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Biosphere 2 was built in the late 01980s by the most unlikely group: a cast of creatives, a charismatic philosopher-king, a financier, theater nerds, and an amazing crew of engineers. The idea behind Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1, of course, being the Earth) was to build a self-contained structure and set of systems that could test the idea of a self-contained space colony, albeit one that was anchored to the earth. In 01991, just four years after construction began, B2 was launched: a team of Eight “econauts” were sealed into the three-acre habitat, along with a Noah’s ark-load of life. Ostensibly, the challenge was simply to see if they could survive.
A team from Long Now arrived in Oracle, Arizona to tour Biosphere 2 on the evening of October 26, 02022, just as the sun was setting. We were there to investigate: to see if there were lessons that we could extract from B2 and apply at Long Now, specifically to the Clock of the Long Now. We all had done our homework and watched Spaceship Earth, the excellent new documentary that retells the B2 origin story. But nothing can really prepare one for the experience of encountering B2 in person.
Oracle, Arizona, is a long way from anywhere. The Sonoran Desert is a reasonable analog for the surface of Mars. And the ziggurats of steel and glass rise above the high plain like an American Giza.
The point of the original Biosphere 2 was bold, but straightforward enough. It was an experiment to see if it would be possible to create a self-contained ecosystem – one large enough to support the lives of the team inside. It was a space station, right here on Earth. And yet, right away, we had so many questions:
Like, why was there what seemed to be a vent at the top of the pyramid? Why install a vent on a closed system?
And what was that UFO-like object peeking out from behind the main pyramid?
These and other questions would have to wait until morning.
The next day, the team gathered for a tour given by John Adams, the Deputy Director and Chief Operations Officer of the facility. He explained that the tower structure that had so puzzled us the day before was, in fact, an observation tower. It was assumed that the original inhabitants of B2 would need a place to retreat to where they could observe “Biosphere 1” – the earth that they had left behind. The vent was installed to cool the glass pyramid, which, in reality, became a giant solar oven in the middle of the desert whenever the sun shined through it— which, in Arizona, was essentially every day. The vent was a striking reminder that B2 is rarely operated as a completely closed system. The ambition to study earth in a hermetically-sealed system has largely been supplanted by a more practical use for the facility: an ecological laboratory that can control more variables than nature allows. Under the auspices of its new owner, The University of Arizona, B2 is now mostly operated as a very large greenhouse, but it has the capability to do far more.
Biosphere 2’s 676,000-gallon “ocean” is the site of some rather significant science. It was here, in the living coral reef that lives under the faux ocean, that scientists proved that there was a direct connection between the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and decreasing coral calcification rates. There is currently an effort to breed and genetically engineer corals that can survive climate change – and those corals will be tested at B2 before being released into the open oceans.
The rainforest is also the site of important climate change research. Climate modelers have subjected it to drought, to floods, to higher-than-normal temperatures, and to atmospheres with higher-than-normal CO2 concentrations. The point is not to see what happens to the B2 rainforest per se, but rather to validate and calibrate the predictions that the climate models are pumping out about the fate of real rainforests during the coming Anthropocene.
B2’s former agricultural areas, the greenhouses where the original econauts grew their food, are now home to L.E.O.: the Landscape Evolution Observatory. L.E.O. has been called the first step in a new science of terraforming planets – which sounds exciting, but in practice boils down to watering sand and then watching that sand slowly turn into soil. Earth scientists have used B2 to watch dirt “grow” for eight years now. Next year they’re going to sprinkle some hay seeds over the newly-formed soil and see what happens.
The tour really got interesting when we were led into the life support system under Biosphere 2 – the so-called technosphere.
At the end of the tunnel is a giant variable volume chamber. It’s a “lung” that, when the biosphere is sealed up tight, fills and contracts with air. Remarkably, the sealed biosphere still loses less air by percentage volume than the International Space Station. When the sun rises, so does the lung’s 40-thousand-pound metal roof, which is attached to the walls by a flexible rubber membrane. And then when the sun sets, the roof settles back in place. Without the lung, B2 wouldn’t have lasted a single day – the windows would have shattered due to the changing atmospheric pressure inside.
As we wandered the grounds, it became apparent what an impressive feat of engineering Biosphere 2 was — and still is.
