The Bramble posted:

Visions of Valerie posted:

OP we're concerned about your bladder. Specifically, concerned about how we can get in on that once a day business? Seems extra convenient

1secondpersecond posted:

Warm weather, good food. Oh, and at the precise moment you're most relaxed and having fun, fast-acting painless euthanasia.

redshirt posted:

One of my favorite places in this world was the Biosphere in Arizona. It's this big pressurized space with multiple environments. It's an engineering wonder, I love it.


*eyes dart from side to side

Mozi posted:

24/7 shuffleboard and free candy

Smugworth posted:

24/7 suckin and fuckin

Gertrude Perkins posted:

The finest example of what the human species is capable of inflicting upon itself is Biosphere 2 — the first zoological gardens of the species, to which human beings come to watch themselves survive, as once they went to watch apes copulate. Outside Tucson, in Arizona, right in the middle of the desert, a geodesic glass and metal structure accommodating all the planet’s climates in miniature, where eight human beings (four men and four women, of course) are to live self-sufficiently, in a closed circuit, for two years, in order — since we are not able to change our lives — to explore the conditions for our survival. A minimal representation of the species in an experimental situation, in a kind of spaceship allegory. As a museum mock-up of the future, but of an unpredictable future — a century hence, a thousand years, millions . .. who knows? — it forms a pendant to the Desert Museum some sixty miles away, which retraces the geological and animal history of two hundred million years. The point of convergence between the two being the idea of the conservation and optimal management of residues — of the relics of the past for the Desert Museum, the anticipated relics of the future for Biosphere 2 — not to mention the magical desert site which allows the problem of survival to be examined, both that of nature and that of the species with equal rigour.

Such a very American hallucination this ocean, this savannah, this desert, this virgin forest reconstituted in miniature, vitrified beneath their experimental bubble. In the true spirit of Disneyland’s attractions, Biosphere 2 is not an experiment, but an experimental attraction. The most amazing thing is that they have reconstituted a fragment of artificial desert right in the middle of the natural. desert (a bit like reconstituting Hollywood in Disneyworld). Only in this artificial desert there are neither scorpions nor Indians to be exterminated; there are only extraterrestrials trained to survive in the very place where they destroyed another, far better adapted race, leaving it no chance. The whole humanist ideology — ecological, climatic, microcosmic and biogenetic — is summed up here, but this is of no importance. Only the sidereal, transparent form of the edifice means anything — but what? Difficult to say. As ever, absolute space inspires engineers, gives meaning to a project which has none, except the mad desire for a miniaturization of the human species, with a view perhaps to a future race and its emergence, of which we still dream . . .

The artificial promiscuity of climates has its counterpart in the artificial immunity of the space: the elimination of all spontaneous generation (of germs, viruses, microbes), the automatic purification of the water, the air, the physical atmosphere (and the mental atmosphere too, purified by science). The elimination of all sexual reproduction: it is forbidden to reproduce in Biosphere 2; even contamination from life [le vivant] is dangerous; sexuality may spoil the experiment. Sexual difference functions only as a formal, statistical variable (the same number of women as men; if anyone drops out, a person of the same sex is substituted).

Everything here is designed with a brain-like abstraction. Biosphere 2 is to Biosphere 1 (the whole of our planet and the cosmos) what the brain is to the human being in general: the synthesis in miniature of all its possible functions and operations: the desert lobe, the virgin forest lobe, the nourishing agriculture lobe, the residential lobe, all carefully distinct and placed side by side, according to the analytical imperative. All of this in reality entirely outdated with respect to what we now know about the brain — its plasticity, its elasticity, the reversible sequencing of all its operations. There is, then, behind this archaic model, beneath its futuristic exterior, a gigantic hypothetical error, a fierce idealization doomed to failure.

In fact, the ‘truth’ of the operation lies elsewhere, and you sense this when you return from Biosphere 2 to ‘real’ America, as you do when you emerge from Disneyland into real life: the fact is that the imaginary, or experimental, model is in no way different from the real functioning of this society. Just as the whole of America is built in the image of Disneyland, so the whole of American society is carrying on — in real time and out in the open — the same experiment as Biosphere 2 which is therefore only falsely experimental, just as Disneyland is only falsely imaginary. The recycling of all substances, the integration of flows and circuits, non-pollution, artificial immunity, ecological balancing, controlled abstinence, restrained jouissance but, also, the right of all species to survival and conservation — and not just plant and animal species, but also social ones. All categories formally brought under the one umbrella of the law — this latter setting its seal on the ending of natural selection.

