AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter November 1993 BIOSPHERE RE-ENTRY DAY: The Press Pouted by Brenda Forman It was a great party, folks, although it started around the time a lot of parties are ending. Kickoff was at 6:45 a.m. with an open-air Vivaldi concert. At about 8:45 a.m., after a proper round of ceremonial speechifying, the eight Biospherians emerged from their two-year hitch inside the great "Earth-in-a-bottle" Biosphere, looking enviably svelte and breathing deeply in the well oxygenated atmosphere of the Arizona desert. After that, it was one big, gorgeous all-day party in the bright Arizona sunshine. Meanwhile, an absolute thicket of TV cameras was busily filming the proceedings from a big raised platform to the side of the stage. Evidently, though, they were not happy with what they saw because when I got home, it seemed like everyone was dying to tell me what bad press the whole thing had gotten! Well, folks, I've pretty much decided that if it were up to the media, nobody would ever dare try anything new, exciting or adventurous, ever again. You mount an ambitious experiment at your sure and deadly peril. Because if everything does not go precisely as planned the very first time out, the media will crucify you -- thoroughly and with obvious glee. Of course, the whole idea of an experiment is NOT to show that you already know all the answers but to find out what you DON'T know! If everything goes according to plan, it means 1) you weren't trying to do anything very challenging in the first place, and/or 2) you designed one lousy test program. No matter. Some murky combination of tetchiness, ego and ignorance seems to drive the media to declare anything adventurous a failure if it dares to be so presumptuous as to help us learn -- by instructive failure -- what we didn't already know. Biosphere II is a classic case in point. You'd never know it from the media accounts but Re-entry Day marked the rather successful conclusion of a remarkably bold and innovative experiment. Yeah, they had to pump some oxygen in along about the half-way point. Yeah, the cockroaches proliferated (although you might ask any New Yorker when they don't!) But contrary to some of the gloomier predictions, nobody died. On the contrary, all eight Biospherians are in excellent health. Nor did the plants turn brown and dissolve into a great pool of green slime. On the contrary, the plants grew so fast (especially in the Rain Forest Biome) that the Biospherians had to spend large amounts of time pruning them back. Huge amounts of negative press, however, have been occasioned by the fact that by spring of 1993, the oxygen content of the interior atmosphere had fallen so far that it was necessary to pump in extra oxygen. To hear the outcry, you'd think somebody had committed a public obscenity at the White House door. But come on, folks, that's the whole point of an experiment: to find out what goes wrong so you can identify a solution. And guess what? Some Columbia University researchers just cracked that problem, tracing it to the fact that the soil inside the Biosphere had been enriched with five or ten time the normal ratio of nutrients. The microbes, fungi, etc., that thrived on those nutrients ate oxygen in vast amounts and excreted huge amount of carbon dioxide back into the air. Extra-rich soil, it emerges, is not such a blessing in a sealed environment. The Biosphere II people now have to decide whether they will replace their 30,000 tons of too- rich original soil with a less nutrient-intense variety, or devise some other solution. Incidentally, for REAL hypocrisy, check out the sourpuss accounts of how THIN the Biospherians looked when they emerged. Now really, folks, since when did a bunch of diet- obsessed Americans ever object to losing weight?? If YOU managed to shed 19% of your body weight over two years, you'd be bragging about your new waistline and modeling your brand- new wardrobe! Then there's the crowd that recoils in horror at the thought of actually MAKING MONEY from a scientific experiment. Lordy, lordy, can we just about stand the thought of soiling our greedy little paws with honest profit when we can grovel honorably for a government grant instead? The ivory-tower science crowd seems royally irked that (gasp!) TOURISTS really love to come look at Biosphere II -- several thousand of them at last count, at more than ten bucks a head. Hardly surprising, say I. It's big, it's beautiful -- and it educates by being exciting instead of boring. Our crumbling public school system should only do one tenth as well! In my less charitable moments, I tend to wonder whether a good part of the media's problem with Biosphere II is that IT ISN'T UNDER ANYBODY ELSE'S CONTROL. Ed Bass, the silver zillionaire, bankrolled the whole thing out of his own pocket and so long as he pays his taxes, he can do pretty much what he damn well pleases with his money. He doesn't have to ask your advice. He doesn't have to kowtow to the Congress for his next year's appropriation. And you can't yell waste/fraud/abuse and engineer some hatchet-job GAO report or stage-managed Congressional hearing to stop him -- because it ain't Uncle Sam's money! So maybe all that's left is to give it lousy press. You might call it, "The Revenge of The Out- Crowd." Luckily, the media's prissy attitude about Biosphere II doesn't seem to have interfered with the general public's fascination with the whole adventure. I find that without exception, people are hugely curious about it. In short, this turns folks on -- and if it turns them on to science and the challenges of serious experimentation, then, say I , right on.