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A photo taken inside Biosphere 2 in March 2025
The first impression you get when visiting Biosphere 2 is that it would be a great place to start a cult. The futuristic greenhouse complex is built in the hills north of Tucson and has a beautiful view of the Santa Catalina mountains. The environment contains dangerously high levels of Arizona woo—you can practically feel the earth currents flowing down your energy meridians and making your various chakras and nadis vibrate in sympathy with Mother Gaia.
And the people who ran the place were kind of cultlike! They practiced mandatory weekly meditation and radical theater, were based out of a place called Synergia Ranch near Santa Fe, and had a charismatic and domineering leader named John Allen, who would harangue them for hours about world history and the noösphere. It didn’t help that the eight biospherians who locked themselves inside for a two-year stint in 1992 dressed in Star Trek-like uniforms and had names like Laser and Harlequin. There was a distinct Hale-Boppness to the whole enterprise that people at the time picked up on, years before the Heaven’s Gate cult finally gave wearing matching track suits a bad name. This was not a group of people whose mortal shells you would have been surprised to find arranged in a mandala on the floor when the doors finally re-opened on their great experiment in 1993.
But in truth, the biospherians were sane and competent, and they achieved something that has eluded everybody else, then and since. They built a large-scale habitat and lived inside it for two years in conditions of full material closure, growing their own food, recycling their own waste, and maintaining a breathable atmosphere in a completely sealed environment. Their large complex of greenhouses leaked less air than even the Space Shuttle, and the 17 months they spent inside before needing to supplement the atmosphere with outside oxygen remains the absolute record for survival in an environmentally closed system.
Biosphere 2 was built as a complex of conjoined greenhouses, each hosting a different type of biome. The site included a miniature ocean, complete with wave machine, and a living coral reef. There was a savannah room, a tropical rain forest, a fog desert (an arid microclimate with high humidity) along with a farming area and the biospherians’ living quarters. The group shared a communal kitchen, but each resident had a private space he or she could retire to. Underneath the whole complex was a machine room, also part of the enclosure. Two large rooms with weighted bellows, called the lungs, equalized air pressure with the outside world and served as storage rooms for excess biomass (cut grass) when carbon dioxide levels got too high.
Today the complex is run as an ecological lab by the University of Arizona, and you are free to go inside on a tour. The whole facility feels a bit like a video game level, or a place where you might have to frantically search for the murderer while your fellow biospherians dropped one by one, with the police watching helplessly from outside.
The biospherians ate only what they could grow, a diet built around sweet potatoes, bananas, beets, goat milk, and a particularly vile-tasting bean called the lablab. They spent about three quarters of their time doing farm work, meal prep or cleanup, and approximately all of their time being hangry, which contributed to tensions that split the crew into two irreconcilable factions within a year of starting the experiment.
The meal schedule had crew members taking turns to cook lunch and dinner for their shipmates, which ensured that the two worst cooks on the crew each prepared a quarter of the meals. Their diet was mostly vegetarian, supplemented with small amounts of eggs, milk, and occasional meat and fish. Breakfast was invariably porridge sweetened with papaya, and any attempt at innovation around this meal (the only chance during the day to feel full) met with threats of violence. Lunch was a soup. There was a midmorning snack of peanuts, counted out carefully so everyone got the same portion; the hungry crew ate them with the shells on.
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