker 1: four women who we will meet very shortly called the Biospherians,
Speaker 1: began their first what was to be a two year
Speaker 1: mission of the one hundred year Experiment and were sealed
Speaker 1: off this big press thing they wore, these Mork from
Speaker 1: Orc spacesuit.
Speaker 2: Jumpsuit things, very very weird.
Speaker 1: For real, like broad shoulders, cinched at the waist.
Speaker 2: They're like, don't forget we left San Francisco for New
Speaker 2: Mexico in the late sixties. That's how hardcore we are.
Speaker 2: That's right. I just want to drive that home. And
Speaker 2: I think also somebody who's playing the flute.
Speaker 1: As these so floutist if I'm not mistaken, the kind
Speaker 1: of when you watch the it's kind of funny because
Speaker 1: they couldn't get the door to seal it first, and
Speaker 1: everyone was like, oh, that's the whole point now, that
Speaker 1: they couldn't open it. That's what it was. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was two sealed and they were all just standing there
Speaker 1: kind of like this. But they got in. They sealed
Speaker 1: themselves in, and here were the eight biosperians.
Speaker 2: Oh me, uh, I knew it was me. I'm just teething.
Speaker 2: First up is Mark Nelson. We mentioned him first because
Speaker 2: he was, I guess considered the captain of the team,
Speaker 2: mostly because he was the truest believer of this group
Speaker 2: of true believers, because they had selected from the group
Speaker 2: of synergians they didn't like go find the greatest scientists
Speaker 2: in the world or like astronauts or anything. They just said, Hey,
Speaker 2: you seem enthusiastic. I like the way you do the
Speaker 2: free body movement stuff. Get in there, Get in this
Speaker 2: red jumpsuit. That is seriously, who this group of eight
Speaker 2: people were.
Speaker 1: That's right, you could be our Ryan Tannehill. He's not here,
Speaker 1: There's no way, no, he's got football to play this weekend.
Speaker 1: Abigail Alling was the next person we're gonna mention. She
Speaker 1: was a marine biologist. Jane Pointer is next. She was
Speaker 1: in charge of the farm and the farm equipment and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and she was in the documentary. You
Speaker 1: will see. It's very controversial because Jane Pointer actually is
Speaker 1: the only Bisparian to leave what you weren't supposed to do.
Speaker 1: During the experiment. She had an accident where she cut
Speaker 1: off part of her finger in a rice huller.
Speaker 2: I think I'll do it.
Speaker 1: Whatever that is apparently got a whole rice and I
Speaker 1: just thought it came in a.
Speaker 2: Bag with a little piece of finger in it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: It's the lucky bag. That means you get a million dollars.
Speaker 1: Don't add too much water because that thing becomes a
Speaker 1: full finger.
Speaker 2: It turns into a Dinosaurs preface.
Speaker 1: But it was very controversial when it happened, because you know,
Speaker 1: she had to leave because she needed, you know, a
Speaker 1: hospital to take care of her briefly. But here's the deal.
Speaker 1: She came back in carrying these two large Duffel bags
Speaker 1: that she didn't leave with, and they weren't supposed to do, like, oh,
Speaker 1: by the way, we forgot all these things, go get them.
Speaker 1: The whole point of this whole thing, once again was
Speaker 1: this seal yourself in to see if it was possible
Speaker 1: not to cheat a little bit, because it would render
Speaker 1: the results kind of moot. So she comes in these
Speaker 1: Duffel bags will come back later. I don't know what
Speaker 1: was in them. I don't even think they ever found out.
Speaker 1: I think it was probably fifteen pounds a weed. That's
Speaker 1: what I might have brought back in. I'm just saying.
Speaker 2: The upshot is there's no hospitals or Duffel bags on Mars.
Speaker 2: So people weren't really super happy.
Speaker 1: About it, you know, like the old song goes sure.
Speaker 2: So the next guy's Roy Walford. He was the crew physician,
Speaker 2: who's the oldest one, super old. He was like sixty five, right,
Speaker 2: But he was in great shape because his scientific interest
Speaker 2: was at the intersection of anti aging and nutrition, and
Speaker 2: he had come up with his own diet, called it
Speaker 2: the calorie restricted optimal nutrition diet or Krone diet. Terrible
Speaker 2: name for a diet.
Speaker 1: They're like, you know, that's the same name as a
Speaker 1: bowel disease.
Speaker 2: He said, oh, I know. So he really wanted to
Speaker 2: get his chance at like experimenting with these people with
Speaker 2: the Krone diet, and my goodness, he got his chance,
Speaker 2: as we'll see.
Speaker 1: That's right. Next up we have Mark van Fillow. He
Speaker 1: was a Belgian scientist and he operated the life support equipment,
Speaker 1: including what you'll hear a little bit more about this
Speaker 1: giant lung in the bottom of this facility that breathes
Speaker 1: for the facility. And here's a little tip. If you
Speaker 1: ever go to buy a Sphere two again, you can
Speaker 1: still go there. It's amazing. Take the time to take
Speaker 1: the tour, sort of the underneath tour. It's like twelve
Speaker 1: twelve bucks extra, which Josh sprang for by the way,
Speaker 1: paid my way in like a like a good date.
Speaker 2: Never even asked for it back.
Speaker 1: Appreciate that yet at the end of everything, At the
Speaker 1: end of stuff, you should know you're gonna be like,
Speaker 1: and here's this twelve dollars please, plus inflation. So he
Speaker 1: was dating Abigail Auling. There were two couples among this
Speaker 1: group of eight, which can get a little thorny. The
Speaker 1: reason we know that they were a couple was a
Speaker 1: couple of reasons. One they mentioned it in the documentary,
Speaker 1: but two, even if they headn't have said that. There
Speaker 1: is a shot sort of in the background at one
Speaker 1: point where he feeds her a banana on camera and
Speaker 1: not like peel a banana and like, would you like,
Speaker 1: here's how I would do it with you. Would you
Speaker 1: like to break off a piece of banana Josh? Why no,
Speaker 1: he stuck it in her mouth with his hand.
Speaker 2: Thank you for not demonstrating that on me too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean things have changed. I know the workplace
Speaker 1: has changed, but even in nineteen ninety one, you don't
Speaker 1: do that to a female coworker. You don't do that.
