Interview with Abigail Alling of Biosphere 2
In your book you write that after the doors closed, "What was inside was now all we had." I'm particularly fascinated that while people at Antarctic stations pine for fresh vegetables during the winter, you lived mainly on fresh vegetables, and that while we live on meat and coffee and booze, you were short of all three. Once one has been cut off from a transfusion of supplies, it seems that no matter how well one has prepared, one longs for some commodity one can't get. What kinds of goodies from civilization did you long for? What are three items that you brought that made you grateful for your own forethought?
That is a very interesting analogy! I did not bring any goodies with me! I was very keen to embrace the experiment and I missed coffee, tea, wine, etc. as these all provide a social scene and encourage “hanging out” and conversations. We did have about one cup of coffee every month as we had coffee trees inside, and we created this fabulous banana/goat-milk ice cream or shake that we loved. Also, at the one-year mark we harvested a bunch of bananas and made a banana wine so we could all have one glass!
One glass in a year? That’s surely difficult for most Antarcticans to imagine, as overall we spend much of our off-time three sheets to the wind. After a year without, did one glass of wine get you tipsy? At that party did anyone make out in the corner? Dance on a table? Babble through the intercom system?
Yes, one glass of wine got us tipsy. We all got up and danced on the table at one point!
You mention that you had stringent PQ requirements: did you have to have your wisdom teeth removed? Did you undergo a psych evaluation?
I had no wisdom teeth removed. We all had psych evaluations and were "rated" along with astronauts.
Was the psych eval the MMPI (where it asks true or false questions such as “I see things other people do not see” and “I would like to be a florist”)?
Yes there was that one, and another that I do not recall the name of, and a visual one.
For those two years you lived with seven other people. Over the years did your community dispense with pleasantries or did it continue to find them important? How important is interpersonal "maintenance" in a close community?
We had worked with each other for about five years prior to going in so we had a lot of experience with each other. Interpersonal maintenance was very important and in fact I wrote a paper about this. Please send me your mail address and I will forward it.
I'd appreciate that. After a few months at an Antarctic station, many of the women’s menstrual cycles begin naturally to sync up. My women friends claim that their cycles usually follow that of a local “alpha female”, which can change throughout the season for various reasons, including social standing and use of birth control and such. In Biosphere, did the women's menstrual cycles line up?
Yes, I recall that they did.
Like early Antarctic explorers in their tents, you discovered quickly that distributing equal food rations was the only way to keep people from resenting each others' portions. Did you maintain this practice the entire time?
Yes!
After some months in that small community, you learned that someone in the group was stealing food, and thereafter the food had to be locked up. Did you ever find out who it was? If not, did your own suspicions stick on one person, or did they float around as your relationships with the others waxed and waned?
The food issue definitely was a point of anger. And I thought I knew who was doing it, and I never changed my mind about it!
I'm certain that one of the most fascinating aspects of Biosphere for my readers will be that some of you were in there ripping each others' jumpsuits off and having sex. You promised in your book that none of you would ever disclose who was shacking up with who, but other than names can you elaborate on Biospherian sexual dynamics? Once the doors had closed, how long was it before a couple hooked up? Did they sneak around for awhile or were they open about it from the beginning?
Sorry to be so boring about answering this question, but people who went in as couples, stayed as couples. Those who went in single, stayed single. So, no great comments!
With long periods of the same work routine and inevitable ruts of social interaction, many Antarcticans get "toasty" or "go toast" during the winter, a kind of group insanity fostered by lack of external references, where you're all going a little bit mad, but since everyone else is going mad in a similar way and in the same direction, toastiness is not necessarily apparent as it happens. Did the Biospherians experience this? Did you have a pet word for it?
I did not experience this exactly. We had a lot of contact with the outside — from seeing people daily at the window, telephone calls, etc. So isolation for us was somewhat different. Plus we had a lot of input from people on the outside helping to advise us and assist us in the management issues. Isolation really meant living just with seven others; no other physical contact; the strange [thing] knowing that any one of us could open the door and leave (we were not on a ship or in a remote Antarctic base, which had its own peculiar psychological behaviors); and a very different atmosphere, food, and daily living than what one would experience on earth.
You didn't use money inside Biosphere. After you got out did you ever forget to pay for something or forget to bring money somewhere?
No.
At one point you mention: "Some things that are normally easily arranged take a lot of explaining and haggling to accomplish from a distance. . ." Have you ever told anyone on the outside that you couldn't sign a document because "I'm locked in a Biosphere"? Have you had customer service representatives hang up on you?
When we first started building BIO2, we would have to spell the word "biosphere"! That is how new the idea was. I would rarely try to explain I was inside a biosphere: that would have taken way too much time to get through that one. We all had legal representatives on the outside who could handle our money or other affairs.