You've been assigned to a Biodome in Arizona: the dome encompasses an area of 10 acres and is a little over 100ft (30 meters) tall at its' highest point. Besides being significantly larger than the last Biodome it's also a single connected enclosed 'dome' like pic related, as opposed to multiple connected domes. The purpose of the Biodome is the same as the last: to design and engineer a completely self-sustained contained ecosystem that a small team of people could live in for 'ideally' 5 years. The Biodome has a small living quarters tucked away with individual apartments for about 10 people, electricity and internet is provided and there's a basic plumbing system, but no additional 'outside' water will be provided once the thing is sealed.This is where you come in /an/: your job is to design the novel ecosystem within the Biodome. -What flora and fauna would you pick? -What kind of crops and livestock would you include/recommend?-What kind of biome would you put together?-What kind of terraforming (such as a pond or a terrace), features, or equipment (like fans, additional lights, etc) would you have installed to ensure conditions?How do you make it work, /an/?
>>4833109Ah, you've posted a question that is near and dear to my heart. I fell in love with the original Biosphere 2 project, but it was a disaster due to poor planning and basically killed any hope of future work on archologies or space colonization.First of all I make sure there are no women or jews involved in the project. If there are, I'm not going near it, because it will descend into a clusterfuck of embezzlement and incompetence. No project since the 90s is worth paying any attention to this is so common now.Now, assuming ANY portion of mankind can clear this neoliberal hurdle (it can't) in this utterly fantasy situation, the first thing to be done is start with the basics: water systems, gas exchange, food production, etc. The first Biosphere 2 failed to do this and they ran out of both food and oxygen aside from mostly bananas. They also had no hygiene protocols for the structure, so it became full of pests like cockroaches. I'll just list some of the huge mistakes these idiots made:- No start-up sterilization protocols and TONS of "guts" space in the underbelly of the structure for pests to hide in. This problem was intractable and almost by itself ruined the project.
- Had animal livestock - this would have been fine if it were just chickens, as they kill pests, eat garbage and provide needed protein and micronutrients, but they had everything up to DAIRY ANIMALS. You can not sustain a population of dairy animals in that kind of limited space. Also, humans living in such an environment should be eating almost nothing but plants. Livestock on the order required to feed humans wastes massive resources and doesn't return a high enough ROI. They should have known this, but the original planners of B2 were LITERAL FUCKING ACTING TROOP HIPPIES AND A BRAINLESS OIL BILLIONAIRE.- The biggest issue was that they HAD ZERO PLANS for gas exchange. They just assumed that a smattering of vegetation would provide for EIGHT FULL GROWN ADULT HUMANS. They didn't even efficiently fill out the habitat with the more productive biomes like rainforest or freshwater marsh. Fully about half the habitat consisted of desert (which was pointless since the fucking thing was located in Arizona), thorn scrub and other unproductive shit. When the inevitable happened and oxygen started depleting (since apparently no O2 production calculations were done before sealing 8 adults in a tin can) they chose to make shit up and blame the concrete rather than not having enough functional photosynthesis to actually make the shit. I can fix this issue, but I'm not giving you shit unless you pay me. And I won't be taking any orders from a neoliberal. I'll shoot them on site.- One of the biggest regrets that at least one of the participants mentioned in hindsight was the desire to use artificial lighting rather than relying on external weather, and this is the correct answer.And now I've given you enough free information. The rest you'll have to pay me for FAR away from any billionaires or neoliberals.
>>4833109OP if you were a yogurt, would you be fruit-at-the-bottom or stirred?
>>4833109I shall raise wild humans, no education, no exposure to the outside world. To observe true human nature.
>>4833603You eat the yogurt with fruit chunks in it? Gross man, the fluffy whisp kind is better.
>>4833584No, humans in that environment should be eating lots of fish and eggs, with regenerative aquaculture and a steady supply of leghorn laying hens which are eaten as soon as their productivity dropsBut I agree that pigs/cows/goats/sheep dont really serve a purpose and just suck up resources for hedonism... everywhere.
>>4833859Of course if they did not eat at least a few eggs a week they’d wither awayHow is a biosphere supposed to produce a vegans need for ineffective supplement regimes? Why would you want humans operating below peak condition in a self contained biosphere? Chickens, fish, and bugs recycle waste and pests into food and help the environment churn through biomass. Humans cant even eat half of what grows from the ground, just the domesticated mutant fruits.
>>4833761I mean, it's a human, they'll just act how you raise them and babies wouldn't exactly be able to survive on their own.
>>4833849Terrible taste. Awful taste even. The best yogurt is plain Greek yogurt with some chopped up strawberries and maybe some granola sprinkled in.
>>4833871I will raise them as hands off as possible. They'll be fed by machines.
>>4833871>>4833882No wait, I'll have bonobos raise them. Those are pretty similar to humans.
>>4833859>fish>he doesn't knowYou idiot. You retard. They DID that in B2 and it failed.
>>4833866I want mark sissy to go and stay go. We're not talking about your obsessive money-grubbing using vegans to sell books and avocado salad dressings (avocado oil is still a seed oil, seethe about it).
