Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth

I remember hearing about this as a teenager, and about how it failed in some nonspecific manner. How wrong. How nice to unmake a memory. This is a remarkable film about a remarkable human story. It is well made and engaging, whatever your feelings are for the characters and their doings. This was not a technical experiment, just as our life on Biosphere 1 is not. It was, and is, a human one. And if you make it to the end of the film you will understand why the experiment was a resounding success. May ours be as well.

A very cursive treatment of a bizarre and expensive project that fails to touch on any real explanation how a $200M investment achieved nothing.

Biosphere 2 was never a concept on how to make life in outer space profitable, it was to show how to achieve sustainability and what challenges might exist for colonies off planet Earth. It saddens me to see the negative reviews from people who further prove the movie's plot that greed and politics are killing the scientific community. I remember growing up and watching the experiment go live on national TV. I have visited Biosphere 2 on multiple occasions and it is truly a technological, architectural, and scientific marvel. To understand how people with no agenda, other than creating a sustainable habitat, and no formal credentials in the scientific community created something that exists 30 years later and is instrumental to the scientific community, you must learn their back story and live through their eyes. This movie proves you don't need to have years of experience to contribute to the scientific community. Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence. By definition, these free thinkers, no matter how cult-like or hippie you believe they are, were the visionaries of science. Biosphere 2 is a true contribution to science and the study of our earth and is just as important as research conducted on the ISS.

Just a bunch of self involved, arrogant, privileged, narcissistic old boomers over romanticize a boring cult from their self indulgent past for 2 hours. Produced in an already dated and pedantic documentary style.

I remember visiting the Biosphere 2 when it was being built, and getting very excited about it. I also remember being very disappointed when it failed. This is an interesting take on the project, starting long before it started, focusing on the group that made it happen - something between a commune and a cult. While that was all very interesting, they spent way too much time on it, and not enough on the details of the project itself, specifically why it failed. My understanding is that they let hope blind them and the project never really had a chance to succeed. There simply wasn't enough plant mass to produce enough oxygen for that many people and animals. They never really discuss this in this documentary.

Because as part of a west coast fam vacation- my father TOOK me here to see this (when they were still inside)! Had no idea all this drama went on behind the scenes, and honestly I'm still fascinated by the concept (all of which I didnt really understand as a kid). But to see now that this was really just a glorified science experiment by very smart and financially secure hippy folks wanting to live in a commune...it all made sense.

Tucson, Arizona is my hometown and in all honesty, I have seen Biosphere 2 only once. It is a magnificent structure that makes you wonder what compelled eight people to try and make a life in this small and enclosed space. While there are plenty of controversies about the legitimacy of the project and the band of individuals who constructed this experiment, it's pretty clear that a great many people (especially those on this review page) have very little idea about the idea of allegory. I'll start with the structure of the documentary, which for all intents and purposes is fine. They probably could have trimmed off 15-20 minutes of the buildup to the Biosphere 2 but it was fascinating to see the mindset of the people that conceived this idea. While the defamatory buzz word of "cult" is always tossed around, usually critics are forgetting that a cult's main job is to take money from its participants and grow. Hmmm.... I wonder what religious organizations do that? Try all of them. Anyway, my only gripe is they didn't focus enough on the inner turmoil of the crew once it starting hitting the fan. While this would have added a bit more doom and gloom to the film, I think a less rose colored lens would have helped. It's clear they didn't have enough scientific help on the project, and it was also clear they were not transparent about the countermeasures in place with the back-up systems. But I also think people jumped on the negative too quickly. This was an experiment that was the first of its kind, and one has to understand that not everything is going to go perfectly. News media, especially the local Tucson news which had a rather conservative bent at the time, were all too willing to mock the idea of "hippies" with the capital to make this happen. Ultimately, one of the former crew members summed it up perfectly. Capitalism has monetized any potential science associated to the project, and it remains a strange tourist destination in a dusty small town. It's the monument of steel and glass in an area that is largely old houses and mobile homes. It was a shock to see perpetual liar and scum bag Steve Brannon in this mess, clearly illustrating that his terrible talking points and smug superiority was not a recent development. This story does illustrate one thing that I wish people would take more seriously. Each person does have an affect on our own biosphere. Whether we think we are insignificant or not, we cannot buy into the capitalist doublespeak that business and "Wall Street" minds can solve the ills of society and our planet. They have no long term goals, no personal responsibility to other human beings and no soul. Go ahead and give me a down vote for that if you like...you know it is true. There was a great scene at the end of the movie Silent Running that illustrated the conundrum of our current humanity. The space ship was being called back and the corporatists that destroyed the planet felt the right thing to do was simply continue destroying, even if it was the last piece of beauty left from our great planet. We need to continue to maintain our planet, for we are not going to some other planet any time soon. And frankly, blowing up the ship is not a viable option.