Almost too small to work at all

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, environmentalism, synergistics, psychology, MMPI

The funding totaled a quarter billion dollars. The dedication of the participants was extreme. They had everything going for them: cooperation from many eminent scientists, the good wishes and eager attention of millions, both liberal and conservative.

The project did produce useful scientific results...just not about anything on the agenda. The major result was psychological; prior experience in analogous environments gave plenty of warning, even forboding. Scientifically, Biosphere 2 was very useful, even unique (to date). Humanly, it was a tragic failure.

It seems so good. Trillions of words of science fiction have been written about closed environments: rocket ships, lunar or Martian colonies, satellite worlds, drilled-out asteroids; with populations from one to hundreds, thousands, even millions. One thing is for sure: in a space encompassing three acres, enclosing 170,000 cubic meters, eight people cannot get along.

As narrated by Jane Poynter in The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, the eight "biospherians" and many other potential residents, plus many active supporters and the staff that ran "Mission Control" during the experiment, fragmented into warring camps that were hardly on speaking terms by the end.

The biospherians were, it turned out, a special breed. Trained aboard the concrete ship _Heraclitus_ and at Quanbun Downs in the Australian Outback, the people who first endured the regimen and then were picked for the two-year Closure shared a number of characteristics with "right stuff" astronauts and crews that over-winter in Antarctica.

As measured by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, they shared an Adventurer profile, always on guard, hyperactive, creative, optimistic, confident to a fault, and outgoing. It seems to me they are fortunate that they fragmented only into an Us and a Them (four on a side, inside Closure, rather more uneven in Mission Control). They only went halfway to, "What do you get when you lock up five type A folks for a year? Four dead type A's."

Comparing the biospherians' experience with that of crews of submarines, the Mir and ISA space stations, ships at sea, and mining camps, we find a singular fact: You need an authority structure or it all breaks down. The Eight had great egalitarian goals, which resulted in two Equal-Hate societies.

It is a lesson both navies and commercial shippers have known for centuries. The skipper and officers may not always be the best, but you have to have them, lest disaster result. Biosphere 2 was a disaster.