Did you know?

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When I was a senior in high school (1966) my coach and the elementary principal were reffing a game on a January Tuesday night in St. Ansgar, Iowa. They took me along to watch since we were playing them next. On the way home we drove through a blinding snow storm with lightning and thunder. It was scary….
 
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In 1991, eight people walked into a giant glass structure in the Arizona desert and sealed the door behind them. They would not open it again for two years. Their goal was as audacious as anything humanity had attempted: to prove that people could survive inside a completely self-sustaining, enclosed world — and in doing so, to lay the groundwork for one day living on other planets.

The experiment was called Biosphere 2. The name itself contained the ambition: Earth was Biosphere 1, and this was humanity's attempt to build a second one from scratch. It was a three-acre enclosed world, a sprawling complex of glass and steel containing miniature versions of the planet's major ecosystems. Inside, there was a rainforest. There was an ocean, complete with a coral reef. There was a desert, a savanna, and farmland for growing food. The eight crew members, known as Biospherians, were meant to live sealed inside this artificial Earth, growing their own food, breathing air recycled by their own plants, drinking water cleaned by their own systems — a closed loop, entirely self-contained.

For a while, it looked like it might actually work. The crew settled into their strange new world, tending crops, managing the ecosystems, and living off what their enclosed planet could produce. It was a bold vision made real, a self-sustaining world humming along behind glass walls in the desert. Then reality set in, and the cracks began to show.

The first winter brought unusually heavy cloud cover, and that single change cascaded through the entire system. Less sunlight meant the crops grew poorly, and food began to run short. The crew, dependent entirely on what they could grow inside, started losing significant weight. They grew thin and weak, hungry in a way that made even simple tasks exhausting. Climbing a flight of stairs became an ordeal. The dream of effortless self-sufficiency collided with the hard truth that crop yields depend on sunlight and weather — forces no one inside the glass could control.

Then came a more frightening problem. The oxygen levels inside Biosphere 2, which should have held steady at the normal twenty-one percent, began to mysteriously drop. Slowly but relentlessly, the air grew thinner. By sixteen months into the experiment, oxygen had fallen to 14.2 percent — the equivalent of suddenly living at an altitude of around 13,400 feet above sea level. The crew was exhausted, perpetually short of breath, and some of them were waking up in the night gasping for air. Their sealed world was quietly suffocating them.

The mystery of the vanishing oxygen would eventually become one of the experiment's most valuable lessons, but at the time it was a crisis. To keep the crew alive, outside oxygen had to be pumped into the supposedly closed system. And that intervention handed critics an obvious line of attack. A "closed system" that needs outside air pumped in, they pointed out, is no longer really closed. The whole premise — a perfectly self-sustaining world — had failed in the most fundamental way.

And if hunger and thin air were not enough, the human element delivered its own blow. Confinement and scarcity did to the crew what they have always done to people under sustained pressure. The eight Biospherians split into two rival factions. The tension grew so severe that members of the opposing groups barely spoke to one another for months. Sealed together in a glass world, slowly starving and struggling to breathe, the team fractured along human fault lines. The experiment in living together became, in part, an experiment in how isolation and deprivation can pull a group apart.

They completed the two years. On the day the door finally opened, all eight crew members emerged, having survived their strange ordeal. But the world outside could not agree on what they had actually proven. To many, Biosphere 2 looked like a costly failure — an expensive folly that had needed outside oxygen, run out of food, and dissolved into infighting. The grand vision of a self-sustaining second Earth seemed to have collapsed.

Yet what makes Biosphere 2 truly remarkable is not the ambition that launched it, but the lessons hidden inside its failures. Each thing that went wrong taught us something important about how our real world works. The oxygen crisis, for instance, revealed something no one had anticipated: the soil inside the structure was packed with bacteria that consumed oxygen faster than the rainforest and other plants could produce it. The microbes were quietly eating the air. It was a profound lesson about the hidden, invisible processes that keep the balance of gases in our atmosphere — processes we never think about because, on the real Earth, they simply work.

The food shortages taught their own lesson. They showed, in the most direct way possible, just how dependent crop yields are on sunlight and weather — variables we take completely for granted on the outside, where a cloudy winter is an inconvenience rather than a threat to survival. And the social breakdown delivered a sobering reminder that any future attempt to send humans on long, isolated missions — to Mars, say, or deep space — would have to reckon not just with engineering and biology, but with the psychology of people trapped together under scarcity and stress. Every flaw inside that glass dome was, in the end, a lesson about how fragile and finely balanced the real one is.

