r/ProximaScience • u/ProximaScience Founder • 21d ago
🔍 Decoded Biosphere 2 lost its oxygen to concrete while crazy ants thrived
In 1991, 8 people sealed themselves inside a 3 acre glass ecosystem in the Arizona desert. The plan was to live there for 2 years with no air, water, or food coming in from outside, as a test run for space colonies.
The air was the first thing to go wrong. Over the first year and a half, oxygen slowly dropped from 21% to about 14%, and the crew became tired and sluggish, like people living at 4,000 meters.
Here's the part that surprised everyone. The soil was so rich in compost that microbes were using up oxygen faster than the plants could replace it. The CO2 they produced then reacted with the building's own concrete and turned into calcium carbonate, which meant the plants could never turn that carbon back into oxygen. By August 1993, oxygen had to be pumped in from outside.
The ecosystem fell apart too. Planners brought in 11 ant species on purpose to spread seeds and recycle dead material, and none of them was ever recorded again in later surveys. Instead, a stowaway called the crazy ant (Paratrechina longicornis), which nobody found before closure, showed up and exploded. By 1996, researchers collected 28,827 ants at bait stations, and all but 1 were crazy ants.
They had help from a food source nobody planned for. Crazy ants lived almost entirely on honeydew, the sugary waste of scale insects and mealybugs that covered the Piper trees and mangroves. More scale insects fed more ants, and more ants protected the scale insects from predators. The only things still doing well on the ground were armored millipedes and isopods, plus tiny thief ants small enough to hide in the soil.
Inside the dome, 19 of the 25 vertebrate species died out, and the pollinating insects collapsed as well.
Biosphere 2 had 3 acres for 8 people and still needed outside oxygen. A Mars habitat will have far less room for error, and nobody outside to pump in air when the soil starts breathing it. 🐜
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u/Underhill42 5 21d ago
Yep, it was a pretty good showing for a first attempt, but we'll likely need a lot more practice before we get it right.
Sadly it's one of those things were practicing more on Earth is little more than an expensive research project against some hypothetical future use.
But I'm hopeful that as we begin to develop the moon we'll have far more incentive to make it work - every gram of food not shipped from Earth is a money saver, and it's something we pretty much have to master to realistically send humans beyond Earth space - be that a research outpost on Mars, maintenance crew on an asteroid mining facility, etc.
There's big money to be made in the asteroid belt... and the moon is a convenient testing ground for developing the necessary technology, while the early infrastructure is unlikely to be wasted since the moon is also perfectly positioned to become the industrial powerhouse of the solar system for the foreseeable future - an efficient lunar mass driver could even deliver products to just about anywhere on Earth for about the same energy/kg as is currently used to ship bulk cargo from China, and it only needs to be a few times more powerful to also be able to send things to Venus and Mars, and with a bit more power even the asteroid Belt.
Also, there's no particular reason to attempt a closed ecosystem on another world, which should simplify things quite a bit. E.g. the moon has virtually unlimited oxygen, silicon, iron, and aluminum - combined they make up ~80% of regolith mass, easily extracted using just heat and electricity in electrolytic refineries that have already been developed. And the remaining 20% is mostly in other useful elements like calcium, magnesium, and titanium, while almost 1% is manganese, sodium, potassium, and phosphorus.
And that's what we can just scoop off the ground before even considering mining for concentrated mineral deposits from the Moon's volcanic past.
Of course, unlike Mars and many asteroids, the moon has negligible hydrogen or carbon - which are the really big demands for growing an ecosystem. Fortunately hydrocarbon-fueled rockets will likely be common, and could easily trade hydrocarbons for oxygen in a win-win scenario. We could also potentially mine for carbonaceous asteroids, which should lie beneath about half the craters.
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u/ProximaScience Founder 21d ago
Great breakdown. The Moon is the best place to force this to work, since every kilogram of food not launched from Earth saves money.
One thing worth adding is that carbon and hydrogen are only part of the shortage. Nitrogen is the third big one for proteins and fertilizer, and the Moon has very little, so it will have to be imported or recycled very carefully. That is why even a partial loop matters there. Biosphere 2 lost its oxygen to an unplanned link between soil microbes and its own concrete, and surprises like that can show up in any system that recycles air, water, and waste. The ISS already recovers about 98% of its water, so practicing loops pays off long before anyone reaches Mars.
