TED - Ideas worth spreading

Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2.html

I'm usually not a big fan of the tech ones, but this one fits into both the category of technology and the category of adventure. A crew of eight people spent 2 years living in a perfectly sealed dome, growing their own food, and essentially fully sustaining themselves. Really good one. Maybe some day we can build one on the moon or mars, who knows.
 
I watch them whenever I encounter them and if it's a topic I'm interested in. I just recently discovered them, so maybe I'll discuss future favorites some other time.
 
Homie said:
Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2.html

I'm usually not a big fan of the tech ones, but this one fits into both the category of technology and the category of adventure. A crew of eight people spent 2 years living in a perfectly sealed dome, growing their own food, and essentially fully sustaining themselves. Really good one. Maybe some day we can build one on the moon or mars, who knows.
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Thx, will watch. :)
 
Homie said:
Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2.html

I'm usually not a big fan of the tech ones, but this one fits into both the category of technology and the category of adventure. A crew of eight people spent 2 years living in a perfectly sealed dome, growing their own food, and essentially fully sustaining themselves. Really good one. Maybe some day we can build one on the moon or mars, who knows.
Click to expand...
Well, I think it is sort of cheating when your water comes from giant storage tanks which you filled ahead of time. The first mission was also plagued with numerous problems, and they only grew 83% of what they ate so it wasn't exactly a closed system. They also had to add O2 and scrub CO2 to keep from suffering medical complications and possibly even dying like most of the rest of the animals did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere2

According to the college-level textbook Biology by Neil Campbell and Jane Reece, Biosphere 2 suffered from CO2 levels that "fluctuated wildly" and that most of the vertebrate species and all of the pollinating insects died. Insect pests, like cockroaches, boomed. In practice, ants, a companion to one of the tree species (Cecropia) in the Rain Forest, had been introduced. By 1993 the tramp ant species Paratrechina longicornis, local to the area had been unintentionally sealed in and had come to dominate.[7] Galagos reproduced in Biosphere 2, but a number of pollinating insects were lost to ant predation and several bird species were lost.

During the first mission, the oxygen inside the facility, which began at 20.9%, fell at a steady pace and after 16 months was down to 14.5%. This is equivalent to the oxygen availability at an elevation of 4,080 meters (13,400 ft).[14] Since some biospherians were starting to have symptoms like sleep apnea and fatigue, Walford and the medical team decided to boost oxygen with injections in January and August 1993.

Daily fluctuation of carbon dioxide dynamics was typically 600 ppm because of the strong drawdown during sunlight hours by plant photosynthesis, followed by a similar rise during the nighttime when system respiration dominated. As expected, there was also a strong seasonal signature to CO2 levels, with wintertime levels as high as 4000-4500 and summertime levels near 1000 ppm. The crew worked to manage the CO2 by occasionally turning on a CO2 scrubber, activating and de-activating the desert and savannah through control of irrigation water, cutting and storing biomass to sequester carbon, and utilizing all potential planting areas with fast-growing species to increase system photosynthesis. [15]

Many suspected the drop in oxygen was due to microbes in the soil. The soils were selected to have enough carbon to provide for the plants of the ecosystems to grow from infancy to maturity, a plant mass increase of perhaps 20 tons.[16] The release rate of that soil carbon as carbon dioxide by respiration of soil microbes was an unknown that the Biosphere 2 experiment was designed to reveal.

The respiration rate was faster than the photosynthesis (possibly in part due to relatively low light penetration through the glazed structure) resulting in a slow decrease of oxygen. A mystery accompanied the oxygen decline: the corresponding increase in carbon dioxide did not appear. This concealed the underlying process until an investigation by Jeff Severinghaus and Wallace Broecker of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory using isotopic analysis showed that carbon dioxide was reacting with exposed concrete inside Biosphere 2 to form calcium carbonate, thereby sequestering the carbon dioxide and, as part of it, the oxygen that had disappeared. [17]

The discovery of the small difference between rate of respiration and rate of photosynthesis depended on the extremely low leak rate of Biosphere 2. It was shown by Dempster that had Biosphere 2 leaked as much as other closed ecological test chambers, the wash-out effect of outside air mixing in would have concealed the entire imbalance.
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And the second mission only lasted 5 months due to all sorts of financial and political issues.,.
 
