ive seen some other players here with the tag alpha lima and I was wondering how i can get this or if i can get this at all. also i see priya's flair...but we all know why she has that ;-)
i friggin knew they’d run it here this weekend at fest. stoked I got to hear the >!FM transmission!< rather than just the wayback machine archive. started >!broadcasting!< on friday but died this morning.
ok so i have spent way too much time on this and i need somebody else to look because the >!Daniel timeline!< lines up with a real place in Oracle, Arizona so closely that i have gone from “probably a reference” to staring at satellite images of research buildings at 1am.
Google Earth view:
https://earth.google.com/web/search/Biosphere+2,+Oracle,+Arizona
the place is Biosphere 2, which apparently is just sitting there outside Oracle and you can visit it like a normal tourist attraction even though it looks exactly like the sort of facility where a scientist would disappear behind six different personnel classifications. >!Daniel’s timeline places him in oracle in 1985, somewhere between Tucson and what he calls the northern biosphere 2 site. i assumed that was only there to locate the journals geographically, then I looked up the property history.!< the land had previously been a ranch and later became a Motorola management training center with an airstrip, guest suites, meeting rooms and a dining area. Motorola transferred it to the university of Arizona Foundation in 1979, and the Foundation used it for retreats until Space Biospheres Ventures purchased the property in 1984. construction of the present Biosphere 2 facility began in 1986 according to the current official history page, while another university history says construction of the main apparatus began in January 1987. >!Daniel is there in 1985, directly between the purchase and the construction dates.!<
that year is bothering me because the property was already developed wiith buildings, roads, accommodations and all sorts of infrastructure just sitting there before the huge glass structure got built. >!so when Daniel writes about work near the future Biosphere 2 site, he could be describing something that occupied the earlier campus rather than the building everybody recognizes now.!<
Biosphere 2 was built as a controlled, materially closed environment where researchers could isolate variables and observe the behavior of an entire system. (sound familiar????) The visible biomes sit over a basement called the technosphere, which covers roughly the same 3.14-acre footprint and contains the electrical, plumbing and mechanical systems. The enclosure is separated from the ground by a 500-ton welded stainless-steel liner, there are 26 air handlers controlling temperature and humidity, and the pressure inside was regulated by huge structures officially called the lungs.
my current theory is that SIER used part of the older Oracle property during the period after the 1984 sale, probably in the Motorola or conference-center buildings, and that the public Biosphere project grew out of whatever had already been happening there. It could have been a successor program, a cleaned-up version of the same research, or just a convenient way to reuse a remote scientific campus after the events Daniel is writing about.
here are a bunch of links i found too:
Biosphere 2 official homepage
https://biosphere2.org/
Official history and facility details
https://biosphere2.org/about/about-biosphere-2
University of Arizona — “Biosphere 2: A Brief History, An Experiment in Place and Time”
https://biosphere2.org/sites/default/files/2021-08/B21307_Press_History02lo.pdf
Official address and directions
https://biosphere2.org/visit/visit-biosphere-2/maps-directions-contact
Landscape Evolution Observatory research description
https://biosphere2.org/research/research-initiatives/landscape-evolution-observatory-leo
>!I jsut figured out the broadcast, but i was wondering if the first thirty minutes is just a bunch of red herring meant to keep impatient people out of the game.!< I'm all about slowcore, so no shade, just wondering if I missed any important details in the first part that I'll need for other Layers. I didn't take notes...and I don't want to listen to it again...it freaks me out.