And here is the part most people don't know: Biosphere 2 never actually stopped. The structure still stands today in the Arizona desert. The University of Arizona now runs it as an active scientific research facility, using its enclosed, controllable environments to study questions that matter urgently in the present. Researchers there investigate coral reef restoration, climate change, water systems, and endangered species, taking advantage of the unique ability to create and manipulate entire miniature ecosystems under glass. The experiment the world wrote off as a failure simply found a new purpose.

That may be the deepest lesson of Biosphere 2. What looked like a failure was, in truth, a vast and irreplaceable source of knowledge — about soil and air, about food and climate, about the limits of human isolation, and about how staggeringly complex the systems are that keep our living planet running. The grand dream of building a perfect second Earth turned out to be far harder than anyone imagined, and the difficulty itself was the discovery. The eight people who sealed themselves inside that glass world did not prove we could easily recreate our planet. They proved how extraordinary, and how fragile, the one we already have truly is. The experiment never stopped running. It simply changed what it was trying to solve.

The deeper legacy of Biosphere 2 is a lesson in humility — about how little we truly understand the planet that sustains us, and how much we take for granted every single day. The crew sealed inside that glass world assumed they could recreate Earth's life-support systems on a small scale, and they discovered, painfully, that those systems are far more intricate and delicate than anyone had imagined. The oxygen they breathed was being silently consumed by bacteria in the soil. The food they depended on collapsed under a few weeks of unexpected clouds. The very air, water, and harmony they needed to survive proved nearly impossible to engineer and maintain, even with all their preparation and ambition. And meanwhile, on the other side of the glass, the real Earth was performing these same miraculous balancing acts effortlessly, for free, as it always has — keeping the oxygen at twenty-one percent, growing food across continents, recycling water through the sky, all without anyone managing it. That contrast is the enduring gift of the experiment. Every failure inside the dome was, in truth, a measurement of how extraordinary our planet is. When the oxygen dropped and the crops failed and the crew turned on one another, the experiment was not simply falling apart; it was revealing, in real time, the staggering complexity of the systems that make life on Earth possible. It taught us that a closed world is almost unimaginably hard to build, and that the open one we inhabit is a marvel beyond easy replication. That knowledge has only grown more relevant with time, which is why the structure still stands and still runs, now devoted to studying climate change, water, coral reefs, and endangered species. The experiment the world called a failure became, instead, one of the most valuable lessons in environmental science ever conducted — a reminder, written in glass and steel in the Arizona desert, that the planet beneath our feet is rarer and more precious than we ever stop to consider, and that we would do well to protect the one biosphere we cannot rebuild.
 
Doc said:
View attachment 84242



In 1991, eight people walked into a giant glass structure in the Arizona desert and sealed the door behind them. They would not open it again for two years. Their goal was as audacious as anything humanity had attempted: to prove that people could survive inside a completely self-sustaining, enclosed world — and in doing so, to lay the groundwork for one day living on other planets.

The experiment was called Biosphere 2. The name itself contained the ambition: Earth was Biosphere 1, and this was humanity's attempt to build a second one from scratch. It was a three-acre enclosed world, a sprawling complex of glass and steel containing miniature versions of the planet's major ecosystems. Inside, there was a rainforest. There was an ocean, complete with a coral reef. There was a desert, a savanna, and farmland for growing food. The eight crew members, known as Biospherians, were meant to live sealed inside this artificial Earth, growing their own food, breathing air recycled by their own plants, drinking water cleaned by their own systems — a closed loop, entirely self-contained.

For a while, it looked like it might actually work. The crew settled into their strange new world, tending crops, managing the ecosystems, and living off what their enclosed planet could produce. It was a bold vision made real, a self-sustaining world humming along behind glass walls in the desert. Then reality set in, and the cracks began to show.

The first winter brought unusually heavy cloud cover, and that single change cascaded through the entire system. Less sunlight meant the crops grew poorly, and food began to run short. The crew, dependent entirely on what they could grow inside, started losing significant weight. They grew thin and weak, hungry in a way that made even simple tasks exhausting. Climbing a flight of stairs became an ordeal. The dream of effortless self-sufficiency collided with the hard truth that crop yields depend on sunlight and weather — forces no one inside the glass could control.

Then came a more frightening problem. The oxygen levels inside Biosphere 2, which should have held steady at the normal twenty-one percent, began to mysteriously drop. Slowly but relentlessly, the air grew thinner. By sixteen months into the experiment, oxygen had fallen to 14.2 percent — the equivalent of suddenly living at an altitude of around 13,400 feet above sea level. The crew was exhausted, perpetually short of breath, and some of them were waking up in the night gasping for air. Their sealed world was quietly suffocating them.