That evening, we gathered to consider what we saw at Biosphere 2. When B2 was first in the news back in 01991, it was hailed as a visionary piece of engineering which, by its very existence, asked us to understand ourselves differently. Biosphere 2 was the whole earth under glass, a miniature model of Spaceship Earth. We were meant to understand that while the econauts sealed inside were LARPing a trip across our solar system, the rest of us were not players in a play. We really were on board a ship, eight-thousand miles across and traveling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the sun – and the idiot lights on the life support system were, and still are, blinking red. B2 was a mammoth piece of engineering which embodied a philosophy, a point of view, a warning. And now? While B2 had been made scientifically useful, we all saw what was lost, too. Biosphere 2 has lost much of its original poetry and, with that, has largely fallen out of the conversation.
So, the question came back to us. How do we ensure the Clock of the Long Now doesn't suffer a similar fate?
At some point in the late fifth century, as the Western Roman empire fell, a group of Zoroastrian priests in Iran’s Fars Province lit a very special fire.
As the days passed, they kept the flame burning. Years became decades, and decades became centuries, with the fire moving between various locations, until it eventually ended up in the Yazd, a desert city around 600 km (373 miles) south-east of Tehran. In 01934, a new temple was built there to house it, where it continues to burn to this day. It’s one of only nine in the world – a flame that has been kept alive for more than 1,500 years.
This millennia-old Zoroastrian fire is an extraordinary act of long-minded maintenance – and one of many examples of long-term thinking in my new book The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time (Wildfire, March 02023). What might we learn from it if we want to think with a longer perspective?
The Yazd temple that houses the 1,500-year-old fire today is situated on a busy street with cafés, clothing stores and a tourist information centre. Once you are inside the gate, however, the world outside fades into the background. Visitors encounter a peaceful garden, containing a round pool of water lined with benches and conical trees. Beyond that is a light-coloured, one-storey brick building, with a portico topped by the Zoroastrian ‘Faravahar’ symbol: a bird’s wings outstretched like an aeroplane viewed from above, with a holy male figure for a head.
Inside the building, the everlasting fire burns within a goblet. Several times a day, priests wearing all white tend the flames with a mixture of long-burning hardwood and sweet-scented softwood. Non-Zoroastrians are not allowed to go close, but visitors can view the chamber from the entrance hall. Looking at the fire through a tinted glass window, you can see the faint reflection of tourists peering in with their cameras, attempting to capture an image that will no doubt have faded or digitally decayed long before the flame goes out.
Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest faiths, and was founded approximately 3,500 years ago. It is based on the teachings of the Iranian prophet Zarathustra (also known as Zoroaster). In the Yazd fire temple, he is depicted in a painting with a bushy beard and long hair, a halo behind his head, carrying a staff and holding up a single finger, his eyes gazing upward.
With believers concentrated mainly in Iran and India, Zoroastrianism is much smaller than the major global religions: between 100,000-200,000 followers by some estimates. But over the centuries, Zoroastrian practices and writings have significantly influenced other faiths, as well as intersecting with the politics of states and empires. It gave Christianity the three wise men who attended the birth of Jesus – scholars reckon they were Zoroastrian priests – and supposedly helped to inspire Judaism’s theology of the afterlife, with the idea that what you do on Earth affects your fate after you die.
Zoroastrians have a particularly strong relationship with fire, which they see as a focus for ritual and contemplation. The ancient flames they tend are called Atash Bahrams, which means ‘victorious fire’. The fires are not worshipped, but when standing nearby, believers feel they are in the presence of the deity Ahura Mazdā. The flame can be symbolic of various things, expressing inspiration, compassion, truth, devotion, as well as continuity and change.
Atash Bahram fires are extraordinarily difficult to start, which explains why there are so few of them. The oldest fire in India, for example, has stayed burning for more than 1,000 years in a village called Udvada, north of Mumbai. To start it, Zoroastrian priests had to walk back to Iran to fetch a collection of sacred items called the alat – such as holy ash, a ring and the hair of a bull. En route they had to hide to avoid enemy armies and could not cross any rivers or seas, because fire and water cannot mix. It then took 14,000 hours of ritual. But here’s where it got really difficult: an Atash Bahram must be made by combining 16 different fires, taken from the homes of various professions such as a bricklayer, baker, warrior and artisan, plus the fire of a burning corpse and the fire of lightning. The latter fire is particularly difficult to source, because two Zoroastrians have to witness the lightning, and within a rainy storm hope that the strike sets something alight.
