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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

You might be interested in Biosphere 2 [1], a 3 acre hermetically sealed dome stucture designed to house about 8 people with an ecosystem to provide them with everything they need to survive.

They didn't quite get oxygen and food production to the required level, but if you add another acre or so it should work. With renewed interest in moon and mars colonies somebody is bound to revive that line of research.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

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The first experiment was hampered by them not realising the cement needed CO2 to cure, to be honest I would have halted the experiment to find out what the issue was then restarted it. Although they might not have realised this at the time, but then they weren't really testing a proper closed system.

It would have been useful if they were able to test a closed system without the cement sucking up the CO2.

Isn't cement a major CO2 emitter?

The production of cement is, but curing cement fixes CO2. It just doesn't fix enough to offset the production.

On the restarting, I completely agree. You'd need to restart the whole thing multiple times as your knowledge increased. Maybe somebody else is doing large scale closed system human habitats, but I haven't heard of any.

edit: A bit of googling led me to the Russian one and some books on the problem generally. It sounds like a great speciality but probably hard to get a gig in.

If I had a multi-decade old terrarium, I'd be darn tempted to think of sensors you could stick in there and see if there's some sort of cycle going on.

If you want similar projects that weren't influenced by Hippy culture to try and emulate a complex system that nobody really understands you should look into the stuff the Soviet Union did. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS-3 is much more interesting imho. Looking into the minimum number of species you need for sustainability and not being afraid of using technology to augment the system is the better way for reaching truly closed systems.

TIL Steve Bannon was a director of that Biosphere, if only briefly.

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