I
remember very many years ago, when I was still just about at school,
I remember one of the science programmes of the time – Horizon or
Tomorrow's World probably – featuring the commencement of the
Biosphere 2 first mission. It seemed so attractive, 6 or 7 people
sealed into an enormous laboratory with fields for growing crops,
various other biomes like rainforest and desert. and most
attractively, a big pseudo-ocean filled with fish that you could swim
in. The whole thing reminded me of Douglas Trumbull's “Silent
Running” movie, one of my favourites.
The
whole point was that it was supposed to be a closed circuit
environment – nothing in or out, the “bionauts” having to
survive with nothing other than what they could grow themselves.
And so
initially they starved. And I remember there being stories about the
supposedly sealed environment letting in bacteria and air from the
outside, and the whole thing wasn't really self sustaining anyway as
a lot of the food was planted before the Biosphere was sealed. In the
days when to most people the World Wide Web didn't really exist, and
for those that did - like me in my first year at university – it
was used mainly for playing MUDs based in California. Therefore you
couldn't really follow the project like you could do now.
There
was a second mission, but apparently this dissolved in acrimony after
management takeovers and an attempt by members of the first mission
to break in.
Sad. It
all seemed so idyllic on Horizon, the image of a guy swimming in “the
ocean” has always remained with me. It seemed like such a cool
thing to do, the dismal reality of ant takeover and falling oxygen
levels never registering on my radar. It seemed like practice for a
really long space mission, and indeed since then various other
experiments, with greater success, have run along these lines to see
if a Martian mission is possible without everyone going mad and
stabbing each other.
Of
course, if you want, you can try and take part in the Mars One
reality show mission, where various lucky folk will be sent to spend
the rest of their lives on Mars in capsules about the size of a
caravan stood on end, by the looks of things. And all this while
having your decaying psychological state being observed by Big
Brother type fans 24 hours a day!
On the
other hand, this is how our colonisation of the solar system will
eventually have to start, it's just not cost or resource effective to
send people that far with a plan to bring them back. But imagine
having the fact that you are the only person on the mission who is so
ugly they can't get a partner.
I think
the first space murder investigation will be on the cards.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 15/09/2013
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