Micro-Earth, Biosphere 2 -- The Ultimate Haven

"We were in quarantine for two years. Or we put the rest of the world in quarantine for two years."
"Any time there was a special occasion of drink or food, all the conflict [among the eight people who volunteered to live within the confines of Biosphere 2 for two years] drained away. No one wanted to spoil it."
"Whatever food and drink really makes people happy in quarantine should be pursued. This isn't fun unless we can have feasts and parties and do home brewing [under quarantine from COVID-19]."
"Wherever you are, you are supported, and you are living, because we have a healthy Earth biosphere. Fall in love with every bit of it. The plant on the windowsill, the tree on the corner. We have to understand that every breath of air that we take, every drop of water, every bit of food is produced by our biosphere."
"That's the awareness we need to come out of this pandemic. We're all connected. It's showing us the downside of it. But we need to recognize the flip side. Think of this amazing biosphere that's given us birth."
"Biosphere 2 was so far ahead of its time that it offered an understandable way of getting around what a biosphere was. We weren't making a model of planet Earth, thank you very much. It was a little slice."
"It totally transformed me, and everyone else who was in there. I'm still digesting it. The incredible bodily connection that all of us felt with that living system, to where it was unthinkable that we would harm it in any way. The mindfulness with which we took care of the biome. The tender loving care that we took, and the visceral sense that we were connected was also part of the human dimension."
"That knowledge and that love went from my brain, my mind, to my body. To where my body got it. My bodily understanding that I was connected to that world."
On one level being alone with seven people was like being in an encounter group, or group therapy, for two years. I got to see ways I related to other people that I didn't like. I had to change who I was."
Mark Nelson, 77, former 'Biospherian'

Biosphere 2, Mark Nelson, 1991

"Leonardo da Vinci talked about flying machines. Centuries later the Wright brothers built one. Biosphere 2 may prove to be the Kitty Hawk of biospheric life-support systems."
"Then again it may prove to be one of those airplanes everybody sees in the movies and laughs at that had 16 wings flapping at the same time."
Biosphere 2 patron Ed Bass, 1991

It was an imaginative, forward-looking experiment. A costly one, to invest in the needed infrastructure, to develop a system that was as true to the Earth's atmosphere and support of living creatures and vegetation as possible, to allow for self-isolation in a grand experiment where a group of eight people intended to see whether they might succeed at being self-sufficient, as stewards of a miniature Earth, drawing from its resources whatever they needed to sustain life, not only for themselves but for the creatures living alongside them, from insects to birds, mammals to vegetation.

It was quite an ad hoc experiment. The inhabitants of Biosphere 2 who named themselves 'Biospherians', were five Americans, two Brits and a Belgian, comprising four of each gender, included among them a botanist, a marine biologist and a physician. The very same professions, in fact, that sea-voyaging geographical exploratory missions of the past setting out to discover new continents and other inhabited locations worldwide with different cultures and levels of civilization generally brought along, in humanity's search to know the world they lived within, through the ages.

In cloistering themselves and shutting themselves away from the outside world, their adventure in living was meant to instruct the participants on how to manage lives separated from all that was familiar as they re-acquainted themselves with the natural world at a level none had ever before experienced and developed sustainable techniques. Biosphere 2 was planned and created to enable the eight people within to creatively live independently. The complex into which they had sequestered themselves was of an immense size, purpose-built through the 1980s in the Arizona desert..

The Biosphere had an ocean with coral reefs, a miniature rainforest, a desert, and a wide range and plenitude of flora and fauna, living among the eight humans. One of whom badly injured herself which mandated she be withdrawn from the closed atmosphere to undergo surgery on her hand. Once her injury was resolved, she returned to the Biosphere. Among a few controversial revelations was that the 'all-natural system', of the breathing, living atmosphere meant to sustain life 'naturally' through its micro eco-system, was the presence of a carbon dioxide scrubber to ensure fresh air could be pumped in to avoid potential hypoxia.

As Mark Nelson wrote for publication in a Dartmouth College journal, as a former Dartmouth alumni, the group grew all their food, raising and slaughtering livestock. They had a laboratory, they were busy maintaining equipment and had their personal living quarters. Everyone was required to work from three to four hours daily, five days a week, to help produce the food they depended on for nutritious health. With no agricultural background among any of them, they were spurred by the reality that if they didn't produce they wouldn't eat.

And eat they did, learning to produce 80 various crops, from rice to yams, peanuts, sorghum, millet, beets, wheat, carrots, peppers, bananas, figs, tomatoes, kale, eggplant, onions, papaya, beans, sweet and white potatoes, squash and herbs. Biosphere 2 was host to 3,000 species of plants and animals.
Crops were grown with biological controls, and organic matter was recycled for composting. And lessons were learned; the cockroaches they hosted meant to recycle organic matter grew exponentially in numbers and began threatening the crops. A situation seen in ants, as well.

