Have you ever heard about Biosphere II or often known as Man’s biosphere? Its an earth system created by humans and was originally meant to mimic the living system in Earth and devoted to maintaining human life in outer space to test whether they could be self-sustaining in this sealed-off environment.
The Man’s Biosphere
It served to explore human-nature interaction within life system in a structure with five areas based on biomes (rainforest, coral reef, mangrove wetlands, savannah grassland), agricultural areas, human living, and working space to study the interactions between these with the rest of nature. As an attempt to create self-sustaining replica supposedly, these inventions become one of the worst thing ever created by scientists. Starting when the crew, Biospherians, eight people marched into a glass and steel complex that covered three acres. Several problems happened from the very beginning. The declining of oxygen yet initially hoped that the system was merely stabilizing itself not quite even 18 months into the experiment, when oxygen levels dropped to the lowest point no longer fulfill the biospherian’s uptake, the outside managers decided to pump oxygen into the system so the could complete the full two years as planned formerly.
Issues with Man’s Biosphere
Not until there, the problem had more to do with carbon dioxide than with oxygen. Microbes were metabolizing a high rate of oxygen then produced a lot of carbon dioxide, plants should have been taken into account in using this excess carbon dioxide, except that another chemical reaction was also plagued those. Admittedly, it is pretty clear, the Biosphere II was not self-sustaining it, outside oxygen had to be added and cause another problem which should be fixed. With along multi-million dollar budget, in the attempt of re-creating the level of basic service that supports human’s life such as purification of air, water, pest control, renewal of soil fertility, climate regulation, pollination of crops and vegetation, waste detoxification and decomposition were failed at all.
Final thoughts
Nature’s gifts are often hard to value in monetary terms. Like clean air and freshwater they are often taken for granted, at least until they become scarce then the question is are we managed to get ready living without this nature’s gift or so-called ecosystem services. How if we no longer enjoying freshwater for free as we have to pay more for the purification? how if we no longer managed to spot wildlife in natural habitat but just staring to the past time photo. It is eerie that life we are living in today not as the delightful way anymore. Each one of us has the duty to stop wasting these gifts of nature. From the small things use the electric appliance wisely, turn them off when they are not in use and there are a lot of things such as paper, bottles as well as water that can be recycled and reused so that won’t disrupt too much the interaction between abiotic and non-abiotic component on Earth unless it is guaranteed man biosphere works as well as earth biosphere does.
Ahmad Ardiansyah
