since the dawn of humanity we've had a complex relationship with nature we're obviously a part of it but often we view ourselves as separate from nature or even working against it through the control of fire the rise of Agriculture and the growth of our civilization we've been molding the Earth's environment to suit our needs we try to control it we try to protect it we depend upon it and we try to understand it but could we recreate it taking what we know about the planet and what we need to survive could we replicate the Earth's ecosystems well back in the late 1980s a group of scientists attempted to do just that in the middle of the Arizona desert lies a 3.14 acre research facility that was designed to mimic Earth's complex natural systems this cool looking giant greenhouse building is known as Biosphere 2 okay but where's biosphere 1 that's a great question it's one that we're commonly asked so biosphere 1 is the Earth this is John Adams deputy director of Biosphere 2 which is currently owned and operated by the University of Arizona Biosphere 2 was really thought of up in the early 80s with this notion that there was a lot of discussions about space travel Extended Stays in space and the recognition was is how are you going to do that in 1987 a private organization space biosphere Ventures headed by billionaire and environmentalists Ed Bas spearheaded and designed the construction of Biosphere 2 the project hoped to demonstrate the feasibility of space colonization by recreating the Earth's ecological systems inside of an artificial habitat inevitably you would have to take some of these biological processes that were so dependent here on Earth for into space and balance what happens between them to support the existence of a certain number of people for an extent a period of time no one really had tested that on a large scale and space biosphere Ventures would attempt that they intended Biosphere 2 to be a completely closed self-sufficient system like the Earth's Own biosphere where plants animals and humans could live indefinitely in fact it was the largest closed system ever constructed and one of the most ambitious and complex earth science experiments ever conceived and for the most part they got it right in September of 1991 eight people were sealed in Biosphere 2 known as biospherians they would live inside the structure for a full two years all their food water and amenities had to be obtained from the habitats inside the biosphere they were to have no direct contact with the outside world for the entire length of their stay and almost right away things started to go wrong on Biosphere 2 and one of the first things they began to notice is that oxygen began to go down and down and down about halfway through this first 2year mission um it got so low that they had to add oxygen in CU they were concerned for the safety of the individual inside this was a problem the introduction of outside air defeated the purpose of the closed system that space biosphere Ventures was trying to achieve this along with the perception that management wasn't being forthcoming with their problems LED biosphere to be losing credibility as fast as it was losing oxygen they were very heavily scrutinized by the media and the press and as they say the sort of the the wheels came off the wagon at that time along with the oxygen loss Biosphere 2 experienced a number of other problems including massive plant and animal die-offs the biospherians had difficulty raising enough food to feed themselves and were constantly hungry hungry this contributed to morale problems causing a rift in the group splitting them into two factions and these problems along with the abrupt resignation of the project scientific Advisory Board seemed to confirm the view that the biosphere was just for show and not actual science a second mission was attempted in March of 1994 this second crew was able to fix some of the problems the first crew had but because of management disputes and dissension among the crew that culminated in two biospherians sabotaging the Clos system the mission ended after only 6 months biosphere 2's managing body dissolved at this point and with its original purpose seemingly invalidated the fate of the project was uncertain jeez uh it seems like they failed Big Time a lot of people like to say because of sort of this initial falling out and loss of credibility that it was a failure and no experiment is a failure and that's what this was and is is is it's an experiment on a grand scale had never been attempted before and the engineering is absolutely amazing but what they did learn and probably in my opinion the single most important lesson is really how little we truly understand Earth Systems Biosphere 2 was designed to contain five biomes or habitats a rainforest an ocean a savannah a mangrove wet land and a fog desert along with an agricultural area and living quarters although people don't live in the biosphere anymore the ecosystems are still thriving and have been growing for over 20 years now so we're walking through what we call the lowland of the rainforest and you the rainforest is a is a pretty cool area I mean if you can believe it we're standing in Southern Arizona but look where we're standing yes this is amazing so all of this growth that you see you know has taken place over the past 23 years that this system has been growing and establishing it looks like you're running out of room the the trees are hitting the ceiling now oh they are and and you know one of the things we periodically have to do is we have to go in and you know trim those those upper canopy trees now I think the most important thing for for people to remember is that you can never recreate Earth in its entirety it's impossible there's just too many complex things dang it let's get out of here guys but what you have now is you have plants that have been growing for about 23 years you have a soil column that's confined and isolated from the outside world so underneath all of biosphere is a big stainless steel liner so there's no exchange or interaction with the desert soil outside so all of this is evolving and able to grow inside of this system with very little influence from the outside oh yeah warmer so you can feel I mean almost an instant humidity