'Spaceship Earth'
Before it was lost to obscurity, Biosphere 2 was mostly a punchline. In 1991, eight people, known as Biospherians, sealed themselves off in a massive, indoor 40-acre structure in the Arizona desert for two years. The Biospherians dressed like astronauts upon their entry, but their mission was quite terrestrial. Inside Biosphere 2 was nothing less than an ecological replica of the Earth’s various climes itself.
I was eight years old when the crew entered. In the very few moments since the early 1990s when I’ve given Biosphere 2 a spare, fleeting thought, I’ve mostly recalled Bio-Dome, the wretched 1996 film starring Pauly Shore. It seems Shore, himself a dusty relic of that decade, has more stickiness than this strange science experiment.
Spaceship Earth, like many a documentary before it, urges its audience to reconsider Biosphere 2 - to at once revel in the profound weirdness of eight people locking themselves in a terrarium of sorts (who would want to do that, anyway?) and to take more seriously what those weirdos learned.
Director Matt Wolf catches up with most of the living Biospherians in this reconsideration. Though Biosphere 2 is an arcane footnote to most of us who saw it on the nightly news in the ‘90s, it is clear through these interviews that the experience inside the structure still casts a long shadow for those who lived it. Wolf layers in alongside this the obligatory contemporary news coverage and far more interesting archival footage to conjure this story out of the deep recesses of your memory.
What unfolds is something more humorously odd than you might imagine in some ways, and unsurprisingly dispiriting in others.
Many of the Biospherians were, um, a bunch of hippies, for lack of a better term. John Allen, one of the eight, came up with this crazy idea, and while he had some scientific bona fides, he has quite a few more as a countercultural thinker and theorist. He co-founded the Theater of All Possibilities in San Francisco in the late 1960s, and if that name and locale is evoking thoughts of bizarre improvisational theater and commune-style living, your instincts are well-founded. A number of the other Biospherians had some connection to John well before signing on to the mission, a revelation that, coupled with footage from the acting troupe, doubles down on the strange.
Product of the ‘80s and ‘90s that I am, it is hard not to greet the weird earnestness of Allen and his followers with a deep cynicism - to roll your eyes at their performative utopianism, to sneer at the quaint idealism of these true believers. The ‘60s are over, man!
Wolf does his best to disabuse you of that cynicism, even to redirect it to other sources. As highfalutin and scientifically controversial as Allen’s experiment was, it has very concrete lessons to tell us about what kind of future our species might have when we inevitably attempt to look elsewhere in the galaxy for a home. I found myself wondering what Carl Sagan thought of this, and though my lazy Google searches didn’t turn up much, I have to think he would have approved. We should spend more time and money as a species on imperfect experiments like this and far less on tanks and bombers.
It is here that Wolf’s use of old news clips seems to serve more than the usual purpose of historical context and interview filler. The media isn’t just propelling the narrative of the story. It is also a character in the narrative, and it was (and is) profoundly ill-equipped to tell the story of Biosphere 2 with any of the nuance that it deserves. It latched on to and played up the controversies of the day - from the backlash in the scientific community to the moment when the seal was prematurely broken. And then, it just sort of deemed the whole thing unserious and forgot about it. In short, the media proved itself unserious and incapable of delivering a public service. Here, Wolf seems to be saying, is where your cynicism should be laid.
Spaceship Earth is at once a valuable history lesson and a warning for the present day. It does not tie itself up neatly. A now-famous public figure appears stunningly near the end. His connection to Biosphere 2 is shocking and distracting, but I’m not sure Wolf quite knew how to wrap up the story anyway. He looks back with wonder and lament, and it’s easy to understand why.