Bees and hummingbirds, two of the most delightful animals, and reliable pollinators eventually failed to survive the atmosphere. And eventually the atmosphere itself failed in its purpose to sustain life when oxygen thinned out necessitating the opening of the sealed domes so fresh air could be circulated and replenished. Despite inconveniences and downright emergencies where the inhabitants of Biosphere 2 had little option but to temporarily abandon the airtight sanctity of the domes, they persevered and lived for the appointed two years, isolated and self-sufficient.

Mr. Nelson himself now lives and works on a working farm, serving as an ecology research centre and retreat in New Mexico, called Synergia Ranch, a group he first joined after graduation from Dartmouth College in 1968.

Biosphere 2's 91-foot-tall rain forest contains more than 150 plant species and now provides scientists a test ground for ecosystem experiments. Douglas Adesko

Heading East in a Hurry

"Jet lag is more than just an inconvenience. It's pretty devastating physiologically."
"If you're a constant traveller, you'll probably put on more weight, you'll probably have cardiovascular challenges and you may have some behavioural changes."
Carrie Partch, biochemist associate professor, University of California Santa Cruz

"We know ultra long-haul flights pose some extra challenges but that's been true every time technology has allowed us to fly farther."
"The research we're doing should give us better strategies for improving comfort and well-being along the way."
"After 19 hours on this flight, I think we've gotten this right. It feels like we've been on a flight a lot shorter than that."
Alan Joyce, Qantas chief executive

Crew celebrating after the 19-hour flight Credit: AFP

The International Air Transport Association has forecast that before the end of 2019, 4.6 billion people will have taken flight to somewhere from somewhere, on some airline. They also anticipate that by 2037 that number will almost double to 8.2 billion, the staggering impact on the environment notwithstanding. Among those who take long-distance flights and many do, there is the issue of jet-lag. In fact, therapies to counteract jet-lag are in growing demand by an estimated 6 percent annually making that particular industry worth by 2023, $732 million.

According to Global-Data, over 80 drugs meant to ameliorate the problem of disturbed sleep are currently in clinical development, to add to those already on the market. What's jet-lag? You know it when you feel it, after crossing three time zones fairly quickly flying through the air at jet-speed, the result being the body's internal clock is still set to its home timetable. It's that feeling of exhaustion when you arrive at your destination followed by insomnia later that night. That's jet-lag.

And if you're a constant traveller, your body becomes truly confused and you feel like death warmed over.

Travelling eastward reverses the familiar normalcy of the body's day-and-night cycle, so the outcome of west to east is more pronounced than the opposite. Sound complicated? It's more complex than  you may know, given that each of the billions of cells in the human body has its particular clock. Think heart function, food absorption, metabolism, all those organs disrupted.

Passengers exercising on board Credit: Getty

Scientists won a Nobel Prize in 2017 for their discovery that molecular mechanisms control circadian rhythms. The hope that a laboratory rodent can respond to medication to speed its internal clock adjustment, does not, unfortunately, translate to the formulation of a fast-acting pill that frequent flyers can use to help get over that notorious jet-lag. There are certain remedies such as exercise and whole food (not the usual in-flight fare) to help synchronize the body's adjustment to a new time zone.

A University of Boulder Colorado study in 2017 indicated that body-clock adjustment can be rapidly reached through exposure to natural light. Qantas Airways Ltd. this past Friday launched an experimental flight of 19 hours without stop -- the first such lengthy flight to have been attempted, with more to follow -- New York to Sydney, called Project Sunrise.

Qantas is testing a Boeing 787-9  New York to Sydney nonstop.

Source: Qantas

Not only time zones create the misery of feeling jet-lagged; also involved is poor-quality sleep, and the dry pressurized cabin air. "I've seen people disoriented a week after a flight", commented Conrad Moreira, medical director at the Travel Doctor-TM-VC clinic in Sydney, who prescribes a range of sleep-inducing drugs; anxious flyers included. These are tablets that contain melatonin, produced naturally in the body in sleep promotion.

The travel industry in general is anxious to find a solution to the extreme disorientation and discomfort that accompanies long-range flights, not just for passengers but for their own staff. IATA's latest fatigue-management manual indicates that some cabin crew may spend close to 21 hours awake on the day of a long-haul flight, despite an official duty period shorter than ten hours.

It is expected that data coming out of this first, experimental non-stop flight halfway around the world will render new and useful data, since scientists and medical researchers were meant to be present in the cabin, making a high-altitude laboratory out of Qantas's new Boeing Co. Dreamliner. During flight hours the scientists will have screened the pilots' brains for alertness, as well as monitoring food, sleep and activity of the fifty passengers on board.

Pilots will wear brain monitors during the nearly 20-hour flight.