It is generally thought that the obsession with survival is a logical consequence of life and the right to life. But, most of the time, the two things are contradictory. Life is not a question of rights, and what follows on from life is not survival, which is artificial, but death. It is only by paying the price of a failure to live, a failure to take pleasure, a failure to die that man is assured of survival. At least in present conditions, which the Biosphere principle perpetuates.

This micro-universe seeks to exorcize catastrophe by making an artificial synthesis of all the elements of catastrophe. From the perspective of survival, of recycling and feedback, of stabilization and metastabilization, the elements of life are sacrificed to those of survival (elimination of germs, of evil, of sex). Real life, which surely, after all, has the right to disappear (or might there be a paradoxical limit to human rights?), is sacrificed to artificial survival. The real planet, presumed condemned, is sacrificed in advance to its miniaturized, air-conditioned clone (have no fear, all the earth’s climates are air-conditioned here) which is designed to vanquish death by total simulation. In days gone by it was the dead who were embalmed for eternity; today, it is the living we embalm alive in a state of survival. Must this be our hope? Having lost our metaphysical utopias, do we have to build this prophylactic one?

What, then, is this species endowed with the insane pretension to survive — not to transcend itself by virtue of its natural intelligence, but to survive physically, biologically, by virtue of its artificial intelligence? Is there a species destined to escape natural selection, natural disappearance — in a word, death? What cosmic cussedness might give rise to such a turnabout? What vital reaction might produce the idea of survival at any cost? What metaphysical anomaly might grant the right not to disappear — logical counterpart of the remarkable good fortune of having appeared? There is a kind of aberration in the attempt to eternalize the species — not to immortalize it in its actions, but to eternalize it in this face-lifted coma, in the glass coffin of Biosphere 2.

We may, nonetheless, take the view that this experiment, like any attempt to achieve artificial survival or artificial paradise, is illusory, not from any technical shortcomings, but in its very principle. In spite of itself, it is threatened by the same accidents as real life. Fortunately. Let us hope that the random universe outside smashes this glass coffin. Any accident will do if it rescues us from a scientific euphoria sustained by drip-feed.


Curiously, all the assumptions, explicit or implicit, of Biosphere 2 link up with the issues raised in the Middle Ages by the problems of immortality and resurrection. Would bodies resuscitate with all their organs (including the sexual ones), with their illnesses, their distinctive features, with all that made them specific living beings? We might widen the question today by asking whether we shall resuscitate with our desires, our wants, our neuroses, our unconscious, our alienation? With our handicaps, our viruses, our manias? In its simulation of ideal resurrection, with all negative features eliminated, Biosphere 2 provides answers to all these questions. No viruses, no germs, no scorpions, no reproduction. Everything is expurgated, idealized, immunized, immortalized by transparency, disincarnation, disinfection and prophylaxis — exactly as in paradise. Moreover, if the medieval theologians were close to heresy when they enquired into the concrete forms of the resurrection of bodies, the officials at Biosphere 2 certainly make you feel any half-way detailed examination of the conditions of the experiment betokens the most evil intent.

What is being set in place here is, in effect, the immortality of the species in real time. We long ago stopped believing in the immortality of the soul, a deferred immortality. We no longer believe in that immortality which assumed a transcending of the end, an intense investment in the finalities of the beyond and a symbolic elaboration of death. What we want is the immediate realization of immortality by all possible means. At this millennium end, we have all, in fact, become millenarian: we desire the immediate attainment of existence without end, just as the medieval millenarians wanted paradise in real time — God’s Kingdom on earth.

But we want this immortality here and now, this real-time afterlife, without having resolved the problem of the end. For there is no real-time end, no real time of death. This is an absurdity. The end is always experienced after it has actually happened, in its symbolic elaboration. It follows from this that real-time immortality is itself an absurdity (whereas imagined immortality was not: it was an illusion). Biosphere 2 is an absurdity. For, at bottom, nothing takes place in real time. Not even history. History in real time is CNN, instant news, which is the exact opposite of history. But this is precisely our fantasy of passing beyond the end, of emancipating ourselves from time. And the CNN presenter locked away in his studio at the virtual centre of the world is the homologue of his Bio 2 brothers and sisters. They have all passed over into real time, the one into the real time of events, the others into real-time survival. And, of course, into the same unreality.

Smugworth posted:

I think we're on to something

Smugworth posted:

I think we're on to something