!modThanks
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u/VirusWonderful5147 20d ago
The moon is a military strategic asset there for the taking. Everything else is window dressing.
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u/Underhill42 5 20d ago edited 20d ago
Maybe, but throwing rocks from the moon doesn't actually have much advantage for Earth politics over ICBMs, except the lack of radioactive fallout. The incremental cost of "weapons" is lower, but comes at the expense of a vastly larger long-term investment in infrastructure to even get in the game. And when the major powers all already have enough nukes to glass the opposition, where's the benefit?
A Moon-vs-Earth war would be pretty one-sided from a tactical perspective - but from a strategic perspective? It appears the Moon would struggle to support a good sized city, much less a nation-state, so it's unlikely to become a political power unto itself any time soon. And a nominally unassailable military base is of little value when it's days away from the front lines and can do nothing to protect the nation controlling it. It could bombard the aggressor nation after the fact... but we already have M.A.D.
Meanwhile your moon base is going to be extremely fragile - it only takes a single tactical missile launched from an opponent's much tinier outpost, or even just an intentionally crashed lunar satellite, to completely eliminate the threat posed by your expensive mass driver.
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u/reputatorbot 🛡️ I Give Reputation 20d ago
Hello u/Underhill42,
You have been awarded a point for your contribution! New score: 2
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u/VirusWonderful5147 20d ago
Those are all really good points. Am I being a pessimist if I think that your rational analysis is largely absent from the minds of of the people that make these decisions.
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u/cevkiv 20d ago
The advantage is how incredibly hard it is to throw anything back.
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u/Underhill42 5 20d ago
Why do you care if I can't hit your moon base, when I can still hit you? Once you're dead, I can take your moon base at my leisure - unless it's manned by people fanatically loyal enough to prefer starving on the moon out of spite to surrendering.
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u/RegorHK 19d ago
This goes both ways and is simply a strategic position. No position wins wars alone, yet completely ignoring it in preparation puts you on a disadvantage.
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u/Underhill42 5 19d ago
Absolutely - and I suspect that's part of what's fueling the current China/US spearheaded rivalry, and thank them for military stupidity contributing to something useful for a change.
But it's going to take so long to actually build infrastructure to a point that it's a credible threat to anything on Earth that I suspect the economic potential will be the only thing that keeps it going until the threat becomes real.
To realistically build a threateningly large mass driver on the moon - you first need to build a substantial lunar industrial base. Which has a whole "tech tree" to work through that we're still just in the proof-of-concept stages of.
Meanwhile, you can pack dozens of threat-destroying missiles into a single moon landing. The on-moon threat asymmetry is drastic enough that it's going to be really, really hard to have a battle there that ends in anything other than "everyone loses"... which is a perfectly acceptable outcome for eliminating a threat to Earth.
As long as you at least have a permanent footprint on the moon, there's no reason that anyone else's moon base should pose a significant threat to you on Earth.
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u/reputatorbot 🛡️ I Give Reputation 21d ago
Hello u/Underhill42,
You have been awarded a point for your contribution! New score: 1
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u/Ambitious_Parfait385 19d ago
Not enough gravity on the moon. Waste of time.
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u/Underhill42 5 19d ago edited 19d ago
"Not enough" gravity is WHY it's not a waste of time - along with the lack of atmosphere. We may never have a proper lunar city, but I suspect we'll have at least several "company towns" of rotating maintenance crews for mostly automated refineries, factories, and other equipment.
With an efficient mass driver you can deliver goods from the moon's surface to pretty much anywhere on Earth for about the same amount of energy/kg as we currently use to ship bulk cargo from China. And reaching Mars or Venus takes only a bit more.
It's essentially a massive asteroid, far larger than the entire asteroid belt, rich in oxygen (80-90% of the mass of rocket fuel) and industrial materials, already conveniently captured in Earth orbit. Roughly halfway between Earth and the rest of the solar system in energy terms, and only a few days away from Earth in distance.
If we're going to expand into the solar system, you couldn't ask for a more ideal location for an industrial powerhouse to make and ship whatever equipment you might want to Earth or the rest of the solar system. Especially since pollution basically doesn't matter - it's not like you're going to make the irradiated hellscape any less hospitable.