Source: Qantas

That Which Humankind Has Destroyed ... To be Restored

"We are very happy that after this first procedure on Najin and Fatu that they have recovered very smoothly and they are doing really well and fine today just twenty-four hours after this first procedure."
Dr.Robert Hermes, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW)

"I am pretty sure we will overcome that hurdle [perfecting the technique whereby the species can be renewed]."
"But even if we are able to have those frozen embryos and store them for 3,000 years or longer, we can say we have saved the whole organism for future generations."
IZW spokesman

Rhino keeper James Mwenda checks on Najin, one of the last two northern white rhinos on the planet

"Both the technique and the equipment had to be developed entirely from scratch." 
"We were able to harvest a total of 10 oocytes - five from Najin and five from Fatu - showing that both females can still provide eggs and thus help to save these magnificent creatures."
Professor Thomas Hildebrandt, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Germany

"On the one hand Ol Pejeta is saddened that we are now down to the last two northern white rhinos on the planet, a testament to the profligate way the human race continues to interact with the natural world around us."

"However we are also immensely proud to be part of the groundbreaking work which is now being deployed to rescue this species."

"We hope it signals the start of an era where humans finally start to understand that proper stewardship of the environment is not a luxury but a necessity."

Richard Vigne, managing director, Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya

Fatu is surrounded by her keepers and Dr. Stephen Ngulu of Ol Pejeta before the procedure

China's immense population, the largest in the world, has some cultural appetites that seem unappeasable. It has been well documented and well publicized that many wild animals on all continents are threatened with extinction. Yet the appetite in China for bones, skin, horns, and various parts of endangered species as well as common species of animals knows no boundaries. Animals illegally slaughtered so that their parts can be used in Chinese traditional pharmaceuticals, in potions believed to have health-giving qualities as well as those viewed as aphrodisiacs.

Animals favoured and valued, and bringing huge profit to the black marketers to be used for exotic and highly prized food preparation, recipes unique to China. And there is the matter of bones and tusks used for traditional art, proscribed by most countries of the world in recognition both of the cruelty of slaughtering great beasts and leaving their bodies to rot after their prized horns and tusks have been removed.

The prohibition against hunting endangered species hasn't stopped poaching nor the illegal trade; game preserves in Africa can be monitored but the will is there to make a way to supply the black market. All efforts to stop poaching appear to have come up hard against human greed unwilling to forfeit the opportunity to extract huge sums for prohibited goods. And those whom the black market serves appear to have little conscience respecting their illegal and immoral destruction of animal life.

Demand for rhinoceros horn for Chinese medicine and for dagger handles in Yemen were the cause of a crisis, the result of which was these animals being swept wholesale into extinction from the 1970s forward. The northern white rhino was declared extinct in the world in 2008. An animal population survey was unsuccessful in finding any live specimens in the wild. A handful of the beasts were kept on a Kenyan wildlife reserve where they were carefully monitored and protected.

There were two males left out of the huge numbers that once roamed the grassy plains stretching along the southern edge of the Sahara desert, from Uganda, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Chad. There were no natural predators, other than human beings who were more than eager to continue supplying the illegal market demanding rhino horn. One male named Suni died of natural causes in 2014. The sole remaining male then died in 2018. Leaving only two females.

Neither of the females was able to become pregnant though the older of the two had borne the younger one almost two decades ago. Najin is the daughter of the male Northern White, Sultan, who died last year. She is 28 years of age, and had given birth to a now-18-year-old female, Fatu, both of them living under 24-hour armed guard in the same reserve. Biologists involved in the preservation of a species now doomed to extinction felt it would be worthwhile extracting eggs from the two females.

Years ago, sperm had been cryonically preserved from four male rhinos. Should the scientists involved ultimately be successful in breeding living offspring with the use of the frozen sperm and eggs, the goal they envision is to create a herd of up to fifteen animals. The intent then would be to return the beasts to their natural habitat in Africa, an ambitious project that may well take a decade to succeed with.

This will represent a new procedure in artificially inseminating frozen sperm in a technique never before attempted that must be experimented with to ensure the technique can be properly perfected. The projected involves the Italian biotech laboratory Avantea, the Dvur Kralove zoo in the Czech Republic and the Kenya Wildlife Service representing an "attempt to push the boundaries of what is medically and technically feasible."

A skeptic might ask what good it would do to return fifteen animals to Kenya when the problem that led to the collapse of the species to begin with has not been solved. What is to stop that small herd of fifteen animals from becoming prey once again to unscrupulous poachers and reprehensibly unscrupulous buyers of prohibited exports?

