Now that’s the sort of facepalm mistake that gets people killed. Thanks for the info.
Modeling your micro-ecosystem off the larger Earth macro-ecosystem requires that you not introduce any waaaay out of proportion confounders. Which they seemingly did and unnoticed to boot.
Oops. Just don’t do that in Mars; it won’t end well.
Well that didn’t threaten the experimenters’ lives, just wrecked the Biosphere 2 as a workable demonstrator of a closed environment. A Mars settlement would obviously be provided with additional inputs as needed, with oxygen an obvious one and available as long as the machinery to produce it remained functional. I would be more worried about a Mars colony failing because it went broke than any collapse of its systems.
And that was part of the purpose of the Biosphere 2 experiment: To see what unknowns they weren’t taking into consideration, so they could build a better habitat the next time around.
Even just the uncovered part of the Peninsula that’s not ice covered is the size of England. More than enough room for a colony.
Nitpick: it’s CO2 that concrete absorbs, not oxy. It’s the lime converting back to calcium carbonate, I believe. However, that did effectively take out some of the oxygen.
The point was they didn’t know. We know now.
It was always highly unlikely Biosphere 2 would be a complete (or even near) success. One point was to learn from what went wrong, or at least that was the theory. The project was beset by problems and the funding ran out/was cut.
Biosphere 2 is currently owned and operated by the University of Arizona and experiments continue to be conducted there.
Agreed. We / NASA ought to be funding about Biosphere 7 by now to learn all there is to learn about closed habitats before we do it for real where rescue is more complex than “open the airlock & step outside”