Biosphere 2: Out of Oxygen with Alie Ward and Josh Gondelman | 32

The Big Flop

Wondery

Society & Culture, Comedy, Business

4.6 • 884 Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Imagine sealing yourself in giant, glass, self-contained ecosystem with your boyfriend and a lady who's learning to play saxophone... for TWO YEARS. In 1991, eight semi-qualified volunteers entered Biosphere 2, and promised that they would live inside the giant science experiment without any help from the outside. However, thanks to chopped off fingers, oxygen-gulping bacteria, rampant cockroaches and Steve Bannon, Biosphere 2 would become one of the biggest scientific flops in history.

Alie Ward (In the Wild, Oologies) and Josh Gondelman (Last Week Tonight, Modern Seinfeld) join Misha for this failed science experiment gone too far.

Listen to The Big Flop on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/the-big-flop/ now.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Wonderie Plus subscribers can listen to the Big Flop early and ad-free.
0:05.3	Join Wonderly Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:14.8	Imagine this. You've been handpicked to be one of eight people sealed inside Biosphere 2,
0:26.6	a massive, self-sustaining indoor research center, and you have one goal.
0:33.6	Figure out how to colonize Mars.
0:36.6	Oh, and you can't leave. For two years. You're in the garden picking sweet potato greens to feed the goats you take care of. You avoid the moldy ones. Sometimes you eat one, yolo. You contemplate your life's journey, how you ended up here.
0:56.5	You didn't go to college, but now the man running this experiment whose name is, and
1:01.5	I kid you not, Johnny Dolphin.
1:05.1	He says you're an expert agriculturist.
1:08.7	That's fun, I guess. But life inside the biosphere hasn't been fun. You've already
1:15.9	had an accident that required surgery. Your boyfriend can't stop playing the conga drums out of
1:22.1	boredom. The pounding is stuck in your head and you can't get rid of it. Also, you might be dying. The air feels thin.
1:31.5	You can't finish a sentence without gasping. Suddenly, your stomach cramps and you feel a bit untethered.
1:39.6	A portal opens up. You walk through it and travel through time. You have an argument with your brother,
1:47.1	and then you travel back to the sweet potato garden. The worst part is that Biosphere 2, this $150 million
1:55.3	terrarium in the middle of the Arizona desert, is one day supposed to be humanity's Martian salvation,
2:02.9	and you're not even sure you'll survive two years here. Life couldn't possibly get any worse.
2:10.4	Wait a minute. Are you hallucinating still? Or is that Steve Bannon?
2:19.0	What we are working with in Biosphere 2 is to develop the basics of a long-term ecological life support system based somewhere off of this planet.
2:31.1	While their home video shows them feasting, the truth is the biospherians have
2:35.3	had trouble growing enough food to sustain themselves. When your oxygen is going down, stopped
2:41.5	working essentially in your life support system, that's a very bad failure.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Wondery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Wondery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.