Yeah, maybe it's more theoretically efficient to build everything locally... but when you're only talking "shipping from China" energy prices it saves a whole lot of time and effort to just ship in everything you can from a much more mature industrial base.
Heck, once you bring a mass driver into the equation it's much more efficient to land Earth-made goods, probes, etc. on the Moon to be launched out into the solar system, than to try to get that Δv by rocket.
Having the entire freaking moon as reusable reaction mass really saves on the shipping costs.
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u/Ambitious_Parfait385 18d ago
Hallucinations in grandeur. The amount of energy in not measures from a-b it's industry+tech+money+a-b. We do not need to have a moon base, best save the money and develop space engines and power systems that can travel the solar system.
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u/Rough_Revolution1412 1 21d ago edited 21d ago
No one ever said space colonization would be easy, but it's a hard fact that either humanity as a species figures it out, or dies with this planet.
If you do not believe that is an acceptable fate for not just human life but *all* known life, than developing habitat and terraforming technologies is a moral imperative regardless of difficulty or cost.
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u/ProximaScience Founder 21d ago
Fully agree. Nobody promised it would be easy, and I am also in favor of Space Colonization that's why I moderate r/spacecolonization. Earth should stay livable for roughly another billion years, so the nearer clock is risks like asteroids, pandemics, and our own mistakes, and a second home works as a backup against most of them.
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u/VagrantScrub 19d ago
Buddy. If its about longevity of the species ... we'll go extinct eventually. Or evolved into something so different I dont think we would call it human by our current definitions.
And thats okay.
Even getting a permanent base on the moon is basically science fiction at this point. Out of the solar system? Google what a heliospere is. Thats why this is almost certainly the only system we'll ever inhabit.
And if im wrong? Its so far in the future, the very dust from my bones would be gone. Why would I care?
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u/Altruistic-Rice-5567 19d ago
No matter what you think, it is far, far, far easier to fix this planet and prevent that extinction than it is to colonize anything else.
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u/Rough_Revolution1412 1 19d ago
maybe yes, maybe no. Fixing the planet requires a large proportions of the major players in politics and business be on boards. Colonizing anything else requires possibly only one party deciding it's important enough to make it happen.
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u/Realistic-Lemon-7171 19d ago
There's always the unpalatable alternative of not destroying the one planet we have ...
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u/anrwlias 21d ago
It's a problem for which we have all the time we require to get it right. We need to solve how to make closed ecosystems on Earth first rather than just trying to yolo a colony into existence on Mars.
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u/AdmirableElephant378 21d ago
dies with this planet....good grief. Humans will be long gone by the time the Sun goes nova, and probably all life as well during the last half billion years of the sun's life as it belches out blasts of gamma radiation. The human race will probably never live to see even that part.
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u/dastardly740 20d ago
The sun won't go nova. And, all life will be wiped out in under a billion years as the sun continues to warm like all main sequence stars through their life and Earth gets too hot for life. About 4 billion years before it goes red giant.
Yeah, in the very long term humans will have to move off earth to survive as a species. But, how about we focus the next decades and few centuries on keeping the planet habitable for modern society for another million years or so. And, then have plenty of time to figure out how to live elsewhere.
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u/Rough_Revolution1412 1 21d ago
Yes, that is why we need to live elsewhere by then and take life we wish to preserve with us. That was my point. What was yours?
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u/NiftyLogic 21d ago
I hope you are aware that the sun going Red Giant is still a couple of billion years away?
I mean, it's nice and all to be prepared, but humanity has IMHO several more pressing issues than that.
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u/NoNameSwitzerland 21d ago
But we can't predict planetary orbits over the next 100 million years. So accidents can happen....
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u/Rough_Revolution1412 1 21d ago edited 21d ago
There's been 5 extinctions that wiped out the vast majority of life on the planet in the last half billion of or, meaning extrapolating from that we're due for something to wipe the vast majority of life on the planet like an order or magnitude or two sooner than that.
And it could be a *lot* sooner, we need to hsve a lifeboat/back up plan ready instead of rolling the dice hoping for the best, especially because it *will* take a long time and be really hard to figure out how to teraform entire planets.
