Chapter 44 8.6 Another Synthetic Ecosystem

Taking parts of the natural environment and reassembling them into wetlands or grasslands is just one way to create ecological regions, which ecologists call the "comparison" method.This approach seems to work well, but, as Tony Boggs points out, "There are really two ways to do this. You can simulate a particular environment found in nature, or you can create A synthetic environment." Bio2 ended up being a synthetic ecosystem with many aligned parts, like Ardi's swamp. "Bio2 was a synthetic ecosystem, and California is now a synthetic ecosystem," Boggs said.Warshall agrees: "What you're seeing in California is really a harbinger of what's to come. It's a deep synthetic ecology. It has hundreds of species that are not native. A lot of Australia is also Going down this road. And the redwood/eucalyptus forest is actually a new synthetic ecology.” In this world of aircraft dispersal, many species are intentionally or unintentionally getting on the plane and spreading from their native places to their original roots. The unreachable distance has created many different ecosystems."The first person to use the term synthetic ecology was Walter Aty," Warshall said. "I realized then that there was already a lot of synthetic ecology in Bio1. I didn't invent it in Bio2. A synthetic ecology where I just copied what already existed." Edward Mills of Cornell University has identified 136 species of fish from Europe, the Pacific Ocean and elsewhere in the Great Lakes of North America. Already thriving in the Great Lakes region. "Maybe the vast majority of the biomass in the Great Lakes region is actually exotic," Mills declared, "it's now a fully man-made system."

We might as well develop a science of synthetic ecology, which we have inadvertently created anyway.Many paleoecologists believe that the entire lineage of early human activities—hunting, grazing, setting fires, and selecting and collecting herbs—has created an "artificial" ecology in the wilderness, to be precise, by relying on Human skills have greatly changed the ecology of the world.All those wild environments that we think of as natural and untouched are actually full of man-made and traces of human activities. "A lot of the rainforest is actually largely under the management of native Indians," Boggs said, "but when we go in, the first thing we do is clear the Indians, and the management skills disappear. The reason why we think this old tree is the original rainforest is because the only way we know to manage the trees is to cut them down, and there are no obvious signs of logging here.” Boggs believes that the traces of human activities have left It's so deep that it won't be easily erased at all. "Once you change the ecosystem and you find the right seeds for planting and the requisite climate window, the change starts and it's irreversible. This synthetic ecosystem doesn't need humans to keep going, It operates undisturbed. The present synthetic flora and fauna will persist even if the people of California die. It will always be like that."

“California, Chile, and Australia are converging very quickly into the same synthetic ecology. Same people, same purpose: get rid of those ancient herbivores and replace them with beef-producing cattle,” says Boggs. A synthetic ecology, Bio2 is actually a harbinger of the ecology of the future.Clearly, our impact on the natural world has not disappeared.And maybe the big glass bottle of Bio2 can teach us how to artificially evolve a useful, less destructive synthetic ecology. When these ecologists set out to assemble the first synthetic ecology, they tried to devise several guiding principles that they felt were important for creating any living closed biological system.The builders of Bio2 dubbed these principles the "biosphere principles."When creating a biosphere, keep in mind:

Microbes do most of the work. Soil is an organism.it is alive.it breathes. Create [redundant] (redundant) food networks. Increase diversity incrementally. If a physical function cannot be provided, a similar function needs to be simulated. The atmosphere communicates the state of the entire system. Listen to the system: see where it's going. Rainforests, tundra, swamps are not naturally closed systems in themselves: they are open to each other.The only naturally closed system we know of: Earth as a whole, or Gaia.Ultimately, our interest in creating new closed systems is really about deploying examples of ecosystems that have life of their own so that we can generalize their behavior to understand the Earth system, our home.

In closed systems, co-evolutionary diversity is concentrated.Pouring shrimp into a flask and snapping the neck is like putting a chameleon into a mirror bottle and plugging the entrance.The chameleon responds to the image it creates, just as the shrimp responds to the atmosphere it creates.A sealed bottle—when the inner loops are woven and then compacted—accelerates change and evolution within it.This isolation, like the isolation of terrestrial evolution, fosters diversity and marked difference. Ultimately, though, all closed systems can be opened, or at least leaked.We can be sure that no matter which artificial closed system, sooner or later it will be opened.Bio2 will be closed and opened about once a year.And, in the universe, within the time scale of galaxy, this closed system of planets will also be penetrated, and in the way of intersecting, to supply the life seeds to each other——to exchange the species with each other.The ecological type of the universe is: a certain galaxy in a closed system (planets), inventing various things like a chameleon locked in a mirror bottle.And every now and then, a miracle that emerges from one closed system shocks another.

In Gaia, the vast majority of the small Gaias that we build that are closed for a short period of time are really only instructive aids.They are models built to answer a basic question: what kind of influence and role can we have on this unified life system on earth?Is there a plane of control that we can reach, or is Gaia out of our control at all?