. . .on Biosphere II, the experimental closed environment built in the Arizona desert in 1991:
I remember going to visit the biospherians in Arizona. They were inside when I visited, and I talked with them by telephone. They were enjoying themselves, but it was very stressful. At the time I saw them, they were very upbeat. But in the end the thing broke down; they had to bring in air from the outside so they wouldn’t suffocate, which was against the whole idea. They were there about the same length of time as a mission to Mars would take, about a year and a half, but from a scientific point of view it was a flop. In a strict way it’s not possible to have a simulation of a trip to Mars. You can do a technical simulation but not a human simulation. How people will get along with each other, you can’t simulate that. When you are on the ground, the whole feeling is totally different than if you were really going to Mars. I think of the old polar expeditions, when they would go off for three years and there would be no radio communication. These people would survive under all sorts of unknown conditions, have amazing adventures no one could possibly have simulated.
. . .on low-cost space travel:
It will come, but only when there is a high enough demand so that you can have a “public highway” system. To support today’s air traffic network, you’ve got to have a million passengers constantly on the move. The same will be true in space: It’s not really a technology problem, it’s more a sort of chicken-and-egg economic problem. I hope that it will grow, probably on the back of the military. The military has needs for all kinds of space launching and is prepared to pay for it. So with luck something like this space highway will develop. It doesn’t matter who pays for it initially. In the end it will belong to everybody.
. . .on colonizing space:
The main purpose is to provide a place for adventurous people to go. They will all have their different motives. Some will go in order to get rich; some will go to get away from their neighbors. There are all sorts of reasons for going. And I think all of them are valid. The good thing is that they can all be more or less cooperating to develop the system. We also need a lot more knowledge of biology before we can do something like colonize a comet. It would be very nice to build trees that can directly produce liquid fuel and other things from sunlight. The real problem is the low temperature. You’ve got to have a tree that grows a long, long way from the sun in a temperature environment that is just a few degrees above absolute zero. Going out to the comets is probably going to take a couple hundred years.
. . .on the potential of biotechnology:
The future of biology is exciting and unknown. The main thing is that the era of molecules is over and the era of organisms is here. The reductionist model was the basis of biology in the 20th century, and it was enormously successful—we reduced everything to molecules. We had DNA and RNA and proteins, and everyone studied molecules. We found out wonderful things. The problem for the next century is putting it all together. We know pretty much what the building blocks are. The question is, how do they actually function? How does the system work as a system? There is a man called Carl Woese [who revolutionized biology with his discovery of the archaea microbes]. His metaphor for biology is a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into the eddies in the water. These eddies always re-form when you disturb them. That’s biology: a dynamic system that you don’t understand. You just poke at it with a stick and it responds and then re-forms itself.