People not being able to cut it for a few months on Earth with perfect day/night & gravity cycles & extra raw materials, water, energy & food when necessary doesn't bode well for off-Earth artificial communities.
 
Formaldehyde said:
Well, I think it is sort of cheating when your water comes from giant storage tanks which you filled ahead of time. The first mission was also plagued with numerous problems, and they only grew 83% of what they ate so it wasn't exactly a closed system. They also had to add O2 and scrub CO2 to keep from suffering medical complications and possibly even dying like most of the rest of the animals did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere2



And the second mission only lasted 5 months due to all sorts of financial and political issues.,.
Click to expand...

Narz said:
People not being able to cut it for a few months on Earth with perfect day/night & gravity cycles & extra raw materials, water, energy & food when necessary doesn't bode well for off-Earth artificial communities.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it just goes to show that we cannot easily replicate mother earth. Still an interesting experiment though.
 
As well, the point of an experiment is to figure stuff out. The fact that it didn't work properly lead to new discoveries.
 
This deserves a bump, great website.

I'm usually not into psychology stuff (at all), but found this interesting nevertheless:
Philip Zimbaro on time: so simple theorie but I have to admit I never thought about the link between the "one cookie now or 2 cookies later" experiment and how well people do later in life. In hindsight it's pretty obvious, but I never thought about it.
I was going to recommend his other talk (about good and evil) again, but found out that somebody mentioned on page 2 already.

Another one: a suggestion for math education. He does have a point in my opinion.

Also, if you go the main site there's some stuff about some event called "TedGlobal 2009". No idea what it's about though (just more talks?). http://www.ted.com/
 
suiraclaw said:
This deserves a bump, great website.

I'm usually not into psychology stuff (at all), but found this interesting nevertheless:
Philip Zimbaro on time: so simple theorie but I have to admit I never thought about the link between the "one cookie now or 2 cookies later" experiment and how well people do later in life. In hindsight it's pretty obvious, but I never thought about it.
I was going to recommend his other talk (about good and evil) again, but found out that somebody mentioned on page 2 already.

Another one: a suggestion for math education. He does have a point in my opinion.

Also, if you go the main site there's some stuff about some event called "TedGlobal 2009". No idea what it's about though (just more talks?). http://www.ted.com/
Click to expand...

Thanks for the Philip Zimbardo one, I loved it. This guy is right on the money on this topic. I was already aware of exactly what he's talking about here, and in the last 2 years or so I have consciously tried to find the best balance between present-hedonism and futurism, as he puts it. Of course I haven't used those exact words, but the idea has been the same, and I can honestly say I am happier as a result, and think I will be more so as I fine-tune it. Happier now AND in the future, not just one or the other.
 
I've made another discovery. I know have an iPod Touch, and so I can watch (or listen) to youtube while I'm going to sleep.

There's a group called "Authors@Google" which is basically what it sounds like: Google invites authors of various books to come and give a lengthy talk. It's much more in-depth than TED, but less flashy.

In fact, many authors can be found now on youtube, since they give talks to elite audiences more than once, and these talks are recorded.

I've listened to a couple lengthy talks by Tom Friedman (The World is Flat, and Hot Flat & Crowded). Jeffrey Sachs has a few top-notch talks. I've seen Zimbardo's name on the lists, but haven't watched it yet. Bjorn Lomberg gives a lengthy talk as well (I like his thesis, though I don't believe his numbers).

Of the recent TED, I quite liked Gordon Brown's talk.
 
I thought it was decent, I mean the chick was a little overly gay (old school definition) & fanciful but what TED speaker isn't? E is TED's middle name.
 
Narz said:
I thought it was decent, I mean the chick was a little overly gay (old school definition) & fanciful but what TED speaker isn't? E is TED's middle name.
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A lot of her conclusions didn't really follow, and I found that the argument as a whole kind of fell apart at the end.
 
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