It is of course impossible to verify if the ancient fires have ever fizzled out once or twice. One can imagine that the chain has been disrupted by war, disease or natural disaster – and across 1,500 years there must have been many close calls. But the tending of the Atash Bahram flames is nonetheless one of the world’s longest-term commitments to a single act. And remarkably, it has endured through the medium of one of the world’s most ephemeral substances: a flame.
In The Long View, I write about how it’s possible to develop different “timeviews”: alternative perspectives of one’s place within the past, present and future to the dominant short-termist timeview of the modern age. The tending of the Zoroastrian flame is an example of what I call the continuity timeview: an approach to long-term stewardship defined by cross-generational baton-passing; a focus on making things last. (Another example would be the 20-year reconstruction cycle of the Grand Shrine in Ise, which Long Now’s Alexander Rose observed first-hand in 02013.)
So, what elements of the Zoroastrian faith led to this longevity, apart from pious dedication?
The everlasting flames show that it’s not necessary to leave behind something designed to last forever if you want to bridge across the long term. While Zoroastrianism certainly has its precious treasures, such as the alat used to start an Atash Bahram, arguably the faith’s most valuable heirlooms are instead their community practices and habits. It is these that define the continuity timeview.
Like so many faiths and cultures, Zoroastrianism emphasizes that there is a bond between generations. Through a shared act, by focusing attention on a fire that must be tended, the Zoroastrians pass a sacred responsibility forward. What makes this so powerful is that along the way, individuals personally benefit with status and other rewards.
But this is not the only long-minded lesson we might draw from the continuity timeview. Another crucial way that Zoroastrianism – or indeed any successful religion – passes ideas across time is via the power of ritual.
The performance of ritual can be traced into human prehistory. But as societies grew larger, the more routine community-building rituals of faith came into their own, such as prayer, music, tending flames, ceremonies and more. According to the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse at the University of Oxford, rituals helped to foster the trust, cooperation and cohesion that enabled civilizations to flourish: a social glue that bound people together across space and time.
Rituals helped to spread the idea of what a ‘good’ citizen should be, gluing together heterogenous societies. Every time a prayer was recited or a ceremony performed, it signalled a commitment to shared moral beliefs and collective goals among disparate people. As the Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun observed in the fourteenth century, rituals fostered asabiyah, which in Arabic roughly means ‘social cohesion’, transporting solidarity beyond direct kinship to a national scale.
Over time, ritual practices became ever-more embedded in the major organized religions – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism. They are all different in detail, but have much in common.
Many involve synchrony or display, such as the Islamic call to prayer or the Christian singing of hymns. Food makes a regular appearance, such as in Catholic Communion, or the Buddhist preparation of meals to feed hungry ghosts (a neglected spirit or ancestor). Fire or burning incense is also seen across countries and faiths – the lighting of candles to mark the start of the shabbat, or the diya lamps during Diwali. And so is cleansing, such as the various procedures followed before entering temples, or the Hindu practice of bathing the body in holy rivers before festivals.
For the Zoroastrians, tending the fire is a ritual in itself, and the locus for regular ceremonies to mark occasions, called jashan, which involve implements such as fruits, nuts and wheat pudding in metallic trays placed on a white sheet with milk, wine and flowers, led by a priest called a zoatar, while another person looks after the fire: an atravakshi.
Plenty of rituals have no obvious reason to be performed in the specific way that they are, and one culture’s ritual norm can raise eyebrows in another. But the detail does not matter. It’s about the ideas they carry, and the community behaviours they help to foster. As well as encouraging repetition and remembrance, these rituals are a way of forging a relationship with longer-term time, marking beginnings and endings, as well as a connection with ancestors. Rituals therefore are a human behaviour by which ideas can travel across decades and centuries.
If a non-believer or secular organization were hoping to become more long-minded and create ideas that endure, they might do well to ask: what rituals and traditions bring their communities together?
Some rationally minded sceptics might be reluctant to participate in a spiritual practice, but not all rituals involve deities or worship.
Recently, I asked Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz, the director of strategy at the Long Now Foundation, how he thinks about ‘long rituals’ within the organisation. He cited the obvious events like the monthly seminars the foundation holds, inviting speakers to talk about long-minded research or writing, as well as more casual meetings for the broader Long Now community at The Interval, Long Now's office, bar, and gathering-place in San Francisco, California. But there are also less frequent traditions that Brysiewicz and his colleagues follow: for example, the team makes regular camping “pilgrimages” to the original site of the 10,000 Year Clock project in Eastern Nevada. Then there’s the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco event in December with the Prelinger Library, he says, and the concomitant Winter Party for members and friends.