The mystery of the vanishing oxygen would eventually become one of the experiment's most valuable lessons, but at the time it was a crisis. To keep the crew alive, outside oxygen had to be pumped into the supposedly closed system. And that intervention handed critics an obvious line of attack. A "closed system" that needs outside air pumped in, they pointed out, is no longer really closed. The whole premise — a perfectly self-sustaining world — had failed in the most fundamental way.

And if hunger and thin air were not enough, the human element delivered its own blow. Confinement and scarcity did to the crew what they have always done to people under sustained pressure. The eight Biospherians split into two rival factions. The tension grew so severe that members of the opposing groups barely spoke to one another for months. Sealed together in a glass world, slowly starving and struggling to breathe, the team fractured along human fault lines. The experiment in living together became, in part, an experiment in how isolation and deprivation can pull a group apart.

They completed the two years. On the day the door finally opened, all eight crew members emerged, having survived their strange ordeal. But the world outside could not agree on what they had actually proven. To many, Biosphere 2 looked like a costly failure — an expensive folly that had needed outside oxygen, run out of food, and dissolved into infighting. The grand vision of a self-sustaining second Earth seemed to have collapsed.

Yet what makes Biosphere 2 truly remarkable is not the ambition that launched it, but the lessons hidden inside its failures. Each thing that went wrong taught us something important about how our real world works. The oxygen crisis, for instance, revealed something no one had anticipated: the soil inside the structure was packed with bacteria that consumed oxygen faster than the rainforest and other plants could produce it. The microbes were quietly eating the air. It was a profound lesson about the hidden, invisible processes that keep the balance of gases in our atmosphere — processes we never think about because, on the real Earth, they simply work.

The food shortages taught their own lesson. They showed, in the most direct way possible, just how dependent crop yields are on sunlight and weather — variables we take completely for granted on the outside, where a cloudy winter is an inconvenience rather than a threat to survival. And the social breakdown delivered a sobering reminder that any future attempt to send humans on long, isolated missions — to Mars, say, or deep space — would have to reckon not just with engineering and biology, but with the psychology of people trapped together under scarcity and stress. Every flaw inside that glass dome was, in the end, a lesson about how fragile and finely balanced the real one is.

And here is the part most people don't know: Biosphere 2 never actually stopped. The structure still stands today in the Arizona desert. The University of Arizona now runs it as an active scientific research facility, using its enclosed, controllable environments to study questions that matter urgently in the present. Researchers there investigate coral reef restoration, climate change, water systems, and endangered species, taking advantage of the unique ability to create and manipulate entire miniature ecosystems under glass. The experiment the world wrote off as a failure simply found a new purpose.

That may be the deepest lesson of Biosphere 2. What looked like a failure was, in truth, a vast and irreplaceable source of knowledge — about soil and air, about food and climate, about the limits of human isolation, and about how staggeringly complex the systems are that keep our living planet running. The grand dream of building a perfect second Earth turned out to be far harder than anyone imagined, and the difficulty itself was the discovery. The eight people who sealed themselves inside that glass world did not prove we could easily recreate our planet. They proved how extraordinary, and how fragile, the one we already have truly is. The experiment never stopped running. It simply changed what it was trying to solve.

The deeper legacy of Biosphere 2 is a lesson in humility — about how little we truly understand the planet that sustains us, and how much we take for granted every single day. The crew sealed inside that glass world assumed they could recreate Earth's life-support systems on a small scale, and they discovered, painfully, that those systems are far more intricate and delicate than anyone had imagined. The oxygen they breathed was being silently consumed by bacteria in the soil. The food they depended on collapsed under a few weeks of unexpected clouds. The very air, water, and harmony they needed to survive proved nearly impossible to engineer and maintain, even with all their preparation and ambition. And meanwhile, on the other side of the glass, the real Earth was performing these same miraculous balancing acts effortlessly, for free, as it always has — keeping the oxygen at twenty-one percent, growing food across continents, recycling water through the sky, all without anyone managing it. That contrast is the enduring gift of the experiment. Every failure inside the dome was, in truth, a measurement of how extraordinary our planet is. When the oxygen dropped and the crops failed and the crew turned on one another, the experiment wasrr not simply falling apart; it was revealing, in real time, the staggering complexity of the systems that make life on Earth possible. It taught us that a closed world is almost unimaginably hard to build, and that the open one we inhabit is a marvel beyond easy replication. That knowledge has only grown more relevant with time, which is why the structure still stands and still runs, now devoted to studying climate change, water, coral reefs, and endangered species. The experiment the world called a failure became, instead, one of the most valuable lessons in environmental science ever conducted — a reminder, written in glass and steel in the Arizona desert, that the planet beneath our feet is rarer and more precious than we ever stop to consider, and that we would do well to protect the one biosphere we cannot rebuild.
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I wanted to know why the crew split into 2 factions so I looked it up. No surprise: half of the crew wanted to import emergency supplies and the other half did not - the latter wanting the experiment to stay intact.