Speaker 1: It's never been okay the first office you did not
Speaker 1: feed did someone a banana like that?
Speaker 2: For sure? That's true. That's what it says on the
Speaker 2: T shirt. There was Sally Silverstone who was the most
Speaker 2: widely liked of the group. We get the impression she
Speaker 2: got along with everyone. She was an English social studies teacher,
Speaker 2: and I think she was in charge of the food basically, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she was the chef. I mean she made banana
Speaker 1: everything out of bananas. We'll see. She ended up writing
Speaker 1: a book afterward called Eating In Thank You Colan From
Speaker 1: the Field to the Kitchen the Recipes from Visca too.
Speaker 1: She originally called it eating in Colon guys, I mean
Speaker 1: really eating in, but they changed the title.
Speaker 2: He's next Tavera mccallums. Next, he was in charge of
Speaker 2: the analytical chemistry lab. He was one half of the
Speaker 2: other couple with Jane Pointer. And they're actually still involved
Speaker 2: in this kind of stuff today. They're like, that's right.
Speaker 2: They formed some company that is exploring how to live
Speaker 2: off of earth.
Speaker 1: That's cool, you know why because he never fed her
Speaker 1: a banana on camera, That's right. And then there's where
Speaker 1: was he from? He was from? He was European too,
Speaker 1: I think, No, okay, he was from US a all
Speaker 1: right music city. Sure, he was a little Nashian. So
Speaker 1: the last person is Linda Lee, and Linda Lee was
Speaker 1: the biome design manager of the Desert Rainforest in Savannah,
Speaker 1: and she was the one who was looking for that
Speaker 1: jungle in a box idea, right, all right, So that's
Speaker 1: the eight.
Speaker 2: Of them, that's the eight people. There are also thirty
Speaker 2: eight hundred species of plants and animals in there. They
Speaker 2: put in everything from cockroaches to kind of till the
Speaker 2: soil and make it even richer. They put in these
Speaker 2: these little primates that look kind of cat like, they
Speaker 2: have huge eyes. They're adorable. They're called bush babies. Anyone
Speaker 2: ever seen a bush baby? Super cute. We want to
Speaker 2: take out your phone right now and look, we won't
Speaker 2: be mad. They're so cute that we're pretty sure that
Speaker 2: they were just put in there just because they're so cute.
Speaker 1: They had to have something, right sure. And here was
Speaker 1: the idea, is you know, they were gonna it was
Speaker 1: all about synergy. And we talked a lot about synergy
Speaker 1: on our show, how in nature, like everything is working
Speaker 1: together ideally to help everyone out. And that was the
Speaker 1: idea here in a shrunken version of Earth, is you're
Speaker 1: gonna have plants that are pollinated by these specific very
Speaker 1: specific because it can bring in everything. It's not Noah's
Speaker 1: Ark for goodness sakes, because you know that was real.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if you knew that they brought in
Speaker 1: things to pollinate those specific plants, like here, we need
Speaker 1: these insects, We need these plants because they're going to
Speaker 1: maximize oxygen for us, and we're going to breed stuff
Speaker 1: out and they're going to breed stuff in and it's
Speaker 1: going to be a beautiful exchange of CO two and
Speaker 1: oxygen and everything's going to be working in synergy with
Speaker 1: each other to make this a grand success.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Because it was a sealed facility, everything had to
Speaker 2: be recycled, Like you said, their breaths were recycled with
Speaker 2: the plants, their wastewater was put through this marsh, and
Speaker 2: then they ended up drinking their own pea. Essentially. It
Speaker 2: was and that's the appropriate response to that. It was
Speaker 2: pretty amazing. It was like the whole design was pretty great,
Speaker 2: and all of this was in five different biomes. And
Speaker 2: a biome is a type of ecosystem that is a
Speaker 2: really specific type of ecosystem that's made up from the
Speaker 2: interactions of all like the every rock and rain drop
Speaker 2: and rubber tree and reindeer all interacting and all sorts
Speaker 2: of difficult to be a weird, weird biome, but they're
Speaker 2: all interacting in all sorts of complex ways, and all
Speaker 2: of those complexities formed the characteristics of that biome.
Speaker 1: In elementary school, when they said, Josh, what are the
Speaker 1: four ours? And you should have? I said, well, blurted
Speaker 1: out eating writing, arithmetic. You said, rainbows, reindeer, and what else.
Speaker 2: I like yours? I said, rain drops, rocks, rubber trees,
Speaker 2: and reindeers. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Thanks, man, Man, that's a That's a Carpenter song if
Speaker 1: I've ever heard one. You know, she was a hell
Speaker 1: of a drummer, Karen Carpentery.
Speaker 2: That right.
Speaker 1: There are videos of Karen Carpenter just get singing down
Speaker 1: on the drums, which I never knew.
Speaker 2: Great, she was the Neil Pert of your day.
Speaker 1: All right, where are we here? Should I put on
Speaker 1: my glasses? Now? I shouldn't put on my glasses? All right,
Speaker 1: let's talk about these biomes. There were five of them
Speaker 1: in total. Each, like you said, each ecosystem had a
Speaker 1: very specific set of interactions supposedly within it. But as
Speaker 1: we'll see, there were variables that didn't let that happen.
Speaker 1: One was the and we walked through each of these.
Speaker 1: They're still there today. The tropical Amazonian rainforest has a
Speaker 1: twenty foot waterfall. Pretty cool, it's amazing. There was a savannah,
Speaker 1: very useful. There was a coastal fog desert, kind of
Speaker 1: like the west coast of Mexico, like south of California.
Speaker 1: What else was there? There was a freshwater marsh and
Speaker 1: get this, you guys, there was a mangrove marsh. They
Speaker 1: had saltwater mangroves there, my favorite plant on planet Earth.
Speaker 1: They had on little Earth out there, and that flowed
Speaker 1: into the showstopper, which was a nearly seven hundred thousand
Speaker 1: gallon ocean. It had a coral reef, It had a
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty foot stretch of beach, and it
Speaker 1: was operated by vacuum pumps. And we know this because
Speaker 1: we were in the Underneath tour and I was like, Josh,
Speaker 1: look of this. They're just a random pole that had
Speaker 1: a button that said Ocean on, Ocean off. And I've
Speaker 1: never wanted to press something more in my life.
