Biosphere 2: The Once Infamous Live-In Terrarium Is Transforming Climate Research, October 4, 2021
by By Keridwen Cornelius for Scientific American

“The Space Analog for the Moon and Mars (SAM) ‘is very much, at a scientific level and even a philosophical level, similar to the original Biosphere,’ says SAM director Kai Staats. Unlike other space analogues around the world, SAM will be a hermetically sealed habitat. Its primary purpose will be to discover how to transition from mechanical methods of generating breathable air to a self-sustaining system where plants, fungi and people produce a precise balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide.”

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We look to digital clocks and can no longer tell time.

We walk through automated doorways and lose the opportunity to open the door for a stranger or a friend.

We speak to our radios and no longer benefit from the happy accident of the in-between station.

The room is illuminated when the thermal signature of our body is recognized against the backdrop of the ambient norm, and we are encouraged to forget that not long ago everyone knew how to start a fire with sticks and stones.

We use GPS to guide us across the nation, or just a few blocks to a gas station we have already visited a hundred times before, yet we could not give those same directions to a friend.

We used to memorize dozens of phone numbers, calculate tips for the wait staff in our head, and estimate the time of day by looking at the sun. Now we use computer applications under the pretense the our brains are free to do more, yet we fall to sleep each night binge watching Netflix series instead.

Today I spent the entire day working with my hands. This is the first time I have done so in many years, for without a workshop and tools, my creativity has primarily been expressed in the digital world of film and computer programming.

In my parents’ driveway and garage, the same driveway and garage where I spent every evening and weekend through high school and college tinkering, inventing, and building, today I worked to mount a 100W solar PV panel to the top of my Subaru Forester and install a battery, charge controller, inverter, and A/C power strip. Another day to complete the project, it was a welcomed respite from time at my computer.

The kind of satisfaction that comes with dirt beneath the fingernails, a scraped knuckle or two, and the taste of sweat when the sun hits noon cannot be duplicated in any other way. My brother joked, “Oh?! Are you going DIY now?” knowing full well how much I scoff at that term.

I find the return to Do It Yourself a much needed counter movement to the automation of just about everything. Yet at the same time, I find it somewhat humorous that simply doing things on your own—from the repair of a washing machine to the preparation of food now requires a 3-letter acronym. Funny. Sad. Interesting too.

My grandparents’ generation knew nothing of automation, outside of the vehicles they purchased with parts manufactured and assembled. Everything they consumed, save bread, was grown on their land. All buildings constructed, repaired, maintained with their own hands. No one was hired to do the work. And no one was rewarded for a DIY job well done. It was the norm, the necessary foundation on which everyone involved in agriculture lived.

My parents’ generation did not desire to work as hard as their parents, to be encumbered to physical labor in the same way. Packaged, disposable goods combined with increasingly sedentary jobs in city centers reduced not only the time spent, but the skills associated with doing it yourself.

And now, come full circle, we recognize what was lost in that transition from too much physical labor to too little, for the kind of gratification that comes from having accomplished something on your own, with your own two hands, cannot be replaced by purchasing the equivalent product. It never will.