Lee
 
Doc said:
View attachment 84242



In 1991, eight people walked into a giant glass structure in the Arizona desert and sealed the door behind them. They would not open it again for two years. Their goal was as audacious as anything humanity had attempted: to prove that people could survive inside a completely self-sustaining, enclosed world — and in doing so, to lay the groundwork for one day living on other planets.

The experiment was called Biosphere 2. The name itself contained the ambition: Earth was Biosphere 1, and this was humanity's attempt to build a second one from scratch. It was a three-acre enclosed world, a sprawling complex of glass and steel containing miniature versions of the planet's major ecosystems. Inside, there was a rainforest. There was an ocean, complete with a coral reef. There was a desert, a savanna, and farmland for growing food. The eight crew members, known as Biospherians, were meant to live sealed inside this artificial Earth, growing their own food, breathing air recycled by their own plants, drinking water cleaned by their own systems — a closed loop, entirely self-contained.

For a while, it looked like it might actually work. The crew settled into their strange new world, tending crops, managing the ecosystems, and living off what their enclosed planet could produce. It was a bold vision made real, a self-sustaining world humming along behind glass walls in the desert. Then reality set in, and the cracks began to show.

The first winter brought unusually heavy cloud cover, and that single change cascaded through the entire system. Less sunlight meant the crops grew poorly, and food began to run short. The crew, dependent entirely on what they could grow inside, started losing significant weight. They grew thin and weak, hungry in a way that made even simple tasks exhausting. Climbing a flight of stairs became an ordeal. The dream of effortless self-sufficiency collided with the hard truth that crop yields depend on sunlight and weather — forces no one inside the glass could control.

Then came a more frightening problem. The oxygen levels inside Biosphere 2, which should have held steady at the normal twenty-one percent, began to mysteriously drop. Slowly but relentlessly, the air grew thinner. By sixteen months into the experiment, oxygen had fallen to 14.2 percent — the equivalent of suddenly living at an altitude of around 13,400 feet above sea level. The crew was exhausted, perpetually short of breath, and some of them were waking up in the night gasping for air. Their sealed world was quietly suffocating them.

The mystery of the vanishing oxygen would eventually become one of the experiment's most valuable lessons, but at the time it was a crisis. To keep the crew alive, outside oxygen had to be pumped into the supposedly closed system. And that intervention handed critics an obvious line of attack. A "closed system" that needs outside air pumped in, they pointed out, is no longer really closed. The whole premise — a perfectly self-sustaining world — had failed in the most fundamental way.

And if hunger and thin air were not enough, the human element delivered its own blow. Confinement and scarcity did to the crew what they have always done to people under sustained pressure. The eight Biospherians split into two rival factions. The tension grew so severe that members of the opposing groups barely spoke to one another for months. Sealed together in a glass world, slowly starving and struggling to breathe, the team fractured along human fault lines. The experiment in living together became, in part, an experiment in how isolation and deprivation can pull a group apart.

They completed the two years. On the day the door finally opened, all eight crew members emerged, having survived their strange ordeal. But the world outside could not agree on what they had actually proven. To many, Biosphere 2 looked like a costly failure — an expensive folly that had needed outside oxygen, run out of food, and dissolved into infighting. The grand vision of a self-sustaining second Earth seemed to have collapsed.

Yet what makes Biosphere 2 truly remarkable is not the ambition that launched it, but the lessons hidden inside its failures. Each thing that went wrong taught us something important about how our real world works. The oxygen crisis, for instance, revealed something no one had anticipated: the soil inside the structure was packed with bacteria that consumed oxygen faster than the rainforest and other plants could produce it. The microbes were quietly eating the air. It was a profound lesson about the hidden, invisible processes that keep the balance of gases in our atmosphere — processes we never think about because, on the real Earth, they simply work.

The food shortages taught their own lesson. They showed, in the most direct way possible, just how dependent crop yields are on sunlight and weather — variables we take completely for granted on the outside, where a cloudy winter is an inconvenience rather than a threat to survival. And the social breakdown delivered a sobering reminder that any future attempt to send humans on long, isolated missions — to Mars, say, or deep space — would have to reckon not just with engineering and biology, but with the psychology of people trapped together under scarcity and stress. Every flaw inside that glass dome was, in the end, a lesson about how fragile and finely balanced the real one is.