Speaker 2: Then the humans they lived in their own little biome,
Speaker 2: the anthropogenic biome wing and for some reason, they decked
Speaker 2: it out in the purplest purple you've ever seen.
Speaker 1: It's so cool.
Speaker 2: I suspect it was some sort of emotional experiment. They
Speaker 2: wanted to crack them because there's no explanation where I
Speaker 2: was like, was purple big in nineteen ninety I was like, no, no,
Speaker 2: it's never been big because.
Speaker 1: It's tied to print somehow. But I can't.
Speaker 2: Only Prince could pull off purple, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: So in the alongside that, the purple wing that they
Speaker 2: lived in was a agro forestry plot where they grew
Speaker 2: their food and for a short time it was probably
Speaker 2: the most productive quarter acre of crop land in the
Speaker 2: entire world.
Speaker 1: Short time. It's just a hint of where things going.
Speaker 1: And then beneath it all, like we said, was the
Speaker 1: tour that you can take now. Had all the computers
Speaker 1: and stuff, which if you go, it's kind of funny
Speaker 1: to laugh at the stuff now, these you know, late
Speaker 1: eighties computer systems, But they did the job back then.
Speaker 1: At this giant lung that you can still stand over.
Speaker 1: It's very intense, very cool.
Speaker 2: So the whole thing was put together in a three
Speaker 2: acre facility. It sounds pretty big until you stop and
Speaker 2: think about it. And because this is nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2: The best measurement that we can put it in is
Speaker 2: SMU's standard mall units. So if you had gone to
Speaker 2: Rivergate Mall in nineteen ninety one and walked around the
Speaker 2: seers there, you would be walking around a Sears that
Speaker 2: was a little less than four acres in size, which
Speaker 2: means that these people were stuck for two years inside
Speaker 2: a facility smaller than a sears as. I'm sorry, are
Speaker 2: they still around at all?
Speaker 1: Is there still seiers or that completely go away? Now?
Speaker 2: I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I got it maybe from front rogue. That doesn't tell
Speaker 1: me much, by the way. No, all right, so life
Speaker 1: inside the biosphere was pretty interesting. They're sealed off again, smaller.
Speaker 2: Than a what sears.
Speaker 1: Oh, and anger management is really paying off. That was
Speaker 1: such a quick twitch.
Speaker 2: It slips out here or there. Good.
Speaker 1: So obviously, you know, all this stuff is very obvious,
Speaker 1: but we just want to kind of drive it home.
Speaker 1: You're not going out for coffee, you're not ordering a pizza,
Speaker 1: You're not there's there's nothing you can bring in. It's
Speaker 1: just you. You can't go have a drink at the bar
Speaker 1: if you want one, like you were in there with
Speaker 1: what you got, what you can grow. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of small animals. There's a lot of insects, there's cockroaches.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of hippie tippy science types all living
Speaker 1: together and more for more. Actually, they didn't wear those jumps.
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, because they had to work really hard.
Speaker 1: As soon as they left that that press conference the beginning,
Speaker 1: they're like, let me get out.
Speaker 3: Of this stuff.
Speaker 1: Of course it was all glass. So they all saw
Speaker 1: them change clothes.
Speaker 2: Right, but no Chinese food.
Speaker 1: They couldn't get ramen delivered. None of that stuff. I
Speaker 1: would not be. All they had was what they had,
Speaker 1: what they could grow, and that the fourteen pounds of
Speaker 1: weed in those duffies.
Speaker 2: And don't forget the tour bus after tour bus of
Speaker 2: gawkers and school kids who paid thirteen dollars to come
Speaker 2: look at them. So, in addition to being sealed off
Speaker 2: from the rest of earth for two years, they were
Speaker 2: exhibits in a human zoo essentially. And there's a there's
Speaker 2: a little shot in the documentary where some guy is
Speaker 2: like trying to take a picture of one of them,
Speaker 2: and he stops and he's like he did that and
Speaker 2: it's documented, and I think he's a jerk.
Speaker 1: So if all this sounds awesome, and it does to
Speaker 1: you in the audience, and you don't know what happens next,
Speaker 1: you're thinking, guys, this is amazing, is ambitious. They're trying
Speaker 1: to do real science. They put all this money into it.
Speaker 1: They got a geodesic dome, they got those duffies full
Speaker 1: of whatever. You're right, it sounds amazing, And if you're
Speaker 1: wondering did it go wrong? It did. There were a
Speaker 1: number of real design flaws in this thing. And I
Speaker 1: don't think it was necessarily because they weren't. I hadn't
Speaker 1: done this kind of thing before. Because they had, besides
Speaker 1: themselves figuring all this out, they had teams and teams
Speaker 1: of you know, legit scientists from all over the world
Speaker 1: like contributing, so everyone was kind of pitching in and
Speaker 1: involving themselves with their expertise. So I don't think it
Speaker 1: was a lack of that. It was just maybe not
Speaker 1: the most thought out thing to begin with, like the
Speaker 1: whole idea that you could I mean, the biggest problem
Speaker 1: was it couldn't carry out the science they wanted to
Speaker 1: because Earth doesn't have five biomes in a three acre space.
Speaker 1: They didn't seal them off from each other. Now, and
Speaker 1: you go and visit their doors. Between all these they
Speaker 1: built walls and stuff, and you go from the rainforest
Speaker 1: and shut the door behind you and you go into
Speaker 1: the desert. And that, you know, kind of works in
Speaker 1: a way. When it's all right next to each other.
Speaker 1: It's not natural and nothing is going to work. And
Speaker 1: they just didn't think of that, I guess.
Speaker 2: So pretty much any like actual science they were trying
Speaker 2: to do as far as BIOSPHERICX went, was moot from
Speaker 2: the beginning, because again they didn't seal the biomes off
Speaker 2: from one another. You had an Amazon rainforest thirty feet
Speaker 2: away from a coastal fog, right And as a result,
Speaker 2: the desert actually didn't stay desert because the more rain
Speaker 2: you made in the jungle to increase plant production and
Speaker 2: then you know, boost oxygen, it meant more fog roll
Speaker 2: than every day in the desert, and so the cacti
Speaker 2: got choked off by all the moisture and it turned
Speaker 2: into like scrub land. And Linda Lee came in at
Speaker 2: one point, I was like, what the hell.