Through these activities, Brysiewicz and his colleagues are participating in the same kind of shared acts and ritual practices that have connected people for centuries – bearing witness to oration, finding fellowship in communal meals, pilgrimage, and honouring important sites.
If you think about it, your life is probably already packed with rituals: national holidays, sports events, family traditions, and far more. They can be celebratory, such as a song sung over a birthday cake, or sombre, such as a minute’s silence to remember the dead. But one question to ask yourself might be: which ones are promoting the principles of maintenance and stewardship?
Whether it is the commitment to a single act, such as tending the everlasting Zoroastrian flame, or participation in a chain of acts, observing rituals connects us across space and time. They are one of the most long-minded habits we have.
Richard Fisher is the author of The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time (Wildfire), which was published in the UK and other territories on 30 March 02023. He writes the newsletter The Long View: A Field Guide.
Anteros, a freed slave of the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, had decided it was a good day for a walk on the beach. Damp sand stuck to his bare feet as he walked, probably deep in great thoughts about matters that continue to remain a mystery, when he felt shock travel from his foot to the rest of his body, knocking him out of breath. The source of the shock, upon close inspection, was a live torpedo ray.
“Although he initially suffered an excruciating cramp, the pain he had long endured from what might have been gout miraculously disappeared,” writes historian of neuroscience Stanley Finger in his book Doctor Franklin’s Medicine.
As painful as it was, the jolt felt by Anteros would lead to the discovery of a treatment for countless diseases such as gout, arthritis, chronic headache, and more.
Long before man had discovered the scientific principles behind electricity, ancient physicians worked with electric current to treat physical and mental disorders such as epilepsy, vertigo and depression. The ancient world depended on nature for many needs now provided by technology, including sourcing electric current. Prior to the discovery of electricity, humans utilized electric fishes for all their ‘shocking’ needs.
Ancient Egyptians were familiar with one such shock generating fish, the Malapterurus electricus or the Nile catfish. Indigenous to the Nile, the first known depiction of the catfish can be found as a mural inscribed in 02750 BC on the tomb of the architect Ti in Saqqara, Egypt. Egyptians were not the only Mediterranean culture to depict the catfish in their art; a thousand miles north and 3000 years after the Saqqara mural , similar murals could also be found in the Roman city of Pompeii. While these murals fail to reveal whether the natives of the two lands used the electric fishes for any medical purposes, ancient Egyptian writings on papyri record the use of the electric fish to relieve pain 4700 years ago. Later records by Pliny and Plutarch also report the Egyptians' use of electric eel to treat joint pain, migraines, melancholy, and epilepsy.
Approximately 2500 years following the first depiction of the Nile catfish, Hippocrates of Cos, the Greek ancient physician regarded as the "father of medicine" recorded in his book On Regimen medical uses of the Mediterranean electric ray (Torpedo torpedo) and Nile catfish for the treatment of headaches and arthritis.
In 45 AD, word of Anteros’ miraculously cured gout reached Scribonius Largus, the court physician for the Roman Emperor Claudius. In his role as imperial philosopher — a Roman title roughly equivalent to scientist — he began experimenting and recording the medical benefits of the live torpedo fish, and suggested placing a live torpedo on the forehead to treat a headache.
“Headache even if it is chronic and unbearable, is taken away and remedied forever by a live torpedo placed on the spot which is in pain, until the pain ceases. As soon as the numbness has been felt, the remedy should be removed lest the ability to feel be taken away from the part,” observed Largus. “Moreover, several torpedoes of the same kind should be prepared because the cure, that is, the torpor which is a sign of betterment, is sometimes effective only after two or three (placement of individual fishes)”.
Noting Anteros’ experience with the live torpedo, Largus, for treating gout, recommended placing a live fish under the patient’s feet. He also opted to use the electric shock produced by a torpedo in the treatment of conversion hysteria.
Scribonius Largus was a reputable physician of his time, and upon learning of his methods, other medical practitioners soon began mirroring his methodology to treat their patients with electric currents of the torpedo fish. Some physicians, hoping to find a cure for paralysis, even attempted to shock their patients with the electric fish, possibly with the hope of artificially causing a muscle contraction or twitch to break through paralysis.