And here is the part most people don't know: Biosphere 2 never actually stopped. The structure still stands today in the Arizona desert. The University of Arizona now runs it as an active scientific research facility, using its enclosed, controllable environments to study questions that matter urgently in the present. Researchers there investigate coral reef restoration, climate change, water systems, and endangered species, taking advantage of the unique ability to create and manipulate entire miniature ecosystems under glass. The experiment the world wrote off as a failure simply found a new purpose.

That may be the deepest lesson of Biosphere 2. What looked like a failure was, in truth, a vast and irreplaceable source of knowledge — about soil and air, about food and climate, about the limits of human isolation, and about how staggeringly complex the systems are that keep our living planet running. The grand dream of building a perfect second Earth turned out to be far harder than anyone imagined, and the difficulty itself was the discovery. The eight people who sealed themselves inside that glass world did not prove we could easily recreate our planet. They proved how extraordinary, and how fragile, the one we already have truly is. The experiment never stopped running. It simply changed what it was trying to solve.

The deeper legacy of Biosphere 2 is a lesson in humility — about how little we truly understand the planet that sustains us, and how much we take for granted every single day. The crew sealed inside that glass world assumed they could recreate Earth's life-support systems on a small scale, and they discovered, painfully, that those systems are far more intricate and delicate than anyone had imagined. The oxygen they breathed was being silently consumed by bacteria in the soil. The food they depended on collapsed under a few weeks of unexpected clouds. The very air, water, and harmony they needed to survive proved nearly impossible to engineer and maintain, even with all their preparation and ambition. And meanwhile, on the other side of the glass, the real Earth was performing these same miraculous balancing acts effortlessly, for free, as it always has — keeping the oxygen at twenty-one percent, growing food across continents, recycling water through the sky, all without anyone managing it. That contrast is the enduring gift of the experiment. Every failure inside the dome was, in truth, a measurement of how extraordinary our planet is. When the oxygen dropped and the crops failed and the crew turned on one another, the experiment was not simply falling apart; it was revealing, in real time, the staggering complexity of the systems that make life on Earth possible. It taught us that a closed world is almost unimaginably hard to build, and that the open one we inhabit is a marvel beyond easy replication. That knowledge has only grown more relevant with time, which is why the structure still stands and still runs, now devoted to studying climate change, water, coral reefs, and endangered species. The experiment the world called a failure became, instead, one of the most valuable lessons in environmental science ever conducted — a reminder, written in glass and steel in the Arizona desert, that the planet beneath our feet is rarer and more precious than we ever stop to consider, and that we would do well to protect the one biosphere we cannot rebuild.
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It is still there and open to visitors. I was in it about 25 years ago. Now it's a lot like walking through a greenhouse.
 
DidYouKnow974.jpg


Conceived as one of the most ambitious engineering projects in Florida history, the Cross Florida Barge Canal was designed to create a 171-mile shipping route linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. The canal would have cut directly across the Florida peninsula, beginning at the St. Johns River near Jacksonville and stretching westward to the Gulf.

Supporters believed the waterway would dramatically reduce shipping times by allowing vessels to avoid the long journey around the southern tip of Florida. Planning for the canal dates back centuries, but serious construction began in the 1960s. Massive earthmoving operations carved sections of the route, and structures such as the Rodman Dam were completed.

However, growing environmental concerns sparked fierce opposition. Critics warned the canal would damage rivers, springs, wildlife habitats, and Florida's vital groundwater resources. In 1971, construction was halted by President Richard Nixon, and Congress officially deauthorized the project in 1990.

Today, portions of the unfinished canal remain as a reminder of a bold vision that never became reality.
 
Luckytrim said:
I was working on Wall Street when he inherited her fortune - story was going around that he was gonna give it all away.......don't know if he did or not ...
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Michael Nesmith inherited half of his mother's estate, which was valued at over $50 million. This substantial inheritance played a significant role in his philanthropic efforts and personal projects.

Support for the Gihon Foundation​

Role in the Foundation​

  • President: Michael served as the president of the Gihon Foundation, which was established by his mother, Bette Nesmith Graham.
  • Mission: The foundation promotes women in the arts and provides grants and financial support for various initiatives.

Family Involvement​

  • Board Membership: Michael's children are currently members of the board of the Gihon Foundation, continuing the family's legacy of supporting women's initiatives.

Personal Projects​

Michael Nesmith utilized part of his inheritance to fund his creative endeavors, including:

  • Video Ranch 3D: An online virtual performance space that he developed, showcasing his innovative approach to music and technology.
This combination of philanthropy and personal projects illustrates how Nesmith leveraged his inheritance to make a positive impact in both the arts and his own career.
 
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