change yeah oh yeah the fogged up fogged up camera lens so every rainforest has to have a waterfall and a pool of water and we'll walk down and we'll see our stream Okay cool so this is our ocean we going swimming we are ready to go scuba diving the tank itself is about a million gallons by the time you put in the Rock and the sand and everything else the the volume of water water is is just under 700,000 gallons cool seems like it smells like a beach we we're on the beach it's pretty nice here I mean what a what a huge change from you know sweating and the rainforest and the humidity to something that's pretty cool this feels like a nice uh day yeah yeah great a perfect day like the it's nice and cool not too hot on the beach it's great no in order to achieve these environmental conditions um there is a suite of mechanical equipment that sits below us and and a basement like space that we call the technosphere biosphere itself the footprint is is a little over 3 acres um and you have almost two acres in this technosphere space where we have these big units here these are our workhorses these are Air Handlers so they circulate the air as well as condition it um up above we can see all kinds of pipes uh that are running so these are going to move water from one location to another um electrical lines uh pumps Motors but it takes all of this to recreate that which Earth is doing every day for us in addition to controlling air flow there's another major issue that the biosphere designers had to consider Biosphere 2 has a volume of 7.2 million cubic feet as a closed system it's designed to lose very little of the air it contains but Biosphere 2 sits in the middle of the Arizona desert and is subject to large temperature changes from day to night you heat the air up it expands it's got to go somewhere and it's the only way it can go is a push out on the glass and eventually create enough pressure to cause an explosion couple a week at night as it cools enough you could have greater external pressure than infal and you create an implosion backwards k to remedy this problem biosphere Engineers had to help the facility breathe so they gave it a lung a lung yep a gigantic 40,000 lb lung so you feeling strong today do you have your do you have your weedies this morning I didn't okay all right C we'll see if this will work for you then so we're in one or two of these geodesic domes inside of that is this large diaphragm so this aluminum dish here weighs about 16 tons okay the rubber membrane weighs about 4 tons wow so combined weight is about 20 tons um or approximately 40,000 lb oh my God and so what happens is the air expands inside biosphere it's got to go somewhere it comes in here path of lease resistant it pushes this up and then at night this weight pushes down on the air and pushes it back inside biosphere so by this structure going up and down it regulates air pressure inside the facility all while keeping the pressure relatively constant and the reason I asked you if you had your weedies is so if we grab this we can pull down and you and I can move 40,000 lb whoa that's awesome and all that's holding this up is differential air pressure there's no crane there's no hoist there's no big wiench it's moving and so this thing will just go up and down it just oscillates that's amazing okay that's pretty sweet but what do they use the biosphere for these days are they going to seal in another group of people well no at least there are no plans right now if the original Biosphere 2 missions taught us anything it's that there's a huge blind spot in our understanding of Earth so since the end of the original Mission the facility has been used as a gigantic Earth Sciences laboratory so we can learn about those blind spots yeah most earth science experiments are done on the very small scale in beers and small lab setups not always a great model for something as massive and complex as the Earth the only way to test Earth Systems is to use the Earth itself but that must be pretty hard if not impossible to control all the variables but biosphere is this intermediate step where you have these established biological communities and you can come in and say Hey I want to increase the temperature and look at how the system behaves or I want to you know cause a drought or I want to change the atmospheric concentration whether it's CO2 or some other gas and look at collectively how this whole system responds and there's no other place in the world at this scale that you can do those types of experiments some of the earliest research at biosphere focused on manipulating CO2 levels in the atmosphere to model projected CO2 levels in our own atmosphere and see what happened so we we've heard about carbon dioxide going up in the atmosphere and uh we hear a lot of the debat centering around how that's going to change the temperature of the Earth but one thing we know for sure is that as you increase atmospheric CO2 it's a gas that's soluble in water and what ends up happening as it diffuses into the water it begins to lower the ph this is called ocean acidification it was theorized for a long time but was first demonstrated on a large scale by researchers from Columbia University at Biosphere 2 were the first institution the first research institution to really manage um biosphere and and sort of Kick the tires and see what it could be used ecologically increasing the acidity of the ocean environment in Biosphere 2 had detrimental effects on the growth of its coral reef and this doesn't bode well for the Earth's oceans if this happens to them since coral reefs provide a habitat for quarter of all marine species on the planet at this moment the University of Arizona is getting set to conduct the world's largest Earth Sciences experiment at Biosphere 2 the world's largest the world's largest it's called the the landscape Evolution Observatory and its main purpose is to study how water flows through soil they built three artificial sloping Landscapes housed in a 5,000 square meter facility it's pretty big that's a very wide water slide it is and this is you know the top view and a lot of people say that you know is this the water slide or the ski slope inside biosphere but all kidding aside this is the world's largest earth science experiment and it