Speaker 1: This place is very moist by the way, if you
Speaker 1: go to visit. I know that word triggers some people.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, No, the way to describe it it is moist,
Speaker 1: not cool, moist, moist moist moist, moist, so moist, like
Speaker 1: you've been to greenhouses and stuff that kind of moisture.
Speaker 1: Amplify this because there's waterfalls and jungles and stuff.
Speaker 2: So moist.
Speaker 1: Sorry. What else happened? There was a massive influx of
Speaker 1: nutrients from that mangrove marsh that I love, right into
Speaker 1: the ocean, such that you know, there's these great shots
Speaker 1: at the beginning of them, like scuba diving next to
Speaker 1: the reef, like this is amazing, and you know, a
Speaker 1: year later, it's just so choked with algae because it's
Speaker 1: so nutrient dense that scuba diving dried up pretty quickly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it turned into a green, slimy ocean. And we
Speaker 2: keep using the word nutrients, but you could also replace
Speaker 2: that with poop, right, that's true. And then the trees, hmm,
Speaker 2: the tree it's just weird. So they grew really really tall,
Speaker 2: but they were too weak to stand up under their
Speaker 2: own power, their own structure. And they figured out that
Speaker 2: that was because there was no wind inside of the bikeiosphere.
Speaker 2: Outside on biosphere one, the wind pushes on trees and
Speaker 2: in response, trees grow something called stress wood, which gives
Speaker 2: it a lot of structure. The trees inside a biosphere too,
Speaker 2: didn't have any winds, so they didn't grow that stress wood,
Speaker 2: which meant they had to be lashed to the inside
Speaker 2: of the geodesic dome eighty feet up like a giant
Speaker 2: piece of cooked asparagus. Just sad to see.
Speaker 1: I didn't know about this part, and in fact, I
Speaker 1: went out when I went in January, I had purposely,
Speaker 1: I think I watched the documentary, but I purposely didn't
Speaker 1: look at the stuff you put together because I just
Speaker 1: kind of wanted to experience it for the first time.
Speaker 1: But on the plane, Josh was like, you know, I
Speaker 1: heard that they lashed these trees to the tube because
Speaker 1: they're so weak, and he was really kind of not obsessed,
Speaker 1: but you were really sort of into this idea, like
Speaker 1: a like an encyclopedia Brown Sleuth. And we got there
Speaker 1: and Josh was so funny. He was like, look, look
Speaker 1: they're still lashed. And he looked up there and sure enough,
Speaker 1: there's like you know, vinyl chord tying these you know,
Speaker 1: what is it again, Yeah, it's week Dresa, and you
Speaker 1: were just you were so discussed.
Speaker 2: I cracked the case.
Speaker 1: Uh so we mentioned they start out with thirty one
Speaker 1: hundred species of plants and animals forty percent when extinct,
Speaker 1: which I know that sounds like a lot, but that
Speaker 1: was actually better than they thought they were gonna do.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, let me put that in a background extinction
Speaker 2: rate real quick though, Right, according to background extinction rates,
Speaker 2: they should have expected to lose point zero five to
Speaker 2: one to two species out of thirty eight hundred over
Speaker 2: two years. They lost one five hundred and twenty species
Speaker 2: over two years.
Speaker 1: That's on biosphere one, is what you would expect.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, yeah, but like Chuck said, it was still
Speaker 2: better than what they predicted, which was seventy percent extinction rate.
Speaker 2: So forty percent is like a triumph compared to that.
Speaker 1: That's true. And here's the weird thing that happened in
Speaker 1: Biosphere two was that some of the things back, many
Speaker 1: of the things ended up really really thriving, were things
Speaker 1: that they didn't even bring in and intend to thrive.
Speaker 1: For instance, morning glory vines. They can be lovely, We
Speaker 1: all love them. They grew so extensively. They basically, and
Speaker 1: this will become a recurring theme, is they had to
Speaker 1: spend so much of their time doing other stuff rather
Speaker 1: than what each of them had their own little expertise in.
Speaker 1: They didn't get to do the things that they had expertise.
Speaker 1: And so they're out there, as we will see later,
Speaker 1: farming all day, weeding all day, chopping this morning glory vine.
Speaker 1: And that's going to build resentment when you can't do
Speaker 1: your little chrone projects.
Speaker 2: Or Linda Lee didn't even get to take the stuffing
Speaker 2: out of her La Gear shoe box.
Speaker 1: She didn't because he's chopping back those morning glory vine.
Speaker 2: Right. There was a species of ant called the crazy
Speaker 2: ant that took over the place. It actually out competed
Speaker 2: the eleven species of ants that were introduced purposely. No
Speaker 2: one knows how the crazy ant got.
Speaker 1: In, but not show probably probably.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it took over though, and they're still there today.
Speaker 2: When we were sitting there looking out over the ocean,
Speaker 2: kind of holding on this railing, our hands were just
Speaker 2: covered and unfortunately don't bite or anything, but we were like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, we've heard about you guys. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: can't believe if we were a little starstruck. Actually it
Speaker 2: was pretty neat.
Speaker 1: It made up for the last trees I think for sure,
Speaker 1: a little bit all. I mean not all, but most
Speaker 1: of the pollinating things they brought in to pollinate these
Speaker 1: specific plants died off, so they ended up having to
Speaker 1: hand pollinate crops, which I don't know why that sounds
Speaker 1: dirty to me, but that's what they did. And to
Speaker 1: top it all off, well I'm not gonna talk about
Speaker 1: the bush babies.
Speaker 2: You talk about they're.
Speaker 1: Gonna make me do this, I can't do it.
Speaker 2: So remember the bush baby's, the super super cute little primates. Well,
Speaker 2: one of them got into a wiring panel and was electrocuting,
Speaker 2: which is just that's got to be a bummer day
Speaker 2: in biosphere too, you know, Like, I'm sure you could
Speaker 2: smell it throughout the whole facility.
Speaker 1: I bet they're like, hmm, I'll bet they ate hell
Speaker 1: out of that bush baby.
Speaker 2: Right, They did make lemonades out of lemons, though. For example,
Speaker 2: they found that salamanders played a disproportionate role in trapping
Speaker 2: carbon and soil because it eats a lot of the
Speaker 2: leaf eating insects that released the carbon. They hadn't introduced salamanders.
Speaker 2: But they made the observation all the same.
