Biosphere 2: Eight People

Biosphere 2: Eight People, One Dome, No Way Out

In 1991, eight people walked into a glass and steel structure in the Arizona desert and sealed the doors behind them. Their mission was unprecedented: to live for two years inside a completely self-contained world, growing their own food, breathing recycled air, and proving that humanity had the knowledge and the capability to survive beyond Earth.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary, most controversial, and most instructive experiments in the history of science.

Biosphere 2 tells the full story. From the visionary and deeply unconventional man who conceived the project in the New Mexico desert, to the 150 million dollar structure that rose from the Arizona scrubland, to the eighteen months of hunger, oxygen depletion, fractured relationships, and scientific controversy that unfolded behind the glass. This is not simply the story of an experiment that failed. It is the story of what that failure revealed, about the complexity of the living systems that sustain all life on Earth, about the gap between human ambition and natural reality, and about what happens when eight people are sealed inside a world of their own making and left to keep it alive.

Meticulously researched and compellingly told, Biosphere 2 is a book about science and hubris, about ecosystems and human nature, and about the single most important question facing our species. Not whether we can build a new world, but whether we truly understand the one we already have.