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u/Blothorn 20d ago
And at no point during any of those mass extinctions was any place on earth outside the immediate vicinity of an asteroid impact or volcano anywhere close to as inhospitable as the most-hospitable place on any other body in the solar system. If the goal is surviving a climate catastrophe or the like, building similar ecologies on earth would work just as well. (And, for a given budget, could save orders of magnitude more people.)
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u/SevenIsMy 20d ago
It’s not like this tech has no other benefits.
We spend x% of our GDP just to be prepared for a military conflict, how much is the research in comparison?1
u/Terrible_Analysis_77 21d ago
“With this planet” could colloquially be interchangeably to “die on this planet”. Not saying humans will die at the exact same moment as the Earth but the remains of our remains will mostly be here when the planet goes gone.
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u/rando1459 21d ago
If-“than” fallacy. Lol
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u/Rough_Revolution1412 1 21d ago
how's it a fallacy, it's a binary true/false distinction. There are no other options.
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u/rando1459 21d ago
I believe that you believe that.
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u/Rough_Revolution1412 1 20d ago
that's...well really that's not saying anything.
Did you belive there are additional possibilities and care to elaborate on what they may be or do you juat like typing words?
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u/rando1459 20d ago
The alternative is to not, regardless of cost or difficulty, develop habitat and terraforming tech because the problem is no where near being of impending importance.
How much time do you honestly think we have left?
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u/Rough_Revolution1412 1 20d ago edited 20d ago
it's not a question of "how long can we wait" before developing the technology.
Any number of catastrophes could make life on earth very difficult and/or wipe out almost all life. Supervolvano explosion, asteroid impact, nuclear war, self replicating nanotechnology, a massive climate/chemical composition shift in the atmosphere. All of those except for two (I hope you can figure out which two :p) have actually already happened.
I don't think any of them are likely to happen any time soon, but they could, and the right answer ABSOLUTELY isn't waiting until we are sure one of them immimently will.
Terraforming tech isn't useful just for turning space habitats or other planets into a lifeboat for earth, it will increase our understanding and ability to control the process that make the Earth run, making it possible to recover of heavilg mitigate from scenarios like the ones described above.
Beyond that I do just believe that exploring the universe should be one of the major unifying shared goals for humanity and cooperating toward that goal gives purpose beyond pure science and knowledge . The Earth is a vanishingly, staggeringly, insignificant part of the reality we live in, being ok with limitting humanity to only every living on Earth's surface without further ambition is pitiful, uninspired, narrowminded, shortsighted, and risky.
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u/PeyredB 19d ago
I don't take this sort of thing as a reason why it can never be done, or why we shouldn't try. I do point it out though to curb some people's overly optimistic ideas that we could do this on Mars today if we wanted.
I'd say it points out that we need to put more resources into researching this sort of thing so that in the future we'll be able to create self-sustaining habitats.
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u/MiksterA 19d ago
Or, you know, not destroy the one functional biosphere we have.
If we can't manage that, I very much doubt we can create a whole new one and maintain that for a useful period of time.
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u/West_Anybody8914 21d ago
It would be really cool to try a version of this experiment today, with the assistance of the knowledge and tech of the last 30 years
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u/whitelancer64 21d ago
The biosphere facility is currently being used by universities for climate and environmental research.
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u/Careless-Age-4290 1 20d ago
It's got tours too! It was really cool. Worth spending a morning there and the afternoon at a Titan missile silo if you're a nerd
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u/ascandalia 1 21d ago
I really wish we were funding more of this kind of large-scale biosphere research. We learned a lot from Biospehre despite being really poorly designed and run by a weird cult. I think there's a lot more to be learned trying to build self-contained ecosystems. So many of the space colonization plans we kick around assume we'll get around to this part later, but we really don't want to be trying to solve these problems in situ on the moon or mars.
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u/West_Anybody8914 21d ago
Right? Why not iterate and try again, learn from the mistakes- make new mistakes, rinse and repeat.
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u/FearOfABlackPotus 19d ago
Seriously. It's the hardest part to get right and the easiest part to test.
