Chapter 40 8.2 Mail Order Gaia

I used to have a little eco ball on my desk.It even has a serial number: World 58262.I don't have to do anything for my planet, just look at it now and then. At 5:04 pm on October 17, 1989, in the sudden San Francisco earthquake, world 58262 was reduced to dust.In the ground shaking, a bookshelf came loose from the wall of my office and fell on my desk.In the blink of an eye, a thick tome on ecosystems shatters the glass shell of my ecosphere, mashing its liquid guts together like a broken egg. World No. 58262 is an artificial biosphere, and the creators have carefully brought it to a state of balance so that it can survive forever.It is one of the descendants of those microbial jars of Folsom and Cao Hengxin.Hengxin Cao is a researcher working for NASA's Advanced Life Insurance Program at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Compared with Folsom's microbial world, the world he created is more diverse.Cao Hengxin was the first to find a simple assemblage of self-sustaining organisms including animals.He put the small brine shrimp together with the brine algae in a sustainable enclosure.

The commercial version of his closed world is called "Eco Ball", which is basically a glass ball about the size of a large grapefruit.My world number 58262 is one of these glass balls.Completely enclosed within this transparent sphere are four tiny brine shrimp, a clump of fuzzy grass-green algae hanging from a small coral branch, and millions of microbes invisible to the naked eye.There is a little sand on the bottom of the ball.No air, water, or matter of any kind can enter or exit the sphere.The only thing this guy takes in is sunlight. Counting from the beginning of production, the oldest Cao's artificial microbial world has survived for 10 years.This comes as a surprise since the average lifespan of brine prawns swimming in them is around 5 years.It is reasonable to say that these creatures can continue to reproduce in a closed environment, but it is always a problem to let these creatures reproduce in such a closed world.Of course, individual brine shrimp and algae cells die.What obtains "immortality" is the life of a group, the overall life of a group.

You can buy an ecosphere by mail, just like you can buy a Gaia or an experiment in spontaneous life.You unpack such a sphere from a stuffed package.Those little prawns still looked healthy after their turbulent journey.Then, you hold this cannonball-sized ecological ball with one hand and hold it against the light, and it will shine with pure light like a gemstone.It's a world blown into a bottle, with the glass neatly gathered together at the top. The ecosphere just stays there, living in its fragile immortality.Naturalist Peter Warshall has one of the first ecospheres ever made on his bookshelf.Warshall's readings included obscure poems by late poets, works in French by French philosophers, and monographs on the taxonomy of squirrels.For him, nature is a kind of poetry; the ecosphere is a leather bookcase for a hyped entity.Warshall's ecospheres live in benign neglect, almost as a sort of pet that doesn't need to be tended to.Of his "non-hobby," Warshall wrote: "You can't feed shrimp. You can't remove rot. You can't mess with filters, aerators, or pumps that don't exist. You can't either. Open it up and test the water temperature with your finger. The only thing you can do — if 'doing' is the right word here — is watch and think."

The ecosphere is a totem, a totem belonging to all closed life systems.A certain totem was chosen by the tribesmen to act as a bridge between the two separate worlds of the soul and the dream.And the ecosphere, this unique world enclosed in crystal-clear glass, just by virtue of "existence", invites us to contemplate those elusive totem-like concepts, such as "system" and "closed". , and even "survive". "Closed" means cut off from the flow.A manicured garden on the edge of woods, living alone surrounded by a wild state of nature.However, the separation of the garden ecology is not complete - it is a separation that is more imagined than real.Each garden is really just a small part of the larger biosphere in which we all live.Water and nutrients flow into it from the ground, and oxygen and harvest "flow out" from it.Without that persistent biosphere beyond the garden, the garden itself would decay and disappear.A truly closed system does not participate in the flow of external elements; in other words, all its cycles are autonomous.

"System" means interconnected.Things in the system are intertwined, directly or indirectly connected to a common destiny.In an ecosphere world, shrimp eat algae, algae survive on sunlight, and microbes survive on the "waste" produced by both.If the temperature rises too high (over 90 degrees Fahrenheit), the shrimp can molt faster than they can eat, and they are effectively consuming themselves.And without enough light, the algae cannot grow as fast as the shrimp need.The shrimp's wagging tail stirs the water, which stirs up the microbes, giving each bug a chance to bask.In addition to individual life, the ecological ball has overall life.

