I don't often watch documentaries, and review them even less often, but Spaceship Earth is an exception, because it tells at least two highly significant stories: (1) the attempt to construct a totally self-contained environment or biosphere (Biosphere 2) on Earth, with human inhabitants, as a template for what could be sent out to our solar system and beyond in the future; and (2) the media misreporting of what Biosphere 2 accomplished.
The truth is that Biosphere 2 was unable to maintain total self-sufficiency. At seventeen months into its two year 1991-1993 mission, oxygen was imported from the outside into the biosphere to combat the sharp reduction in oxygen from 20.9 to 14.2 percent of the biosphere atmosphere. Obviously, this is not something that could have been done in the middle of a mission to Mars or anyplace off the Earth. But the media were wrong to report this as evidence that the Biosphere 2 mission failed, or was some kind of publicity stunt rather than a scientific experience. Apparently no one in the media read British philosopher Karl R. Popper (for example, The Logic of Scientific Discovery), and his widely accepted view that mistakes are the way that science learns and progresses.
The Hulu documentary, named after Buckminster Fuller's apt characterization of our planet as "spaceship Earth," does a fairly good job of reporting and assessing the above, relying on extensive current and historical in-situ interviews with most of the central players in the Biosphere project, including the Biosphereans themselves. I know at least two people who provided support for Biosphere 2, Carl N. Hodges, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Arizona, who was not in the documentary, and Kathy Dyhr, Director of Public Affairs for Biosphere 2, who had a major role in the documentary. I had long and riveting conversations with each of them in the mid-1980s, when Biosphere 2 was under planning and construction, and both were students at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute pioneering online education program, where I was a faculty member and was first introduced to online education, which gave me the idea for Connected Education and which has become so important during our current Coronaviris pandemic. These conversations, as well as my knowledge of how science works, and plain common sense, are what led me to conclude that the media assessment of Biosphere 2 was so wrong.
But why, then, did the media jump on the bandwagon of Biosphere 2 failure? The documentary provides one of the two answers. Steve Bannon - yes, that Steve Bannon - was brought in by financer Ed Bass to run the Biosphere managing company (Space Biosphere Ventures). Apparently Bannon sought to make a name for himself by publicly and repeated denouncing the project (including destroying some of the crucially valuable data it had collected, according to the documentary).
The second reason is more endemic and intrinsic to the media and to us, its public. As Phil Ochs pointed out so well in his song "The Crucifixion" (1966), we love to tear down, or see torn down, that which we have built up for adulation. The idea that we could build here on Earth a habitat which with proper propulsion could take us to the stars was heady, intoxicating stuff. When it failed to achieve that goal in at least one critically important way, the disappointment that resulted was enough for the media and many viewers to discard the entire project as an ambitious entertainment gambit that flopped.
But facts are stubborn things, and I expect the documentary to continue to bring the truth of Biosphere 2 out to the world and the future, which is that it was an important and major first step that taught us a lot about how we can get beyond this planet to the cosmo beyond.
