Dorion Sagan Paperback 1990 Biospheres: Reproduction of the planet Earth (McGraw-Hill Publishing, ISBN 0-553-28883-0) does more than the unique vision of the planet’s life support system. It also challenges the traditional view of humanity as the dominant feature of life on Earth.
Perhaps this is no less than one would expect from the descendants of astronomer Karl Sagan and biologist Lynn Margulis, whose unorthodox view of evolutionary biology considers the merging of life forms with new ones. Sagan Jr. is well known as the author of books on culture, evolution and philosophy of science.
Ecosphere to biosphere 2
Among the more interesting features of the book are examples of still existing institutions that unexpectedly retain the features of the economic and technological landscape.
For example, Ecospheres Associates in Tucson, Arizona, manufactures and sells sealed glass beads filled with water containing green algae, other microscopic biota and tiny shrimps in a symbiotic community that illuminate the principle of closed life support. This is one of the illustrations of what Sagan calls "constantly processing systems." Named EcoSpheres, they come in different sizes, from 4 inches in diameter to 9 inches, for the price, like small kitchen appliances, and have “replacement periods” for up to a year. With care, they can last for many years. EcoSpheres are a byproduct of NASA, the first product of American experiments to create closed ecosystems, exclusively for people in space habitats.
The “biospheres”, terrestrial biospheres for individuals, families and small groups, were the product of the forgotten, but not forgotten, Institute of New Alchemy (1969-1991). Between Apollo 11 and Biosphere 2, New Alchemy built several biosellers, which he called "arches" on Cape Massachusetts, Prince Edward Island (eastern Quebec) and other places. The Green Center in Hatchville, Maryland, preserves a new legacy of new alchemy.
Ocean Arcs International, founded by the same people who greeted you with bioscreens, created the self-sustaining vessels of oceanic action mentioned in biosphere Their idea of navigating the oceans of the Earth in the form of small marine colonies, regardless of anything non-renewable, including fossil fuels, has since become a wastewater treatment method that can qualify as space colonies technology.
Biosphere 2, 35 miles north of Tucson, took shape just like biosphere The book was close to completion. The site has become the most famous technological marvel in southern Arizona. It is said that in some summer evenings, under one of these ruby sketches of Arizona, all the visual signals of the Martian terrain, located among the red rocks in the mountains of Santa Catalina, from view of Highway 77 and the usual construction. From the library of the tower of human habitat, through the miniature ocean, rainforest, desert, savannah and swamp, Biosphere 2 is 3.14 acres of land under glass. He has been working since 2007 as a research station and educational outreach project at the University of Arizona as part of a ten-year grant of $ 30 million from the Foundation for the Phynecology.
About mice and people
But the book has a flaw. His main philosophy is to protect the environment, which deserves suspicion because of its tendency to blacken humanity. Sagan also risks this, demonstrating a rather consistent anti-human drumbeat, which can easily be the most difficult for his little book.
Each person, says Sagan, is at the same time a multi-species assembly and a unit of a larger organism. The typical Homo sapiens surface is inhabited by the microbiological community of bacteria, fungi, roundworms, pinworms, etc. Our intestines are tightly packed tubes of bacteria, yeast and other microorganisms. To add another insult, Lavlocksky's gaze on Gaia, Mother Earth, about which Sagan sympathetically speaks, shows people as simple components. It is almost enough to force a person to leave all dirty and inhuman DNA behind and build strictly artificial worlds to prove that we can. Except that we cannot, as anyone who upsets the balance of their digestive jungle soon discovers.
Truly, however, there is something disturbing about this idea, also found here, that the hypothesis of Gaia could become the basis of some kind of new green theocracy. What power would “green” religions hold and for what purpose? We find some indications of the meaning assigned to individuals in the Lovelock philosophy, since the library Sagan is: Persons have no meaning. These are numbers, large quantities of unimportant biomass, and these numbers must be contained. All of us, who do not pass from the stage with the help of the best missing, should be midwives in reproducing the original biosphere, creating isolated cocoons of life in space, and maybe not. Right there, Sagan loses his clarity. He thinks, maybe we just need to create protective pods to protect the offspring of Mother Earth from her dying body. OK. It's a bit strange. In addition, it is sufficient beating of men for their reproductive inclinations. I happened to like people, at least in principle.
Sagan says that we are ALL, as humans, and not only in principle. We like them so much that we are on the path to becoming a superorganism made up of individuals, like our bodies are made of cells. In order to prevent these “cells” from multiplying wildly in the “tumors” of surganism, Sagan believes that we will adopt new cultural norms, such as infanticide and abortion, possibly also minor crime and sexual perversions. Until too long, demonstrating the effects of overflow, he makes his way to the experiments of Dr. John B. Calhoun's rodents. If we take the results at face value and allow them to be projected onto the human future, then, as Sagan points out, only gloomy conclusions are possible.
Sagan would do well to indicate that the standard interpretation of Calhoun results is not always the best. The mouse “universes” of John Calhoun’s creation eventually pierced (although it did not reach more than 80% of capacity). They were also closed from the very beginning, which made emigration impossible. Biologists in the field of population consider emigration and death in one light. This is because they cannot track people as soon as they leave the controlled area. But, as any human researcher knows, migration and death are not the same thing. A more complete interpretation of Calhoun’s results reflects the impossibility of a breakthrough, with the result that populations of mice failed, not because they were weak, but because they were trapped in a fence.
These side trips down the slopes of rabbits explain why the book stumbles in some way, and not sire. Only to the end, we again raise a refined look at the Man-Builder of Worlds, unlike Man, trapped inside some kind of monster the size of a planet in space. We are raising a topic in the Soviet bios program of the early 1980s, which supported two people in a full life support system, independent of the Earth, for a five-month simulation of the space path.
Biospherians
Ten years later than Bios, much more and more Capitalist, Biosfera 2 is a significant continuation of the theme that Sagan is trying to express. The investment project of Edward P. Bass (as space biosphere enterprises) is the largest and most complete modeling of the earth that has ever been conducted. The device is the same technological object as the biological one. Its basis of the "technosphere" includes temperature control systems, water filtration, balancing internal pressure, fire fighting and supporting the scientific activities of eight "biospheres". It is also an art, a self-portrait of Man at the end of the twentieth century. Like the book, Biosphere 2 is more a quest than a destination. Both are pearls, not so much because of what they say, or they cannot say, or how they are?