"Survive" means surprise.In a completely dark environment, an ordinary ecosphere can survive for 6 months, contrary to logical expectations.And another ecological ball, after staying in an office with very stable temperature and light for two years, suddenly a breeding tide broke out one day, and 30 small shrimps were added to the ball. However, static is the normal state of the ecosphere.Warshall casually wrote this passage: "Sometimes you feel that this ecological ball is too peaceful, in stark contrast to our hurried daily life. I once thought of playing a non-biological God. Pick it up Shake it for a while: how about some earthquake, you little shrimp!"

It's really a good thing for Ecosphere World to mess up its citizens like this now and then.Disturbance preserves the world. Forests need destructive hurricanes to knock down old trees to make room for new ones to grow.The flowing fire on the prairie can release substances that must be burned to get rid of the hard shell.A world without lightning and fire would be stiff.The ocean not only has the passion to form the warm seabed in the short term, but also has the passion to squeeze the continental plate and seabed in the long-term geological movement.Moments of heat, volcanism, lightning, wind, and waves can renew the physical world.

There is no fire, no flashes of heat, no high-oxygen environment, no serious conflict in the biosphere - not even during its longest cycle.In its small space, over a period of years, phosphate, an essential component of all living cells, binds very tightly to other elements.In a sense, knocking phosphate out of the cycle of this biosphere gradually diminishes any hope of generating more life.In a low-phosphate environment, the only thing that can thrive is a large piece of blue-green algae, so, over time, this species is bound to dominate these stable systems. Adding something to this glass world, such as an appendage capable of producing lightning, might reverse the phosphate sink, and rid itself of the blue-green algae's inevitable takeover.A few times a year, this peaceful world of tiny shrimp and algae produces a few hours of mischief, crackling, hissing, and boiling.Their sabbatical is ruined, of course, but their world can be rejuvenated.

In Peter Warshall's ecosphere (which has been left undisturbed for years except for his reveries), minerals have solidified into a solid layer of crystals on the inside of the sphere.From the angle of Gaia theory, it is just that the eco-ball has created the land.This "land" - composed of silicates, carbonates and metal salts - formed on the glass due to the action of electrical charges, a naturally occurring electrolytic deposition.Don Harmani, the chief executive of the small company that makes the ecosphere, was well acquainted with this trend in his small glass Gaia, and half-truthfully suggested that the sphere could be replaced by ground to prevent the formation of petrified layers.

Eventually, the salt crystals would fall off the surface of the glass ball under their own weight and settle to the bottom of the liquid.On Earth, the accumulation of sedimentary rocks on the ocean floor is part of a larger geological cycle.Carbon and minerals cycle through water, air, land, rocks, and back into living organisms.The same is true for eco balls.The various elements it nurtures also achieve a dynamic balance through the cycle formed by the atmosphere, water and biosphere. Most field ecologists are amazed that such a self-sustaining closed world can be so simple.It seems that with the advent of this toy biosphere, that kind of sustainable self-sufficiency can be easily created, especially if you don't care too much about the organisms that such a system sustains.Arguably, the mail-order ecospheres exemplify an unusual assertion that self-sustaining systems are "subjectively" willing to emerge.

If simple small systems are readily available, how far can we extend this harmony without losing such a self-sustaining world that is completely closed except for energy input? As it turned out, the ecospheres were still intact when scaled up.A huge commercial version of the eco-ball can hold up to 200 liters.That's about the size of a large trash can -- so big you can't wrap your arms around it.In a beautiful 30-inch-diameter glass sphere, sea prawns play among the leaves of seaweed.However, unlike the usual ecological balls that only have 3 or 4 spore-eating shrimps, this huge ecological ball contains 3,000 shrimps.It's a tiny moon with its own inhabitants.The law of large numbers applies here; more means difference.More individual life makes this ecosystem more dynamic.In fact, the larger the biosphere, the longer it takes to stabilize and the harder it is to destroy it.As long as it is in a normal state, the collective metabolic process of a living system will take root and continue forever.