How the Biosphere 2 experiment changed our understanding of the Earth (2025) | Hacker News Reader

How the Biosphere 2 experiment changed our understanding of the Earth (2025)

bbc.com

19 pointstaubek4 comments

"To Nelson, realising that his own survival was entirely dependent on the health of the ecosystems around him was transformative (..)"

Anyone know if this has been cast into a video game @ some point?

Would be very useful to teach people the importance of caring for our (shared, unique, non-replaceable) natural environment. Too many people still seem to believe their well-being is somehow disconnected from Earth's natural ecosystems.

I think it would be hard not just because of the amount of variables you have to model for but mainly it just might not be fun--or the fun would be very niche. In "Oxygen Not Included", maybe the most Biosphere 2-like game, your colony quickly collapses if you welcome too many duplicants (people). If you do manage to balance that there are dozens of other ways for the colony to suddenly collapse but then it can be difficult to narrow down what decision(s) lead to it.

> They sit alongside a mangrove-studded wetland and an ocean larger than an Olympic swimming pool..

I’m tired of the colloquial use of “Olympic sized swimming pool,” as a size as they’re rarely correct. FINA, or whatever they’ve rebranded themselves as, defines an Olympic-sized pool at 50m x 25m or 1250 square meters.

Biosphere 2’s ocean was 35m x 20m (700).

It's an interesting experiment. Looking to the future, we can only hope the new billionaires minted by the AI revolution deign to fund experiments as ambitious as this, for us mere mortals to run. The AI jobpocalypse isn't coming unless the new billionaires want to sit on their money and not do anything with it. The yacht and related industries aren't going anywhere. Billionaires want to research how to make smarter humans? They'll spend money on that, which will lead to jobs in that sector, and everything downstream of that. All that's changing is which oligarch gets to decide what to spend money on. Going to space is one of their wishes, and so there's a bunch of money going there. For the job-fearfull, figure out how Sama and Dario are going to spend their billions and be in that field.

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