Three decades after Scribonius recorded the first known medical use of electric current in human history, Dioscorides of Anazarbus, a Greek military surgeon, added new treatments with application of the fish to the already existing list. In his book On the Material of Medicine, Dioscorides records a treatment for prolapsed anus that makes use of fish-derived electric current. For centuries, these remedies were applied by the succeeding physicians without enough attempts to confirm their worth as treatments.
Claudius Galenus Galen (130 AD - 201 AD), a Greek physician and surgeon in the Roman Empire, sought to confirm their efficacy by trying the great physicians' remedies on himself. He concluded:
“The whole torpedo, I mean the sea animal, is said by some to cure headache and reduce the prolapsed seat when applied. I indeed tried both of these and found neither to be true. Therefore, I thought that the torpedo should be applied alive to the person who has the headache, and that it could be that this remedy is anodyne and could free the patient from pain as do other remedies which numb the senses: this did so for the above-mentioned reason.”
However, Galen found one use for electric fish: he treated epilepsy with the application of the electric current from the torpedo.
The ancient electro-therapeutic remedies continued to be practiced by physicians around the world until at least the eighteenth century. Steady experiments of electric discharge from the fish helped advance the medical treatments for disorders such as depression, seizures, arthritis, vertigo, headache and epilepsy.
When Middle Eastern and Asian physicians were treating diseases with the shock-inducing fishes, the Western world was just beginning to understand animal electricity. In the eighteenth century, a new field in the science of medicine emerged which was known as ‘medical electricity’. In 01745, Johann Gottlob Krüger (01715 - 01759), a professor of philosophy and medicine in Halle, Germany hypothesized that electricity, like all things, must have a utility and since it neither had any use in theology or jurisprudence, “there is obviously nothing left but medicine… The best effect would be found in paralyzed limbs.” Indeed, Krüger wasn’t entirely wrong in his hypothesis. A year later, Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, a student of Krüger, successfully treated patients suffering from contracted or otherwise disabled fingers using electrical currents. However, despite several promising results with different mechanisms like the Leyden jar, the first man-made capacitor, the use of electric current as a treatment did not immediately catch on among medical practitioners.
During the eighteenth century, scientists conducted a number of studies on the presence of electricity in nature - with a keen focus on its presence in animals such as the torpedo. By the late eighteenth century, Luigi Galvani, a professor of anatomy, explained via his famous frog experiment the animal body as the source of electricity. Since Galvani regarded animals as the source of electricity, death for him was an extinction of “that most noble electric fluid on which the motion, sensation, blood circulation, life itself seemed to depend.” For the anatomy professor, the idea that “death comes when blood ceases to circulate and to produce the electric fluid by friction in the brain and the nerves” was at least “plausible, if not true.”
Galvani’s explanation of death found reinforcement when western naturalists and researchers learned of the fish that was said to naturally produce shock equivalent or stronger than the man-made Leyden jar. It was John Walsh, a British scientist, who concluded after an in-depth investigation of the torpedo ray and the electric eel of Guyana that the shock produced by the aquatic animal was, in fact, electric in nature. Concluding his research, Walsh wrote:
“That the effect of the Torpedo appears to be absolutely Electrical, by formula its circuit through the same conductors with Electricity, for instance metals, animals and moist substance: and by being intercepted by the same non-conductors, for instance glass and sealing wax.”
Walsh’s research into electric fish, conducted between 01772 and 01775, is often considered as the dawn of electrophysiology.
However, electrophysiology wasn’t the only field to get its start from Walsh’s findings. Working along with Walsh on this research was the Scottish surgeon John Hunter. Focusing on the anatomical structure of the torpedo ray, Hunter found that the organs responsible for generating the electric current, as well as “picking up and directing” it in the fish, were formed by stacking numerous flat disks on “one above the other”. 30 years later, the Italian physicist Alexandro Volta borrowed the same stacked disc structure first identified by Hunter to create what was known initially as an “artificial electric organ,” a device that could provide constant electric current to a circuit. You may be more familiar with Volta’s invention as the first electrochemical battery.
That artificial electric organ, which produced electricity by chemical means, was at first a breakthrough for the medical field as it allowed the use of Galvani's direct current to treat tumors and other diseases. In the centuries that have followed Galvani’s experiments, electrical current has proven to be far more than a medical curiosity. We have reinvented our daily lives around electricity, taking the currents that were once only found to exist in a few obscure fish species and allowing them to course through a global network of power and information.
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