Located in Oracle, Arizona, Biosphere 2 is a jewel of technology, which he may be able to patent and sell in the future, when the colonization of space is in everyone’s mind. In the meantime, Bass launches his eyes closed on this adventure, which he therefore presents to the public on this day in September 1991 by locking up eight ultra-prepared individuals for two years. Taxed as fraud and simple entertainment, this scientific experiment is not unanimous, but the billionaire knows that it is necessary to take risks to move forward. However, he quickly becomes disillusioned: the press is murdered, the project is a financial abyss, the “biospherians” are doing very badly in their new habitat and when they leave, following managerial rifification, the billionaire dispossesses John Allen and his friends of Biosphere 2. An investment fund is called to the rescue and it is Steve Bannon (!) who took the lead in 1994 of what seemed to be a visionary project. Later, it was Columbia University that used it as a research center. It is no longer a question of colonizing space, but of reflecting on the impact of global warming on different environments.
Since this adventure, Ed Bass has no longer played the futuristic billionaire: he focused his efforts on philanthropic activities linked to ecology and in 2007 sold Biosphere 2 to the University of Arizona for a quarter of the sum of departure. Ten years later, he donated $ 30 million to them to help them carry out their research. If he has remained very silent in recent years – we rarely see him in the media – the Texan has had a lasting impact on scientific research. Indeed, despite the many controversies and the apparent fiasco that Biosphere 2 has been, the experience has enabled NASA to develop programs such as SAM2, which aim to understand and accomplish what Ed Bass and his acolytes: allow man and his environment to live together better so that one day they will be able to settle in space. All this long before Elon Musk.
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