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If you have an interest in either science or pop culture, you probably recall Biosphere 2, which briefly captured the world's fancy in 1991 when eight "biospherians" boldly went where no man or woman had gone before—into a giant terrarium for two years to live with plants, animals, and a whole lot of bugs. Their mission, driven by a strange philosophical meld of Star Trek and The Whole Earth Catalog, was going to show us everything from how to live in tune with nature here on earth to how we might someday exist on other planets.

It didn't work so well. The air inside the steel-and-glass enclosure went bad, cockroaches thrived, and the biospherians were constantly warding off hunger. Sometime after rumors spread that pizza and candy bars were being smuggled inside and that seven tons of oxygen had to be pumped in to keep them all breathing, Biosphere 2 became a national joke, a staple of late-night monologues and gleefully snarky reporters. By the time the eight biospherians were released back into the wild, the project had settled into a cultural niche as one of those goofy examples of self-aggrandizing counterculture idealism just made for a Saturday Night Live skit.

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