Seal up eight people for two years in Biosphere II? : It’ll be a soap opera--until the women interrupt

I wonder whether, if I were 35 or 40, I would want to be sealed up with seven other people for two years inside that enormous Biosphere II they are building in the Arizona desert.

It certainly sounds like a Brave New World--the first step toward colonization of space.

According to the paper, the biosphere will cover 2.25 acres. It will look like a great greenhouse with a domed tower for offices and apartments. It will be a closed environment, a self-contained ecosystem sealed off from the world.

It will contain a forest, an “ocean,” a marsh, a savanna and a desert, and will be stocked with 4,000 species of plants, many fish, insects and birds, and chickens for eggs and meat. There will be a few goats, but no cows, because cows eat too much.

Nothing will be wasted. Everything will be recycled, including air and human waste. Everyone will have to do his or her share of the gardening. They will have radio and TV and telephones, but no one can get out except in a medical emergency.

How does that sound? Idyllic? Like a scene from “Lost Horizon”? Two years away from the clang and clamor of city life, away from crime, gridlock, smog and litter?

Their preparations for setting up the ecosystem are exquisitely detailed. Exactly the right plants must be chosen, the right insects, the right birds.

Perhaps everything can be foreseen and controlled, except for those eight people. Who are they going to be? Who will select them? Will they be four married couples, which at first glance seems perhaps the safest way to go. Or will there be an equal mix of single men and women. Will they all be young?

Whatever the mixture, this adventure will probably turn out to be the most engaging soap opera ever produced. I have an idea that it will provide a great deal more interesting data about people in a closed environment than about plants, insects, goats and fish.

If the women aboard are going to be more than tokens, the team will have to be equally divided as to sex. Fewer than four women might easily feel dominated by the males.

Will they all be strangers? Or will some be married, or lovers? I think they will have to be strangers, or at least they must not, at the outset, have had any intimate relations with one another.

A married couple would form a little power bloc, always standing together against the others. Either that or they would crack under the strain and begin squabbling in public, so to speak, which would soon demoralize the entire community.

If there were four married couples the stage would be set for a game of round-robin adultery, that being one of the most popular diversions among bored and isolated monogamists.

But if you start with eight young and healthy singles, four men and four women--Jack and Jill and Jim and Joy and Joe and Nancy and Fred and Samantha--nature will inevitably take its course, and one or more pairs of them will begin to taste of the forbidden fruit. We know from Genesis that a healthy young male and female isolated in a Paradise will not be able to resist that apple.

Not only will the mixture of four single males and four single females lead to romance but also to its inevitable corollary, jealousy.

It may begin unobtrusively enough, with Jill and Jack bumping hips at the drinking fountain. But in that sort of isolation this early courtship ritual will not go unnoticed. Then Jack and Jill will find excuses to be together in the forest. Their absences will become longer and more frequent. Now everybody knows. And Fred cannot contain his jealousy.

Foreseeing trouble, Samantha will try to divert Fred from his yen for Jill, to spare a confrontation between Fred and Jack. This will of course infuriate Joy, who has had her eye on Fred since their first nude swim in the ocean. Noticing Joy’s distress, Jim decides he’d better make his move or he’s going to lose Joy to Joe, who’s been carrying her books.

When it gets that far, Nancy, who has been left out in this game of musical chairs, will get on the phone and call control to tell them that they’d better come running because things are beginning to unravel in Paradise.

Of course it is not only the dynamics of physical sex that can be studied during two years in a sealed environment. It should also be an excellent laboratory for observing many other aspects of conflict and cooperation between the sexes.

Is it true, for example, that in a conversation between the sexes men make 96% of the interruptions? That was the conclusion of a study made by Candace West and Don Zimmerman, sociologists at the University of California.

In single-sex conversations males cut off males and females cut off females, but these interruptions were equally divided between the speakers.

I can’t imagine four young women in Biosphere II allowing themselves to suffer 96% of the interruptions over a two-year period. After about one year of that, I should think, the women would start interrupting back.

That is perhaps one of the things we will learn from this experiment--that once civilization moves out into space, women are no longer going to let men dominate the conversation.

I wouldn’t mind taking part in that liberating process, but, all things considered, I don’t think I want to go.