Speaker 1: So that's all well, and good. Things aren't going great.
Speaker 1: There's a domino effect happening in nature because things aren't,
Speaker 1: you know, helping each other out. S yenergy wasn't happening,
Speaker 1: you guys. But there were two really big giant hurdles
Speaker 1: that would affect the entire outcome of this experiment. Both
Speaker 1: things they didn't count on. Both things are very important.
Speaker 1: And they are eating and breathing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, going pretty good.
Speaker 1: Still going pretty.
Speaker 2: Good, I think so, you guys, still enjoying ourself. Well,
Speaker 2: if I'm not mistaken, Chuck just set us up with
Speaker 2: a cliffhanger, which means we're gonna take one more message break.
Speaker 5: That's right, stuffish, softy jawsh shop, soft.
Speaker 1: Your shal We're back, everybody, Hi, Nashville. All right, never
Speaker 1: gets old. All right, We're gonna take these one in time.
Speaker 1: Hunger number one. They initially calculated that we're gonna live
Speaker 1: on about twenty five hundred calories a day. Not too bad.
Speaker 1: They never got very close to that. They had to
Speaker 1: farm their own food, like we said. They had farm
Speaker 1: some on the ranch in New Mexico, like sort of
Speaker 1: like we farm. Actually, there may be some lechit farmers here,
Speaker 1: God bless you, that's right. But like I farm in
Speaker 1: my backyard a little bit. I farm. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: a kind of farming they did. They weren't like professional farmers,
Speaker 1: so they did an okay job growing stuff.
Speaker 2: Well in true synergy and fashion. None of them had
Speaker 2: any experience with subsistence farming, and I guess they hadn't
Speaker 2: thought that through when they sealed themselves off for two
Speaker 2: years tried to grow their own crops.
Speaker 1: At first they got about eighteen hundred calories a day,
Speaker 1: not terrible, you're pretty hungry, but you're living. That rose
Speaker 1: to about two thousand at one point when the farm
Speaker 1: was going pretty good. Again, you're fine, you're probably hungry
Speaker 1: on two thousand galleries. But again, these people are working really,
Speaker 1: really hard every day, so they're burning through those calories
Speaker 1: very very quickly. And again they have to spend all
Speaker 1: their time now weeding and farming and doing all these
Speaker 1: things that they thought that Linda Lee was probably primarily doing.
Speaker 1: And they're not able to run their experiment. So again
Speaker 1: tension is increasing as they go.
Speaker 2: But doctor Walford was like, yes, yeah, that God because
Speaker 2: he had a captive sample for two years to study
Speaker 2: his chron diet, and he actually was vindicated. Everybody dropped
Speaker 2: a shocking amount of weight. I think the average was
Speaker 2: twenty one percent of their body weight for men, fourteen
Speaker 2: percent for the women. And the thing is, their blood
Speaker 2: markers started to show improvement, like their cholesterol levels were
Speaker 2: actually good, and their weight finally stabilized, and they actually
Speaker 2: got to this weird level of healthy from that calorie
Speaker 2: restricted optimal nutrition diet. And Walford was he was pretty
Speaker 2: happy about that.
Speaker 1: He's like, isn't as great? Everyone screw you, Walford. They
Speaker 1: did the cartoon thing where they look he's like taking
Speaker 1: a nap and they look at him and he's like
Speaker 1: a he turns into a roasted turkey in his bed.
Speaker 1: The point is, everyone they were hungry all the time.
Speaker 1: They were hungry. They lost the enzymes that they formerly
Speaker 1: had to digest meat. They didn't have a lot of
Speaker 1: meat to begin with, but they certainly couldn't digest it
Speaker 1: anymore in their guts. They ate peanut shells just you know,
Speaker 1: like let's just just eat that whole peanut. Weren't even
Speaker 1: showing these things to get more calories. They ate things
Speaker 1: that grew. They ate tons of sweet potatoes because they
Speaker 1: grew sweet potatoes pretty successfully, so their skin turned to orange. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they ate ut beats. They grew a lot of beats.
Speaker 1: They grew a lot of bananas. You know what happens
Speaker 1: to beats the next day in the bathroom. So can
Speaker 1: you imagine these people are all subsisting. They've got orange skin.
Speaker 1: Their bathrooms look like a crime scene, and they are
Speaker 1: eating so many bananas. They made banana wine, and in
Speaker 1: the documentary they talk about how awful it tasted and
Speaker 1: how quickly they drank it.
Speaker 2: But I just just a second, like, let's all get
Speaker 2: in the mindset of living for two years on sweet
Speaker 2: potatoes and beats. That is cruel. Yeah, that's like somebody
Speaker 2: saying moist over and over each.
Speaker 1: What about the coffee? Though they thought of coffee ahead.
Speaker 2: Of time, This is where I would have signed out.
Speaker 2: I would been like missions over for me. They were planning.
Speaker 2: They actually did grow coffee upland in the rainforest, but
Speaker 2: they miscalculated, and it turns out they could put together
Speaker 2: one cup of coffee every two weeks, which meant everybody
Speaker 2: got to six cups over the entire two years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not one cup each, Like that's even bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they got three cups of coffee per year each.
Speaker 2: It took four months to make a pizza because they
Speaker 2: had to start by growing the wheat. They harvested their
Speaker 2: salt from the ocean, and then their only source of
Speaker 2: milk came from three goats stardust division and milky way okay, beats,
Speaker 2: sweet potatoes and goat milk. Yeah, yeah, I don't understand
Speaker 2: why you guys aren't more grossed out by that. Do
Speaker 2: you guys eat a lot of beets and sweet potatoes
Speaker 2: and go milk together.
Speaker 1: I mean, like they're.
Speaker 2: Fine on their own and you know, normal amounts, but
Speaker 2: you put them all together for two years.
Speaker 1: Guys, this is Nashville. They're back to the land. They're
Speaker 1: real American.
Speaker 2: Hey, I'm a real American. I can get back to
Speaker 2: the land, but I don't want to live on sweet
Speaker 2: potatoes and beats and goats milk for two years. Can
Speaker 2: we not all agree on that?
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 2: Okay, thank you? We can finally move on from that part.
Speaker 1: Whatever socialist fascist communists, because those are all the same thing.