The team performed the ovum pick-up procedure on Fatu to collect eggs from her ovaries

Honouring One's Conscience

"It shows that when we make a decision whether to be dishonest or not, it's not only 'What can I get out of it versus what's the punishment, what's the effort'?"
"It actually matters that people have morals and they like to think of themselves as good human beings."
Nina Mazar, behavioral scientist, Boston University

"The evidence suggests that people tend to care about the welfare of others and they have an aversion to seeing themselves as a thief."
Alain Cohn, assistant professor of information, University of Michigan

"[A survey found that] without money, not reporting a wallet doesn't feel like stealing."
"With money, however, it suddenly feels like stealing and it feels even more like stealing when the money in the wallet increases."
Christian Zund, study co-author

Wallets with cash, a key, a grocery list and business cards were used to test honesty.  (Christian Zünd via Associated Press)

A new study appears to confound the generalized theory that people finding a wallet with money in it are unlikely to return it to its owner, intact. This three-year study considered to be the most all-encompassing world-wide test of peoples' inherent honesty came to the conclusion that people are, after all, inclined to want to do the right thing and return a lost wallet they find. The finding was a surprise to the researchers and it goes a long way to confirming that people in general tend to be mindful of ethical conduct to the extent of actually practising it.

Not only was the discovery made through this study that people value honest behaviour in themselves which will benefit others, but that the incentive to respond honestly is enhanced when a greater amount of money found in a lost wallet is involved. Published in the journal Science, experts in the field of human behaviour feel on the basis of the study and its finding that business and lawmakers might take notice that dishonesty can be prevented through moral expectation absent punitive reactions.

No fewer than 17,303 wallets were used in a giant research ruse that took place in 355 cities on every continent. Wallets complete with transparent business card cases and visible contents containing three business cards reflecting male names identifiable with the country they were distributed in were used to seed the experiment. Each of the business cards came complete with an email address, the wallet owner identified as a freelance software engineer.

A key, a handwritten grocery list in the language of the country the wallet was used in also occupied the wallet, along with in most instances a modest amount of cash in local currency, while others had no money in them at all. They were distributed by research assistants entering post offices, hotels, police stations, banks, museums and other public arenas to approach someone in authority with the spiel: "Hi, I found this on the street around the corner".

'The evidence suggests that people tend to care about the welfare of others, and they have an aversion to seeing themselves as a thief,' said Alain Cohn of the University of Michigan, one author who reported the results. (Christian Zünd via Associated Press)

The research assistant would then hand the wallet over to the individual they had addressed, perhaps someone behind a reception desk, with the additional explanation: "Somebody must have lost it. I'm in a hurry and have to go. Can you please take care of it?" Most people emailed the purported wallet owners with a view to returning the wallet. Peru and Mexico were the two countries where fewer wallets were returned than in any other.

An average of 40 percent of people into whose hands cashless wallets were placed reported them while 51 percent of people given wallets with money, did the same. The experiment was repeated in three countries, just to make certain of the outcomes. In Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States the routine was given a second round and this time greater amounts of cash were added.

Where the initial experiment used around $13.45 in local currency, the repeat performance upped the ante considerably, adding $94.15 in cash. The response to the lost wallets was even more dramatic, when greater numbers of people dutifully emailed the presumed owners to return the wallets; 72 percent compared with the 61 percent attempting to return the wallets with $13.45, and 46 percent of the cashless wallets.

The gender, age and friendliness of each wallet recipient was recorded by research assistants, including how busy they happened to be at the time; whether they had instant use of computers to enable swift response, and whether co-workers, security guards, or cameras could have recorded the exchange in possession of the wallet, from the 'finder' to the individual taking responsibility for its return.

The theory that any of these potentially compromising details could influence the person to feel compelled to return the wallet appeared not to make a difference at all. As Alain Cohn, one of the study's authors noted, "the psychological cost of the dishonest act" in withholding the wallet with cash seemed to propel people toward honesty and the wallet's return.

And how did the experiment end? In a way that acknowledged people's positive decision making by informing those reporting lost wallets through emails by thanking them and advising that the wallet's owner had left town, and the 'finder' could feel free to retain the money, or if preferred, donate it to charity.

"[Our team] would go into these various institutions ... like a bank or a post office, and they would go to the receptionist at the front and they would say, 'Hey, I found this wallet on the street around the corner. I have to leave right now. Can I just leave this wallet with you?'"
"And then we were interested to see how often people would return these wallets, or at least report to us that they found these wallets."

"When the wallet doesn't have money inside of it, it feels like stealing. But when the wallet has money inside, you start to question: 'Hey, if I don't turn this in, what does that say about me?'"

"And so there is this aversion to viewing yourself negatively and that's part of what's motivating people."

"That's not valuable to the person who we turned the wallet in to, but it is valuable to the owner [keys inspiring people to return wallets to their owners]."

David Tannenbaum, social psychologist, study co-author 

If you came across a lost wallet containing cash, would you return it to its rightful owner? Researchers were surprised to find that a majority of people would indeed return it rather than pocket the cash. (Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images)