took many different disciplines coming together to ultimately come up with questions and what you see here the design of this you know we think of water is something that we understand very well but a lot of the hydrologists will tell you that the principles that we use to describe its Behavior especially as it moves below the surface they were all developed in the 19th and 20th Century and we're still using them today because of our limited knowledge of how water moves through a Terrain it's very unpredictable I mean we hear about it all the time there's either too little water for example in Southern California or there's too much water like Texas is getting there's never this happy medium and so water is one of those resources that is going to be most significantly impacted by you know a change in our climate but understand Its Behavior is critical for us understanding as it rains in the mountains how much is going to end up Downstream for societal needs layer by layer they'll build a replica landscape by first laying bare soil and then slowly adding plant life so they can see how the flow of water through soil changes as you change the landscape the really cool thing and maybe it's not cool when I mentioned it to you right now but we're standing um underneath a structure that weighs 2 million PBS okay let's get out of here yeah so but it's on these columns right here each one of them has a scale and they tell you exactly what the weight of the structure is and as you add water you can see that weight go up and as water leaves the system you can see that weight go down and what we can do is it allows us to mass balance the system you know where is every droplet of water going and the hope will be is this will give us a better idea of the behavior so that we can make more informed decisions biosphere original purpose was to model what it would take to keep people alive in space for an extended period of time are they ever going to get back to that kind of research Matt I'm glad you asked the University of Arizona is doing just that how can we take what we learned in biosphere and potentially create bior regenerative life support systems biosphere was extremely ambitious and they tried to put in as much diversity and all of those natural systems that you find Outside well they quickly learned that it was very difficult to balance all of that so the the Next Generation if you want to say was to go with really a hydroponic setup what you've got here now is a system that's growing and recycling nutrients carbon oxygen and a way that in theory could potentially support a person for one year this is how much would be needed for one person yes you'd start out with the appropriate amount of water and then it would just recycle that water it would eventually be able to recycle there are components to recycle your waste um and to produce enough oxygen as well as caloric intake this is just a model but the idea is that eventually a lunar Greenhouse like this would be sufficient to provide all the food water and oxygen for one astronaut on a daily basis so we really now have a unique opportunity to leverage this one-of-a-kind world's largest earth science laboratory in ways that no one could have even envisioned early on we only have Earth and we're dependent on the systems and the processes and so figuring out a way in which we're able to continue to have those resources and exist um you know in a way that's favorable for us is crucial so what do you guys think the Earth is a giant mystery will we ever unlock all of its Secrets through experiments like Biosphere 2 or will it be forever out of our reach let us know in the comments and we'll reach down there with our eyes and read that those comments yeah and understand the complexity of your words thanks for watching if you like our show and you'd like to help it continue you can go over to patreon and become a supporter last video You Went Skydiving and we talked about thrill seeking and this is what you guys had to say after seeing me go skydiving many of you commented that you now want to go skydiving I can only attribute that to how good I made it look I look good but I think that's great when the dudes ask me me or made me go skydiving I kind of wasn't really excited I was nervous as I said many times in the video I thought maybe I'd go skydiving someday when I'm like really old but I'm glad they made me do it because it was so much fun it helped me get out of my comfort zone and Into the Danger Zone but it's not actually dangerous at all I looked up the statistics you're way more likely to have something bad happen to you in a car than falling out of an airplane with a parachute and a trained professional one issue I had that I didn't mentioned in the video was the the strap on my leg wasn't on correctly necessarily and it it had some bruising it kind of hurt afterwards but it was fine it fine Flintstone and Sam Ram de best expressed some doubt about the number of jumps that ruk Nelson has taken in his life uh which is somewhere above 22,000 Flintstone was saying that he'd have to do two jumps a day 365 days a year to be able to do 22,000 jumps in 29 years in actuality being an instructor he does way more than two jumps a day probably does up to 10 on average so at 10 jumps per day you can see how you could get to over 22,000 jumps he also lives like there he lives right next to it so's he's probably jumping all the time for some reason Camila n asked how do vending machines work well how do they work Matt well I you know I think the reason she asked is because a vending machine is basically a place where food goes to skydive ah but it doesn't have a parachute no that's a d That's dangerous Liv dangerous F food isn't alive so it doesn't need a parachute well some food is alive not usually the food that's in a vending machine I I read somewhere I think it's either Japan or Hong Kong you can buy live crab from a vending machine live crab live crab look it up okay well do they have parachutes no no parachutes that seems dangerous it does Good Question Camila did we answer that question I think we did yeah answered thanks for watching we'll see you next week yeah with an all new video second video of the humans versus nature 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