AURA

Located in Oracle, AZ, is the building that houses “Biosphere 2.” During the first years of operation when a troupe of eight “bionauts” were sealed inside in an experiment meant to establish the viability of such a closed system for use on another planet, it was Arizona’s second most visited tourist attraction (the first being the Grand Canyon).

In their 1986 book, Space Biospheres, John Allen and former crew member Mark Nelson said Biosphere 2 is the prototype for a means of enabling man to achieve "cosmic immortality" to render irrelevant earthly issues before "the burdens of population explosion, agricultural stress on the environment, technological paralysis, mineral and fossil fuel depletion, and numerous other potentially debilitating conditions of an over-burdened planet will prevent the expansion of the human species," as Allen wrote in Biosphere 2: The Human Experiment.

But with the onset of a few technical difficulties, this lofty goal was abandoned and brought to the fore Biosphere’s potential to show “how to do a better job of stewardship of Biosphere I”, as Carl Hodges, of the University of Arizona’s Environmental Research Laboratory in Tucson, said in 1986. “Scientists will ... be able to introduce contaminants into the system, then follow their path and measure their effects throughout the system. Thus, problems like ground-water contamination, acid rain or the warming of the Earth due to the ‘greenhouse effect’ could be studied with laboratory precision,” Hodges said.

● Biosphere II - Intro

● Fees, Hours

● Directions

● 10 day weather forecast