Читать книгу Life Under Glass - Марк Нельсон - Страница 25

This historic day in our lives, the day of closure, was September 26, 1991. By 6:30 AM everyone—including the eight biospherians, the last-minute work crews, family, friends, and staff—had left the Biosphere and the doors were closed. The moment when an engineer closed the airlock door, our glass world became separate from Earth. No free flow of atmosphere, people, plants or animals, food or supplies would pass between Earth and the inside of the Biosphere again. All the preparations were over. From that moment on, the Biosphere became a distinct and separate entity, materially isolated from the rest of the universe except for energy and information flows. The physical boundaries were marked by the glass and steel space frames above, and the stainless steel liner below.

While we biospherians were taking part in the closing ceremonies in the plaza just outside the airlock, the Biosphere was already on its own. When we headed back towards the airlock at 8:15, we inserted the final, crucial ingredient into the experiment: the eight humans. Crucial because we were the ones who would either succeed or fail in making this extraordinary laboratory a working reality.

By the time the crew was sealed inside the Biosphere, along with our personal belongings and all the equipment for our mission, the day had already been crammed with activity and emotional intensity. We woke up at 3:30 AM while the Biosphere was still dark, long before the sun rose. We needed those early morning hours to prepare for satellite links with the East Coast morning TV shows airing three hours ahead of Arizona time. A handful of staff visitors, wanting one last night inside this world they helped build, lay curled up in blankets on the couches in the mezzanine. It was the last night that anyone but crew members would be allowed to sleep inside.

Those few hours before closure were filled with many ‘last’ things for us: last walks in the early morning desert air, last hugs from family and friends, last checklists, last treats. A jug of coffee brought by a friend was the last cup for those of us who hadn’t already decided to wean ourselves from caffeine. Like many other luxuries, there would be precious little coffee inside the Biosphere; only having what beans we could harvest from the handful of young coffee tree saplings in our orchard and rainforest. And our teas were limited to herbal teas.

Opinions about how to prepare ourselves for such an unusual experiment were decidedly divided. Some crew members, such as Gaie Alling, Jane Poynter, and Mark Van Thillo (known as Laser), maintained that “the experiment begins when it begins,” and they’d continue their normal patterns until then. Others, such as Mark Nelson and Linda Leigh (both coffee drinkers), decided to avoid the bodily shock they endured each time we started a week-long trial eating only what we’d have within the Biosphere 2 experimental diet, and so gradually cut out caffeine in advance.

The coffee jug exited with the visitors and the final clean-up crew. Along with the jug went the last packaged sugar and Styrofoam cups that we would see for a long time to come. Our very last luxury was a large breakfast of ham, eggs, and bread with butter; which we enjoyed in the peace and quiet of the Biosphere after the ceremonies, final goodbyes, and closure were over. From then on, all food would be grown, processed, and prepared by our own hands inside the Biosphere under the watchful eyes of Sally Silverstone, our co-captain, Agriculture and Food Systems Manager.