Speaker 1: I wasn't gonna get political. Sorry, hangriness is a real
Speaker 1: situation here though, like it became a real problem. The
Speaker 1: group starts to divide a little bit. There is one
Speaker 1: faction because you know, things aren't going well. So there's
Speaker 1: one faction that's still very much following Becausejohn Allen was
Speaker 1: kind of running the show from the outside. They were
Speaker 1: following John Allen's word still and sort of John Allen Knight's.
Speaker 1: And then there was another faction that we're like, I
Speaker 1: don't think we should listen to this guy anymore, Like
Speaker 1: he's not even in here, and they went, he's right
Speaker 1: on the other side of the glass. He can now
Speaker 1: looked in right outside the glass. John Allen's like I
Speaker 1: had a burrito and was like, oh me. So like
Speaker 1: a real division grew within the ranks, and it got
Speaker 1: kind of ugly interpersonally between them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Abigail Allen said she was spit at twice, and
Speaker 2: Roy Walford later said, that's that's.
Speaker 1: How I thought it's a new one too.
Speaker 2: That's good, thank you, thank you man well man. Poor Roy.
Speaker 1: Things got worse for him by the way. Game Night
Speaker 1: dried up pretty quickly, though. Is the upshot of all that?
Speaker 2: For sure?
Speaker 1: I'm sorry you're the upshot guy.
Speaker 2: That's okay, you can use it once in a while.
Speaker 1: I thank you. I appreciate that the anger management is
Speaker 1: really working. So that's the hungriness. Number two is the
Speaker 1: breathing trouble.
Speaker 2: Yes. So about a year I guess into the mission,
Speaker 2: they started to notice that their oxygen levels were going down,
Speaker 2: their CO two levels were going up, and either one
Speaker 2: of those is bad, but them working in conjunction, that's
Speaker 2: really not good. And it turned out that the atmosphere
Speaker 2: grew to about a level somewhere around Cousco Peru, which
Speaker 2: is way up in the andes An. In true synergy
Speaker 2: and fashion, none of them had any experience living in
Speaker 2: Cusco Peru, so they were suffering like big time. They
Speaker 2: reported having to take breaks walking up the one flight
Speaker 2: of stairs. They were hurting for sure. And they looked
Speaker 2: around and they figured out that at least part of
Speaker 2: the problem was that the soil was about five times
Speaker 2: richer than you'd find out on biosphere one, which meant
Speaker 2: there were tons of little microbes that were sucking up
Speaker 2: the oxygen as they did their thing and releasing a
Speaker 2: lot of CO two. That was problem one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that one's a little frustrating because you know,
Speaker 1: at the beginning, they're like, we really need to grow stuff,
Speaker 1: so let's get the best soil and bring that stuff in.
Speaker 1: And no one ever was like, but wait a minute,
Speaker 1: that's not how it is, like, we should bring in
Speaker 1: realistic soil. Great band name, by the way.
Speaker 2: Realistic soil.
Speaker 1: Sure, I don't know, No, I'm not sure. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is Nashville, they know. Yeah, okay, oh you know what,
Speaker 1: that's my band with a nine other guys.
Speaker 2: Oh that's funny you say that because I had thought
Speaker 2: of when the dimes a dozens.
Speaker 1: Oh that's the name of our band.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you thought of that.
Speaker 1: When I was saying that, Wow, oh wait just now, no, no, no, earlier.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say, it's like an hour ago.
Speaker 1: I just still the way your brain works always surprises me.
Speaker 1: Thanks man for all these years. Is being the dime
Speaker 1: a Dozens? Yeah, that's probably a real band here.
Speaker 2: Probably they're backstage right now.
Speaker 1: So the soil, Yes, we did this soil. So normally
Speaker 1: the plant life and biosphere two would have sort of
Speaker 1: reckoned with this and they would have worked over time.
Speaker 1: They would have stepped up and sucked that CO two
Speaker 1: out of the air and burped up oxygen and everyone
Speaker 1: it would have been tenable at least, but that wasn't happening.
Speaker 1: The plants were working hard and the levels just weren't changing,
Speaker 1: and they could not figure out why.
Speaker 2: No, because there's a lot of CO two that should
Speaker 2: have been in the atmosphere that was mysteriously missing. So
Speaker 2: they looked around again, they said, what is going on?
Speaker 2: And they discovered that concrete is an excellent carbon sink.
Speaker 2: It just sucks it right out of the air faster
Speaker 2: than plants, and Biosphere two happened to have one hundred
Speaker 2: and ten thousand square feet of exposed concrete, and that
Speaker 2: concrete was out competing the plants for that CO two,
Speaker 2: So the plants couldn't pump out oxygen. And yet the
Speaker 2: CO two levels were still higher than they should be,
Speaker 2: which meant the biospheres were in trouble, and it wasn't
Speaker 2: immediately apparent what they should do about the whole thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they weren't sure. I mean, they were basically two decisions.
Speaker 1: They were like, well, listen, we can sort of blow
Speaker 1: the spirit of this whole thing, and we can bring
Speaker 1: in oxygen and pump in oxygen and stay in here
Speaker 1: and probably risk the scorn of the media and the
Speaker 1: scientific community and stuff like that render most of the
Speaker 1: science mood, or we can leave, and they didn't want
Speaker 1: to leave. So in the end they decided they're going
Speaker 1: to bring in oxygen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they did. It saved the day. Initially, when
Speaker 2: the biosphere project got underway, the media was super duper
Speaker 2: on board. Somebody actually wrote that it was the greatest
Speaker 2: scientific endeavor since humans landed on the Moon. It's a
Speaker 2: pretty amazing thing to call it right. Just a few
Speaker 2: years later, Time magazine named it as one of its
Speaker 2: hundred worst ideas of the twentieth century, alongside the Titanic
Speaker 2: DDT and sailing the exon Valdi's into Prince William sound Man.
Speaker 2: Bad stuff.
Speaker 1: They really turned on them in the press. Not only
Speaker 1: that reports start to come out of some other things.
Speaker 1: They had a CO two scrubber in there to help
Speaker 1: out that they didn't tell anyone about it. Obviously wasn't
Speaker 1: enough to and that was kind of how they talk
Speaker 1: about it later, was like it wasn't even enough to
Speaker 1: solve our problem. So it's not like we were cheating
Speaker 1: that much, just a little bit. We were still in
Speaker 1: really bad shape, if that makes you feel any better.
