- Biospherian Mark Nelson says that only a small fraction of that data have been analyzed and published. When Dr. Nelson asked the University of Arizona about the rest, he was told the university didn’t have it. “It’s shameful to simply accept that these important data are gone,” he wrote.
Indeed. Hopefully sharing this story will help the missing data be found. Like the closing lines say, perhaps there is much we could learn there, with regards to the original purpose of the experiment and about what could be in our future here on Earth.
I love hearing about Biosphere 2. It's damn near Peak '90s. Almost bought one of those, even though it was $200 and I was fourteen years old. The New York Times did a real disservice in not linking to the video. It's one of your few chances to see Steve Bannon before Saruman possessed him/the FSB poisoned him with TCDD.It was a powerful image, one that inspired later ecologists to create small glass globes full of water, algae and little invertebrates
Original article Worthy of note: "The Chaos Experiment" is probably a terrible interpretation of the off-broadway play Steambath. On TV, it starred the Incredible Hulk.If Bannon does have deeper thoughts about climate change, they could be buried in The Steam Experiment (aka The Chaos Experiment), a 2008 film on which Bannon was an executive producer. The film, according to its promotional text, depicts “a disgraced and deranged scientist (Val Kilmer)” who “traps six sexy strangers in a hotel steam bath and slowly turns up the heat.” The whole point of the movie is to “prove that humanity will go crazy under the pressures of global warming.”
My only interaction with Steve Bannon was last year when he nearly ran me over in traffic in Universal City. We aren't pals. But i know the type: the dreamer who thinks he knows better than everybody else and will do whatever he can to find an edge. Hollywood is brimming with them. Money is super-important to them because it gives them operational flexibility. Hollywood does not work without the money people and you live in such a pie-eyed gold rush universe that the ethos becomes "do what the money says." What's that? You'll pay for my movie if I change it to be about abortion? What's that? Gary Sinise will star in it if he gets to deliver a diatribe against Democrats? What's that? If I take this beautiful, perfect script and let the protagonist inject a boring, worthless, on-the-nose description of what the movie's about so he's assured an Oscar, we can get Tom Hanks? Steve Bannon worked the system from within the system until his dad lost his retirement. Then he decided the system was broken so he found a new system. Robert Mercer is a one-issue guy - "make my $6.8b tax bill go away." And in order to make that happen, we have Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, Trump and Charlottesville. "What's that? You'll let me pick the president if I erase your tax bill?"
Robert Mercer isn't a one-issue guy, he's one of those social conservatives who go crazier and crazier working in the tech industry because libertarians are acceptable in tech circles but women in the kitchen, gays in the closet conservatives are very much not. If he were a decade or two younger he would have been writing ridiculously long blog posts about how a return to feudalism would solve all our problems or sending manifestos to Google's HR department.