Technology's Wild West still holds promise

WIRED: Projects such as the internet have their roots in what many would call foolhardy idealism, yet they have ended up driving economies

I’M SITTING in the middle of the Arizona desert, looking over fields of saguaro, those towering and multi-armed cactus iconic of the Wild West. A few miles away, at Old Tucson Studios, fake cowboys re-enact scenes from the the United States’ past that gave us its reputation for do-or-die individualism.

Down in a valley lies another possible future. It’s what remains of the old Biosphere 2 experiment. A huge 3.15 acre greenhouse, flanked by two geodesic domes, Biosphere 2 was hermetically sealed from the outside world in 1991.

For two years inside, eight individuals – separated from “Biosphere 1”, the Earth’s ecology – struggled to grow their own food and balance their own atmosphere. In the greenhouse, a series of mini-ecologies, or “biomes”, replicated an estuary and mini-ocean, a rainforest, savannah, fog desert, thorn scrub and farmed land.

The participants raised bean and grain crops, fed and slaughtered goats and pigs, and even made their own rice wine, using only the materials and processes occurring within their own mini-Earth.

Privately funded, Biosphere 2 got a lot of press, but never attained the scientific legitimacy that many of its supporters felt it deserved. In the end it cost its benefactor, Edward P Bass, over $250 million, with little in the way of concrete results.

The project took its toll of the “biospherians”, too. They suffered the psychological effects seen in other experiments in long-term isolation: depression, trauma and internecine conflict.

And yet, some real scientific knowledge came from the idealistic venture. While the glasshouse is no longer sealed, the University of Arizona still uses the biomes for research projects, ironically now mostly to simulate the damage that Biosphere 1 is scheduled to suffer as global warming increase. Rather than attempting to produce a natural balance, the researchers seek to imitate a growing imbalance in the outside world.

What I find most intriguing about Biosphere 2 is not how it sought to mimic the Earth’s ecology, but how it reflected another set of grand projects, launched at roughly the same time, by roughly the same people. The cast of characters of the biospherians reads like the dramatis personae of the early web.

John Allen, the charismatic leader of the project, drew his inspiration and his staff from a commune called Synergia Ranch, a New Mexico hold-out from the 1960s that had survived into the 1990s by being ruthlessly disciplined, practical and, frankly, somewhat cult-like.

The early public internet had the same influences. For years, its biggest boosters came from the same 1960s communities of idealists who had evolved their ideas of free communities and big ideas into west coast businesses and consultancies.

Kevin Kelly, editor of Wiredmagazine, was previously an editor at Whole Earth Review'spublishing company. Tim O'Reilly, the coiner of Web 2.0, was involved in Esalen, the centre at the heart of the new age "human potential movement".

The other mirror is the seemingly endless funding for these experiments. Biosphere 2 had only one benefactor, the billionaire Ed Bass, to play with its ideas. But with half-a-billion of funding, other unorthodox ideas were allowed to at least reach fruition. The web, too, rode on waves of funding from Californian venture capitalists who had bought into the wild projections of the first internet enthusiasts.

When one writes about these connections from a European perspective, one cannot help thinking that these adventures were the worst kind of scam, fantasies that echo with the stereotypes of the Wild West. The snake-oil salesman, the strange and isolated Texan cult leader, blind faith in technology bringing the fruits of the rainforest in the middle of a barren desert.

But at the same time as we recognise how naive these projects are, they nonetheless happened – and produced results that less foolhardy ventures would never have created. The Biosphere 2 project inspired a new generation of ecologists – and despite all the scepticism, managed to create a semi-stable ecological balance for two years.

The possibilities of the internet drew in the best minds of a generation, and created a worldwide network that has been the engine of economic advances for the last 20 years.

Perhaps the most damning criticism you can give of the Wild West of scientific and technological exploration is that it detracts resources from other, more pressing needs. While we were exploring and funding the internet with billions in investment, our ecology and economies wobbled on the edge of collapse. While the press was hyping Biosphere 2, pressing problems in Biosphere 1 were being underreported.

Before we can solve big issues, we need the tools and the vocabulary to understand and investigate them. Watching an elderly doctor breathing through an oxygen mask because the carbon dioxide and oxygen levels in the Biosphere had fallen out of equilibrium is as vivid a depiction of the threats to an unbalanced Earth as can be imagined.

Our fluttering economy has been faster documented, and fixes debated and implemented far more speedily thanks to the internet than we could ever have imagined before its spread.

Big gestures and crazy idealism such as permeated Biosphere 2 and the first years of the internet might tweak our sense of propriety, but they also catch our attention. And out of all of the crazy dream of the 1960s to pluck and exploit, building greenhouses in the desert, or linking us together in world-spanning network of equals, seem far more promising futures than all the rest.