Biosphere 2 is the enclosed artificial simulation of a natural environment in the Arizona desert which Baudrillard wrote about extensively in The Illusion of the End. Biosphere 2, according to Baudrillard, is the desperate project of a desperate humanity faced with its own extinction, the obsessive mania to create an artificial paradise of so-called na- ture and so-called reality, given that both of those nostalgic referents have already disappeared.
Biosphere 2, writes Baudrillard, is “the artificial synthesis of all the planet’s systems, the ideal copy of the human race and its environment.” Baudrillard’s critique of the ecology movement is not a rejection or ignoring of concern for the fate of the planet but is rather a plea for a more radical ecology, a so-called écologie malefique consistent with his Nietzschean positive valuation of the term “evil” which recurs throughout his philosophical system, and which counterweights the term “good” in the Nietzschean “genealogy of morals.” He would like to deepen ecology with an ethics of “radical alterity,” which means both the recognition of a more savage and truly other nature and a media philosophy analysis of (the mainstream version of!) Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence as the primary system of the catastrophic replacement of the life-and-habitat-sustaining “vital illusion of the world.”
The physical-environmental destruction of the planet is the most horrible yet secondary effect of the primary (mainstream version of the) VR cloning of existence and the AI cloning of intelligence. Just as the Persian Gulf War of 1991 (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was primarily a television war of images which produced the death and physical destruction of Iraqis and Iraq as its most horrible side-effects – secondary “reality-effects” or “fresh meat” data input for the “VR game” from the perspective of the TV viewers of the VR system.
The mainstream meaning of the term “environment” is its artificial resurrection. Biosphere 2 invests heavily in this experimental Bio Art microcosm, a cloned copy of the world. It contains seven different ecosystems and all the planet’s climates, recreated in a combination Walt Disney and techno-scientific style, housed in a geodesic steel-and-glass structure, including an ocean, a savanna, and a virgin rain forest. Visitors to the Arizona theme park of the Earth in miniature come to watch the eight astronaut-like inhabitants go through the daily routine of their two-year sentence: a zoological garden of the artificial survival of our species.
The 2020 film Spaceship Earth, directed by Matt Wolf, brings together archived material and recent interviews with former participants to document the 1991 Biosphere-2 project. The film itself is excellently made. Its title is taken from the 1969 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by the visionary futurist, systems theorist, and popularizer of the geodesic dome R. Buckminster Fuller. A geodesic dome is a hemispherical architectural structure shaped as a geometric polyhedron. We learn in the movie that the Biospherians were also inspired by the 1972 science fiction film Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern. In that SF narrative, all plant life on Earth has become extinct yet an environmental ecology in miniature has been preserved in greenhouse domes attached to spaceships near Saturn.
From my perspective, what becomes apparent from this cinematic tribute is the lack of intellectual clarity of the Biosphere-2 undertaking with regards to the question if they were seeking to help the Earth’s endangered ecosystem by “getting close to nature” or if they were, in fact, damaging the planetary habitat by replacing or simulating it as an artificial copy. There is confusion if the dream of colonizing other planets embodies the idea of saving human existence or rather fleeing from it by doubling it as simulacrum. As one of the former stakeholders excitedly expresses it in an interview, they wanted to “launch humanity into an extraterrestrial evolutionary trajectory.” They visualized a long-term colony off the planet.
As the film amply documents, Biosphere-2 was an American media spectacle and a global media event. There was extensive coverage on local (Arizona), national, and international TV news programs. TV commentators compared the event to the Apollo missions that went to the moon. They waited for a blastoff. The project participants were contradictorily lauded as “protectors of the planet” and “pioneers blazing a trail for outer space.” As the eight scientist-adventurers open the door to enter the domed vivarium at the spectacular start of their two-year stay, they race from being seen by the TV camera outside to staring into the next available TV camera closest to the inside of the door. Their “sustainability survival” experiment begins in its first moment with the media gaze upon them. The process of selecting the eight Biospherian finalists from among a larger group of candidates was just like a Reality TV game show. A contest or competition, judged by project leader John P. Allen, was held to choose the winners. Each candidate had a minute in front of the camera to self-advertise as the best candidate, like a beauty pageant. The “green” and “space exploration” installation became a tourist attraction of trendy ecological entertainment, complete with t-shirts, a Visitors’ Center, and mud wrestling among the scientists.
The cult leader John P. Allen began to recruit idealistic hippies from the famed Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco to his spiritual and activist closely-knit community in the late 1960s. The group was searching for meaning in life and wanted to do theatre, art, business, and science all at once. They founded the Theater of All Possibilities. In the interviews, some former members confess that they would have done anything that Allen might have asked them to do. He is described as “tempestuous, big time.” Video clips of the theater rehearsals show Allen pushing actors violently and ritualistically to the ground. To their credit, the group had a strong awareness of the imminence of global warming, climate change, and the danger of destruction of the Earth’s environment. At the interdisciplinary “Man, Earth and Challenges” conference which they organized in 1981, they announced their quest for “sustainable living on Earth.” Their financial backer was the Texas investment management billionaire Edward P. Bass, who believed the enterprise would achieve long-term profitability via future outer space spinoffs.
The initial two-year mission inside Biosphere-2 failed due to a runaway greenhouse effect. The balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide went way out of whack. The oxygen deficit made it difficult for the inhabitants to breathe. They were threatened with possible brain damage. Crops took longer to mature, or they failed completely. Food became scarce. They were all losing weight rapidly. They looked emaciated. They were suffocating and starving. Animosity towards John P. Allen grew. He controlled which experts on the outside they were allowed to talk with via their telephone link. John wanted God-like power. By 1994, the Biosphere-2 project was discredited when it was discovered that the managers had violated the self-sustainability principle by secretly installing a “CO2 Scrubber” device to remove CO2 from the inside atmosphere. It was also detected that they were pumping in liquid oxygen.