Life Under Glass. Марк Нельсон
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and vines for the fodder storage bins in the animal bay, our enclosed barnyard area.
Laser logged on to his computer program in the command room to check the technical systems around the Biosphere. A special vibration analysis program gave early warnings of potential breakdowns. He studied the analysis report, completed the weekly maintenance report, then took a quick trip to the basement below the savannah to check on the tanks of water that had been condensed out of the air which passed through the wilderness biomes. Laser was in charge of the rain for the wilderness area (both terrestrial and marine) and had to mix the water which drained through each biome (its leachate water) with an appropriate amount of condensed water to make acceptable irrigation water for each area.
Meanwhile, Roy was completing the laboratory workups from the last set of biospherian medical checks. He was also in the process of conducting a stress hormone study, which requires the collection of daily urine samples. He added the fixative agent to the next day’s collecting bottle and stored the previous day’s samples in the freezers in the genetic and tissue culture laboratory on the mezzanine above the analytical laboratory.
By then, Gaie had finished fixing breakfast. Porridge was standard for every breakfast, and that day she made it with a mix of sorghum and wheat flour, sweetened with ripe bananas and papayas, topped with goat’s milk. The rest of the menu depended on the cook’s allotments of food. On special holidays and birthday mornings there might have been omelets or banana-filled crepes or even a cup of coffee from beans grown on one of the dozen young coffee trees. (The few beans we grew in the Biosphere were never enough for daily cups of coffee.) That morning, along with the porridge, Gaie served a carrot-cake loaf topped with an icing of milk, banana, and passion fruit; there was also a side dish of beans and sweet potatoes stir-fried with chilies.
At 8:00 AM, the kitchen chimes would finally sound on our two-way radios, and we assembled for breakfast. Our breakfast started off with the usual joking and social conversation, but it also served as our morning staff meeting, updating everyone on the progress of the experiment. Sally called the meeting to order and went over who was on the day’s watch and who had cooking duty. She also asked Mark for the weather report, which included key environmental data: high and low temperatures in all the biomes for the previous day, the relative humidity in the agriculture area, outside temperatures (needed for gauging how to program our air handlers for cooling and heating), outside and inside total light received, and high and low carbon dioxide values at various sensors. Gaie then added the high and mid-point CO2 for the previous day, which was followed by a discussion about various options to deal with CO2 levels, tactics which had to conform with the SBV research strategy of minimizing the impact of elevated CO2 on the overall system, and specifically to the ecology of each biome. Should temperatures be lowered in the biomes to lower soil respiration? What was the status of compost making which releases CO2? When would the dormant desert and savannah receive their first activating ‘monsoonal’ rain, setting off an extra release of CO2? Finally, Sally outlined the tasks for the morning agriculture crew, and each crew member outlined his or her day to make sure that all activities were coordinated.
After Sally adjourned the meeting, the 24 hour watch duties (similar to a ship’s officer watch) was officially handed over from Gaie, who was on every Monday, to Mark, the Tuesday watch. Seven biospherians share the watch duties because Laser, as technical manager, has to be on back-up call for all of the others. If anything unusual had happened on Monday, or if there were any alarms during the day, Gaie would note them in the logbook. But this day had gone perfectly. Mark took over the watch and checked by radio with the Mission Control counterpart on the outside, who had also received the Mission Control watch handed over from the previous day’s watch person.
With twenty minutes until the start of the morning work crews, we had some free time to catch up with messages on our computers, or the morning news on TV. Gaie did a quick cleanup in the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher, and turned it on. Then she brought a couple of jugs of mint tea to the plaza for morning break.
For all of us, the one-hour agriculture work began at 8:45, with five of us continuing on for another two hours. That day we weeded sweet potato, sorghum, and peanut plots in addition to routine agricultural duties. Laser, in charge of compost, began his hour by pouring several buckets of animal manure and crop residue into the hammer mill which shred the material into our compost machine and helped accelerate the decomposition process. His other responsibilities were to feed and water the worm-bed area in the agriculture basement. That morning he had brought a bucket of worms to the animal bay for the chickens. Mark’s daily routines include harvesting a bucket of the azolla water fern and cutting fodder for the animals. That morning, he cut elephant grass that had been planted along every available walkway of the agriculture area. He also gathered a bucket of canna lilies that grew in the constructed wetland wastewater lagoons in the south basement which were also used as goat fodder.
While in the south basement where the light spilled through a span of glass, Mark checked the constructed wetland wastewater system, which consisted of three holding tanks that received all the wastewater from our habitat and another set of three for wastewater from the animal bay and laboratories. When filled, the tanks were closed and anaerobic bacteria began the breakdown process. Periodically, by batches, tanks were emptied into the wetland plant lagoons where canna, hyacinth, and a dozen other plants purified the water as they grew. That particular day Mark unloaded part of the wetland lagoon to make room for new wastewater. Before starting the pumps, he checked with Jane to see if the agriculture irrigation tanks were ready to receive the treated wastewater.
Sally continued her round of vegetable harvests, thinning beets from one of our new stairwell planters and picking tomatoes from plants in tubs on the bases of the space frame pillars. Linda had been processing wheat from our last grain harvests for the past couple of weeks in the basement. The noise of the thresher prevented her from hearing the radio, so she told her ‘buddy’, Gaie, to cover any radio calls for her. It was a big world, our three-acre Biosphere, with deep waters, cliffs and hills, as well as a basement filled with mechanical and electrical equipment, so staying in radio contact was important. Having a buddy system (divers use a similar system) helped everyone keep in touch.
That day, we planned to experiment with some new varieties of lablab beans that were given to us from a research center in India. Roy was collecting beans from the first plot in which we’d tried them, and pruned them to encourage more flowering. Jane and Taber also pruned the sweet potato plants to stimulate the growth of tubers, having collected the fifty pounds of high-protein fodder we needed daily for the goats. The weeds they removed went to the compost machine, and the sweet potato greens went to the animal bay as extra fodder.
Gaie usually spent her first morning hour tending the orchard, harvesting papayas and figs, pruning citrus and guava trees, and performing checks on the marine systems before joining the agriculture crew. This included looking over the mechanical systems, as well as data such as temperature, salinity, nutrient, and pH levels. She would then take our little boat ‘out to sea’ to skim the leaves from the savannah cliff face off the surface of the water, and then clean the protein skimmers, another system that removed excess nutrients from our ocean’s water by bubbling air through pipes.
By a quarter to ten, Laser and Taber were at work on technical maintenance. They cleaned the filters on the basement air handlers that controlled climate in the savannah and installed new parts to the system that collected condensed water from the space frame glass over the wilderness areas. Gaie, Jane, Mark, and Sally continued with the peanut harvest, and while Mark and Gaie pitchforked the peanut plants into piles, Sally and Jane stripped the roots and piled the greens into separate buckets to be taken to the drying ovens at the end of the crew. These peanut greens would be used for animal fodder after weighing and drying,
At that point, Linda would have finished threshing and put the wheat grain into the drying oven. After drying, buckets of wheat grain go to the seed cleaning machine for the final separation of remaining leaves. Roy spent this second hour in the medical laboratory on the mezzanine floor of the habitat, working on a paper detailing the oxygen depletion studies he and Taber were carrying out. As work crew ended, the rest of us grabbed a food bucket or sack to