Speaker 1: But they didn't tell anyone, They didn't disclose this, so
Speaker 1: that was a problem. Those two duffies that she brought
Speaker 1: back in from the hospital, those came back up put
Speaker 1: in the press. They were like, what was in those duffies?
Speaker 1: We had the camera footage. You left with nothing, you
Speaker 1: came back with these two big duffies. And she was like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm not really sure whether that was
Speaker 1: It's cool. Man, like, don't be.
Speaker 2: A drag man. You sold that. I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: goo choking.
Speaker 1: So sentiment started to turn publicly on them, and then
Speaker 1: the very scientists that helped them started to turn on them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because word got out that the trees were like
Speaker 2: lashed to the geodesic dome in the ocean, like a
Speaker 2: sea of green slime. So these mainstream scientists that had
Speaker 2: helped design the place really started to distance themselves, and
Speaker 2: they figured out that if they criticized the way it
Speaker 2: was executed, they could kind of give themselves an alibi.
Speaker 2: And so the media turned on it, the scientific community
Speaker 2: turned on it, and so the public turned on it
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was not a good scene. Years later, a
Speaker 1: few years later, in nineteen ninety six, that original og
Speaker 1: Synergy and biospherian Mark Nelson, he came out and wrote
Speaker 1: about it and said, listen, the whole purpose of this thing,
Speaker 1: it was like a beta test. We were supposed to
Speaker 1: go in there, see what didn't work as you would expect,
Speaker 1: and then the second team would come in in year
Speaker 1: three and rectify some of these and then see what
Speaker 1: worked and one didn't. And it's one hundred year experience,
Speaker 1: you guys. It's a long game. The problem was they
Speaker 1: painted it like it wasn't a beta test, like it
Speaker 1: was kind of this perfect, amazing thing out of the box.
Speaker 1: And they had chances. And that's what's so frustrating about
Speaker 1: this whole thing, as they had chances time and time
Speaker 1: again to come out and with pr basically that talked
Speaker 1: about the stuff and was up front, and they would
Speaker 1: have had a much better time selling it to the
Speaker 1: public when things started going bad than if they stood
Speaker 1: their ground, which is what they did and were like, nah,
Speaker 1: I know what you're talking about, that everything's going great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Because anytime something came up, like the Duffel bags
Speaker 2: or the CO two scover or whatever. John Allen and
Speaker 2: his inner circle decided the best route was to cover
Speaker 2: it up or lie or obfuse skate. And it was
Speaker 2: very obvious because, in true synergy and fashion, none of
Speaker 2: them had any experience lying to the press, so it
Speaker 2: was really kind of obvious that they were full of full.
Speaker 1: Of yes, saltwater marsh poo pooh.
Speaker 2: Sure, So the whole there was like this two year
Speaker 2: ongoing pr disaster, and really, more than anything, that's probably
Speaker 2: what sunk the project.
Speaker 1: That's right. But regardless of what the world thought and
Speaker 1: what the press thought, they brought in that oxygen. It
Speaker 1: sustain them. Is actually kind of a fun moment because
Speaker 1: they were very despondent at this point in the documentary.
Speaker 1: They're weak, they can't breathe, They're walking around just like
Speaker 1: slugging around, and then that oxygen gets pumped in and
Speaker 1: they're like almost dancing around in this place. Yes, pretty great,
Speaker 1: brought in some house music, and you know, they brought
Speaker 1: it in for better or for worse, and finished the experiment.
Speaker 1: They did stay in there, to their credit, for the
Speaker 1: entire two years, and emerged on September twenty third, nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three. As Mark Nelson would say, profoundly changed.
Speaker 2: Right, and then as scheduled, Mission two went in after
Speaker 2: Mission one, I think like a few months afterward Mission
Speaker 2: I was slated to just stay in for a year,
Speaker 2: but it didn't last nearly as long.
Speaker 1: Well. Also, Mission two only had three people, Polly Shore,
Speaker 1: Brendan Fraser, and Stephen Baldwin.
Speaker 2: So has anyone seen Biote? WHOA that is A It's
Speaker 2: a genuinely good movie.
Speaker 1: This is my takeaway from Nashville beats Sweet Potatoes. Biodome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: huge town for that stuff, right, it's I watched it
Speaker 1: for research. Seriously, I still didn't. I saw him to
Speaker 1: watch it, and may be.
Speaker 2: The only person on the planet who's ever watched Biodome
Speaker 2: for reach purposes. But it paid off because they actually
Speaker 2: captured a lot of the spirit of everything that went
Speaker 2: wrong in there. It just never went right like Polly
Speaker 2: Shore got it to in the end.
Speaker 1: So Ed Bass you remember Ed he was the billionaire
Speaker 1: son who funded this thing. He sort of fed up
Speaker 1: with all this bad press, the divided factions. It has
Speaker 1: really become pretty ugly at this point. So he said,
Speaker 1: all right, you know what, I'm going to stage a
Speaker 1: hostile takeover of my own company. And John Allen you're
Speaker 1: out of here. I'm sorry. I love you, man. I
Speaker 1: love all the preform dancing we did over the years,
Speaker 1: all the crazy creative kids stuff that we dreamed up.
Speaker 1: Apparently not under the influence of drugs, which was highly surprising.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: They were kind of straight, straight edge, right.
Speaker 2: Supposedly, just weirder and weirder.
Speaker 1: I just don't believe it. And uh, it became way
Speaker 1: more preneur and less eco after this point. I went
Speaker 1: in a more twisted direction when they brought in a
Speaker 1: new board and a new CEO named Steve Bannon. Yes, really,
Speaker 1: And in the documentary they said the name Steve Bannon.
Speaker 1: I went, well, that's a coincidence. And then Waltz's in
Speaker 1: Younger Steve Bannon. I was like, really, yeah, they put
Speaker 1: a villain to introduce in that three exactly.
Speaker 2: It was very surprising. The guy used to be able
Speaker 2: to buy coke off of on air Force one. That's
Speaker 2: who they put in charge a Biosphere two at the end.
Speaker 1: That's right, he was only wearing one collared shirt at
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 2: You're right, did not.
Speaker 1: Get into that. Whatever that look is where you wear two,
Speaker 1: it's I don't know what we have seen that all right,
Speaker 1: I'm wearing this shirt. Imagine if I had like like
Speaker 1: an eyesod polo underneath it with another collar that's up.