>>4833849>>4833872Sour foods are for the low IQ. Ever notice how retards always hate sweet drinks? That's because their brains crave less sugar (because they're not being used).
>>4834215post waistline
>>4834271No.
>>4834271My thoughts:>Flora-The Biodome can only house congruent ecosystems: It should be less than half Rainforest, and more than half Freshwater Pond, not including land for farming. The interior is too warm and humid to be anything but a rainforest and keeping it from that is pointless tedium. -The Rainforest should look like something from the Carboniferous: cycads, palms, ferns, ivy, horsetails, mosses, lichens, carnivorous plants, minimal grasses and flowering plants, etc.. The interior should be dominated by long, thing, stupid plants that grow perpetually, can withstand high humidity, high heat, but also reproduce primarily through spores and/or buds/shoots. Any flowering plants should be kept small or for food. -The Pond is absolutely vital and should be: at least 20ft at its' deepest, mostly rocks, with a rocky shore and minimal exposed mud, and a home for algae, scum, and other forms of cyanobacteria. >Fauna -The Biodome needs to be an Invertebrate/Insect dominated ecosystem: mayflies, dragonflies, darters, wasps, butterflies, carpenter/wood bees, grasshoppers, crickets, moths, flies, pillbugs, beetles, spiders, centi/millipedes. No niche must go un-niched. -Likewise, the Pond should be packed to the brim with numerous aquatic invertebrates that either life full-time or complete a part of their lifecycle in there. Think copepods, shrimps, crayfish, water beetles, boatsmen, etc.. -Vertebrates should be *extremely limited*: amphibians, very small reptiles, and fish (possibly entirely cichlids). Even livestock should be limited to fish, and small domestic fowl like chickens, pigeons, maybe guinea?>Other Design Features. -Fans. The interior needs fans in order to replicate wind. -Lights. The interior needs numerous lights to compensate for seasonally dimmer winters. -The farm & hydroponic lot desperately needs to be twice, or even three times, as large. -Let the Biodome cycle fallow for a bit - just to let it achieve homeostasis.
>>4834312What about a system like a rice paddy where the fresh water ecosystem is periodically partially drained into another dome that is also eventually drained to remove waste products from the water and fertilize that bed with the cercariae worms propagated by a small duck or goose population (which also lay eggs).
>>4834753>What about a system like a rice paddyI think aquaponics is absolutely the way to go in this situation, that rice would be an excellent choice for a crop, and having something like a shrimp/fish rotation would probably be a great idea as well. I think the original Biospherians actually made mostly correct choices with crops and the only thing I'd have changed is adopting a more tropical/South East Asian diet: sweet potatoes, yams, lots of rice and cassava, leafy greens, plantains and bananas, etc.. For a project like this though I'd be really paranoid about grasses. One of the stupidest things the Biospherians did unintentionally was plant grass. Grasses are really aggressive, they choke out more oygen productive plants like herbs and ferns, and I'd worry their thin roots would dig deep into the ground and potentially disturb the integrity of the Biodome. They blamed winter and concrete for the original asphyxiation of the Biosphere, but I blame the small water habitat limiting algae population and grasses smothering more efficient forest floor herb/leafy plants from producing oxygen. Granted, if none of those things are an issue with rice, and corn for that matter, I'd absolutely be favor of including those two grasses. From what I've read the original team suffered unnecessarily due to their lack of experience in sustenance gardening causing them to be in a constant state of half-starvation until they learned how to farm. Even then, however, they still complained endlessly of constant "partial hunger" due to a low caloric diet. I think some experience, a larger hydroponics/paddy system, and the addition of corn, would hopefully feed a team more effectively.
>>4834839>cornNo. It is fickle and needs WAY too much nutrient input to be productive and also needs soaking in super alkaline water (doesn’t take up much space to store plenty of lime for this, but is a difficult to renew resource in a dome) to make its nutrients bioavailable if you wanted it to be a main part of your diet. Pellagra is what happens to you when you try to survive off of corn without nixtamalizing it first.
half acre aquaponics system for fresh foodhalf acre potatoes9acres mixed pasture grazing guinea pigs>cuy con papas and a veggie side every day
If there is a safe way to pickle food, a spineless okra variety seems like a good choice to grow. They’re fast growing and super productive while taking little effort or skill to grow; one plant will produce more okra faster than one person will be willing to eat them. It self-volunteers new plants pretty readily from pods that are missed and the whole plant is edible, though the older parts aren’t palatable. They’re good for making soups thicker and more hearty tasting. The young seeds have a surprising amount of easily digestible nutrition as well as being tasty. It makes a fantastic pickle, but trying to cook the pods needs something acidic to keep them from turning into a lump of snot. Some spineless varieties taste great raw though.
>>4834839>>4834864Without grasses and corn though, what will you end up feeding the animals you need? Even chickens and 'easier' livestock need roughage.
>>4835045Grass is pretty low on the list of a chicken’s preferred roughage and they do just fine with other alternatives to corn. Even “easy” species of livestock shouldn’t be eating much corn, it’s literally just for fattening animals up the last several weeks of their life.