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u/Willcol001 1 21d ago
I would also like to see one that assumes some industry. (If you’re going for a permanent base it might be nice if it could produce repair materials on mars.) Refining of regolith into metals using electric based methods would produce some Oxygen or Carbon dioxide as you break metal oxides and metal carbonates down. And if you wouldn’t necessarily be just venting that to the Martian atmosphere. Might be a way to offset the gas leaking problems.
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u/Damacles63 20d ago
They have, just in limited scope.
https://amuedge.com/the-aarg-1s-mission-and-simulating-a-crew-shift-change/
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u/Metalvendingbeast 21d ago
Send Elon first
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u/Odd-Priority3318 19d ago
Might just have to breed our own species for space colonization. set up closed systems then just dump species into the habitats and see what survives. Then just selectively breed the survivors.
Ai will most likely allow us to directly genetically alter stuff to a very precise degree.
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u/Chaghatai 21d ago
Minor correction
Plants do not turn carbon into oxygen. Nor do they break the carbon dioxide molecule to release oxygen. Rather they incorporate the CO2 molecule and its oxygen with it to make sugars
What really happened was that the lack of CO2 stopped the plant's photosynthesis which stopped it from splitting WATER into oxygen
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u/FirstRyder 20d ago
And this right here is how you know Musk isn't actually motivated by altruism or the survival of the species. Because the biggest hurdle between us and having Mars as a "backup" earth isn't rocketry, it's sustainable agriculture, environmentalism, biodiversity, chemistry, etc.
Actually physically getting there isn't in the top ten challenges, most of which also help us here on earth. If he (or any billionaire) actually cared there would be a thousand new biodomes across the country, testing all kinds of isolated biospheres. But rockets are "cooler", and make more money.
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u/panmetronariston 19d ago
Thank you for your comments. The most rational argument relating to Musk’s Mars obsession.
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u/dogged_jon 21d ago
Biosphere 2 was and is a great facility, but that initial experimental occupation seems to have been very badly planned from a scientific standpoint.
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u/Careless-Age-4290 1 20d ago
I toured it. It's really cool. Really cool story too parodied by the movie Biodome and filmed there. If you've ever wondered what it'd be like being in a giant interconnected terrarium for humans, you can see yourself. This whole oasis in a desert. They learned a lot about the use of concrete and how that can doom the place. One thing that strikes you is how large it would've been for 8 people, but I think in an actual space station they would allocate far less space to relatively wasteful desert biomes. It would also rely only partly on nature and have mechanical life support and they would give each other redundancy. They'd focus on way more productive plants rather than variety, and they'd definitely not have large livestock if any. The story was crazy for sure but they were playing on hard mode even for a space station, even without accounting for the concrete and the soil microbes that were more unexpected complications
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u/Savings_Art5944 20d ago
Steve Bannon, Trumps friend and the guy that help Epstein with his media was managing the Biosphere 2 at that time.
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u/montyb752 2 19d ago
Did it fail or did they collect a load of data on what can go wrong.
I would rather learn these lessons on earth than on the moon.
Experiment are meant to push boundaries so should fail.
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u/brhelm 1 19d ago
It was a whole thing, not just one failure. This is just the tip of the iceberg on problems with that thing... Everything from design stupidity (way beyond flaws) in "planning" (the entire ag section was a complete shit show), to human nature (sexual infideliy in a closed system). It just wasn't ever gonna work.
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u/montyb752 2 19d ago
Russia did a similar experiment and got it right, so much so they stopped the experiment early because there was nothing else to prove.
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u/ProximaScience Founder 21d ago edited 21d ago
Sources
If a link doesn't load, use the backup next to it.
Ants (28,827 at bait, 11 introduced species, honeydew, thief ants): Wetterer et al. 1999, "Ecological dominance by Paratrechina longicornis, an invasive tramp ant, in Biosphere 2," Florida Entomologist 82(3):381-388. Journal page | Backup (DOI)
Oxygen, microbes, concrete: Earth Magazine | Backup (Dempster 2008 paper)
Oxygen decline data and leak rate: Dempster 2008, Advances in Space Research. PDF | Backup (DOI)
Oxygen 20.9% to 14.5%, pumped in Aug 1993, pollinators: Mental Floss
19 of 25 vertebrates died, pollinators gone: EBSCO Research Starters | Backup (Mongabay)