Speaker 1: That's Steve Bannon's look. Sure, he's the only guy that
Speaker 1: does that, so maybe credit to him.
Speaker 2: No, okay, no.
Speaker 1: Two collar shirts anyway.
Speaker 2: So Mark van Pillow and Abigail Alling were rightfully concerned
Speaker 2: about this new direction. They were worried about the safety
Speaker 2: of the Mission two crew, so they went in and
Speaker 2: broke the seal to the facility. They gave it a
Speaker 2: bunch of beer until it pete and then opened up,
Speaker 2: then opened up the air and let it in.
Speaker 1: Really beats sweet potatoes, biodome and breaking the seal.
Speaker 6: Breaking the seal at the bar, Little Nashy, Little Nashy trends. Yeah,
Speaker 6: that's what I'm hoping You ever nicknamed the city and
Speaker 6: it worked?
Speaker 2: No? Not in all the times I've tried.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty good at it. You ever heard of the
Speaker 1: Big Apple?
Speaker 2: Holy Cow?
Speaker 1: Is it?
Speaker 2: That was a mean wow? I called it the old
Speaker 2: cow Pasture.
Speaker 1: Just didn't take, so they busted them out. I like
Speaker 1: to think it happened like in the dead of night.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if it was that dramatic, but that's
Speaker 1: how it plays out of my head at least. And
Speaker 1: that was the end of Biosphere too, as far as
Speaker 1: that project goes, No. One hundred years. That one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty to two hundred million dollars closed system lasted
Speaker 1: for less than three years total, and it would never
Speaker 1: be a closed system again. Like you can visit it now,
Speaker 1: so it's obviously not a closed system. It's very cool.
Speaker 1: But you can walk in that door and through lots
Speaker 1: of other doors now, yeah, and then visit all those
Speaker 1: biomes and it is still legitimately amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is amazing. But because it was never closed
Speaker 2: off again, the spirit of the project was really lost forever.
Speaker 2: And because the press turned on it and scientific community
Speaker 2: turned on it, we still today have this idea of
Speaker 2: Biosphere two just being a complete clue g mess, kind
Speaker 2: of a laughing stock that some hippies tried that really
Speaker 2: didn't work out. And that's all true, but there's a
Speaker 2: lot of stuff that gets overlooked too. Apparently hundreds of
Speaker 2: papers came out of the Biosphere project and some genuine
Speaker 2: scientific discoveries did as well. That low tech wastewater system
Speaker 2: that didn't really work for them because of their ocean
Speaker 2: turning slimy actually has worked in other developing parts of
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 1: It's used all over, that's right, which is great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's also the discovery that ocean acidification bleaches coral
Speaker 2: and kills it off. That came out of biosphere too
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 1: That's right. That's a big problem these days. And then
Speaker 1: all started there. Well the bush babies, Sure, what happened
Speaker 1: to them? They became extinct.
Speaker 2: Yes, they went extinct. The bush babies went extinct. Everybody,
Speaker 2: I don't know why you keep giving these This is
Speaker 2: a silver lining. At least there is a silver lining
Speaker 2: is that while they were there before they went extinct,
Speaker 2: they actually managed to reproduce. And if you were creating
Speaker 2: this test bed for off earth habitation, like, that's a
Speaker 2: really big deal. They got some mammals to reproduce and
Speaker 2: a closed off system, so good things did actually happen.
Speaker 2: But probably the biggest contribution that Biosphere two gave us
Speaker 2: was it reinvigorated humanity's love of Earth. I guess it
Speaker 2: kind of peaked previously in about nineteen seventy with the
Speaker 2: First Earth Day. Then everybody was like, oh, I hadn't
Speaker 2: heard of cocaine before, let me start doing that. Instead
Speaker 2: went that way for a couple of decades, and then
Speaker 2: the biosperience came back and like blue, everybody's coke right
Speaker 2: off their table and got them focused again on on
Speaker 2: thebandon jumped on the floor right.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean it fascinated the world with environmentalism again,
Speaker 1: and it kind of kickstarted that next wave of environmentalism
Speaker 1: in a real way. It really jumps started things on
Speaker 1: the welfare of the planet and for a little while least.
Speaker 1: And the thing that's frustrating is to think about, like,
Speaker 1: where would we be if it hadn't gone that way?
Speaker 1: Like we would be I think last year would have
Speaker 1: been year thirty of this amazing experiment. How much further
Speaker 1: and we've made some pretty great strides, but how much
Speaker 1: further would we have been along in terms of caring
Speaker 1: for our planet had Biosphere to just really solved everything
Speaker 1: to begin with and just kicked as much ass as
Speaker 1: everyone thought I was going to kick. Sure, it's sad
Speaker 1: to think about.
Speaker 2: It's also possible that it was just too it actually
Speaker 2: was too clue you to produce any scientific value. But
Speaker 2: we'll never know ed.
Speaker 1: Bask got Columbia University to take it on as an
Speaker 1: annex at one point for their science departments. That dissolved eventually,
Speaker 1: and now when you go and visit, you will see
Speaker 1: a University of Arizona and a branding everywhere because they
Speaker 1: run it now and that's one of their research facilities
Speaker 1: and they still carry out science there, real science. If
Speaker 1: you ever decide to go, and again I recommend you do,
Speaker 1: you're gonna be staying there. In Tucson, not too far away,
Speaker 1: there's a great Mexican restaurant downtown Tucson called Pinka that
Speaker 1: we ate and it is delicious and wonderful. It really
Speaker 1: is great cocktails.
Speaker 2: And then today they say that if you do go
Speaker 2: take the tour, there's a legend that goes that you
Speaker 2: should hang back and get out of sight of the
Speaker 2: tour guide, especially in the rainforest biome, and just duck
Speaker 2: behind some bushes and hide there for the rest of
Speaker 2: the night after they lock up. If you're really really quiet,
Speaker 2: you look around, you might just catch the ghosts of
Speaker 2: the bush babies. And if you look really really closely,
Speaker 2: you'll see that one of them has its hair standing
Speaker 2: on end.
Speaker 1: And that's the story by his fear too, everybody. Thank you, Nashville,
Speaker 1: thank you very much. Stuff you Should Know is a
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
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