In 1991 four men and four women sealed themselves inside Biosphere 2, a sprawling Arizona terrarium with its own rainforest, ocean, and desert, cut off from the planet for two years. It was meant to prove humans could build a world from scratch. Instead the oxygen quietly drained away, the crops failed, the people turned on each other, and the whole utopian dream curdled into one of the strangest science stories ever told.
The trailer for Matt Wolf's documentary about the countercultural dreamers who built Biosphere 2. Start here for the sheer audacity of the thing — a group of theater-troupe idealists convincing a billionaire to fund a miniature Earth.
Archival footage of the glass-and-steel structure going up in the Arizona desert. Watch a self-contained rainforest, a million-gallon ocean, and a farm get sealed under glass before a single human stepped inside.
A clear account of the day the airlock shut on eight people for two years. The dream was explicit: test the technologies that might one day let humans colonize Mars.
The definitive overview: the eccentric Institute of Ecotechnics origins, the two sealed missions, the oxygen crisis, and the later era when a young Steve Bannon ran the place. A rabbit hole in itself.
Sixteen months in, oxygen fell from 21% toward 14% as hidden concrete and hungry soil microbes ate the air. The crew gasped at night, crops failed, mites swarmed, and management secretly pumped in oxygen to prevent brain damage.
A retrospective that reframes Biosphere 2 decades later — part failed experiment, part cult, part accidental rehearsal for a world that would one day lock itself indoors. Where the dream went, and what it was really for.