Program Notes
Guest speaker: John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder
This podcast features another of the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival. The speakers are John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder, both of whom have been involved in many large-scale Earth Science projects, including Biosphere 2. In his presentation, John makes a strong plea for all of us to gain a better understanding of not just our own local ecosystems, but of the Earth’s entire biosphere as well. It is a fascinating talk and is followed by an interesting Q&A session.
http://www.synergeticpress.com/books/me-the-biospheres/
Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir by the Inventor of Biosphere 2
By John Allen
http://www.synergeticpress.com/
The publishing home of John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:24 ►
And I don’t know about you, but I’m still having trouble getting back up to speed this year.
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Maybe it’s just because I seem to keep getting older each week.
00:00:33 ►
Maybe that’s happening to you too, huh?
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But my energy level just isn’t what I’d like it to be.
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But fortunately, I’m retired and don’t have to fight my way to a cubicle each day like many of our fellow swanners do.
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So even though I’d like to take another day off and just read,
00:00:51 ►
I’m instead going to press on here and see if I can get back up to speed
00:00:55 ►
and do a few more podcasts than I’ve been doing so far this year.
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But anyhow, thanks for sticking around,
00:01:01 ►
and I’ll do my best to keep these little bits of brain candy coming your way, hopefully more frequently.
00:01:08 ►
So today I’m going to pick back up on the Palenque Norte lectures that were held at last year’s Burning Man Festival.
00:01:16 ►
So far, I’ve podcast seven of the talks, and there are still about that many left for us to hear,
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at least depending on which of the speakers give me an okay to podcast their talks. Now the last of these talks that we heard was given by Daniel Pinchbeck,
00:01:31 ►
and you can find that in my podcast number 336. And in case I forget to mention it, the video of
00:01:38 ►
these talks is also available in the event that you would like to take a look at the environment
00:01:42 ►
in which they were given. For example, Daniel’s talk began at 3 p.m. on the Wednesday of the burn week,
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and the one we are about to hear right now followed at 4 p.m.
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And what you can hear, if you listen closely to both talks,
00:01:56 ►
is that as the day gets a little later,
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the sound of drums and other activities on the playa begins to build.
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Now, if you’ve never been to Burning Man,
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well, then these background sounds may be a littlea begins to build. Now, if you’ve never been to Burning Man, well,
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then these background sounds may be a little bit irritating to you. However, if you’re a burner or
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other festival goer, well, then these sounds bring you back to those more carefree days at the
00:02:17 ►
festival when you could be as crazy and free as you felt like, and yet, most likely, not even be
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far enough out of the box to get noticed.
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For me, I never truly knew what unbridled freedom was like until I went to my first
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burn.
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And if I’m not mistaken, this was the first time our featured speakers made it to Black
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Rock City themselves, as you’ll hear John make a few happy comments about Burning Man.
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Now John, who is going to be our featured speaker today,
00:02:46 ►
is the celebrated John Allen,
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who has led an incredibly fascinating life.
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How many other people do you know who, at the age of 83,
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are still doing new things,
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like going to Burning Man for the first time?
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I’m not really sure how to introduce John and his partner Tango.
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On the Burning Man program, they were listed as John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder,
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speaking about visions and biospheres.
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Now, if you go to Wikipedia, you’ll learn a lot about John’s professional life,
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including the founding of Synergia Ranch and Community,
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and as the founder of Biosphere 2,
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which, if you were following
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the news in the early 1990s, well, you couldn’t have missed hearing about it.
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And I won’t go into any more details here, because John will be talking about it in just
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a few minutes.
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And, of course, I’ll post links to more information about John, Tango, their books, and their
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work in the program notes for this podcast, which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
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But rather than have me simply recite a list of their accomplishments,
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instead I want to just pass along a few personal comments instead.
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I’ve only been together with John and Tango on a few occasions,
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and I think most of them were at the home of Captain Rio,
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who was the
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skipper of the boat in the Amazon that Dennis McKenna wrote about in his new book, The Brotherhood
00:04:10 ►
of the Screaming Abyss. And that was on the expedition on which Terrence and Wade Davis got
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kind of crossways with one another, but that’s another story. And now that I think of it, I
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believe that actually it was John Allen’s boat that they were on that
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Rio was skippering at the time. I might be mistaken about that but you can read Dennis’s book and get
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all the details. Anyway at some point after Biosphere 2 the live-in experiments ended and
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some of the people involved in that project bought a large home together in Southern California
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and that’s where I met John and Tango at a few of the gatherings that were held there.
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Now, here’s my point in telling this long story.
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John and Tango have been through it all.
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They’ve not only been around the world on numerous occasions, but they’ve spent a lot
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of time hanging around with some of the most interesting people I know of.
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And yet, even though I hadn’t published my first book
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and was basically a newcomer to the tribe,
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nonetheless, each time we met, they remembered my name
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and some of the things that we last talked about.
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In other words, they are two people who you would love to have over
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for a long conversation one evening
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because they’ve most likely been somewhere that you’d like to go
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or they’ve done something you’d like to do and, well’ll treat you like a lifelong friend even though you’ve just met
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but enough of me let’s now join tango and john in the hot and dusty crystal cave at the 2012
00:05:36 ►
burning man festival hi everyone thanks for hanging out so So for our next talk, we have the
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great pleasure of having John
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Allen and Tango Parrish-Snyder here
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with us.
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John is the creator of the Biosphere 2
00:05:53 ►
project, this fascinating
00:05:55 ►
self-contained ecological environment.
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And he’ll talk to you
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a little more about that. And Tango is
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the publisher of Synergetic Press,
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and I believe she’s currently working on a Albert Hoffman biography. Yes? Awesome. So it’s a great pleasure
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to have them here with us today, and thank you all for coming. Hi. So how many of you
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know a little bit about, just going to take a few moments before John starts to speak,
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just to give you a little bit of a background about my experience working with publishing books on the biosphere.
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Back in 1983, I was commissioned to publish a book called The Biosphere Catalog.
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I don’t believe that in those days biosphere was a household term.
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I remember having to spell it on the telephone every time I
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said it. And I remember, this is a 1984 edition of the Biosphere Catalog, the first approach to
00:06:54 ►
the study of the Earth’s biosphere. What do you study in the Earth’s biosphere? First of all,
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I didn’t even know what a biosphere was myself. So John, the scientific editor, gave me an outline.
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The outline included biomes, atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, microbes, soils,
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plants, animals, evolution, cultures, commodity production, cities, energy, transportation,
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communication, space biospheres, cosmic particles in Earth’s radioactivity,
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genetics and cloning, analytics, biospheric organizations,
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tours, travels and adventures, information, and an appendix.
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This is all before the Internet.
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This is way before the Internet.
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And I had to find somebody that was a key person in each of those areas
00:07:44 ►
to write about that subject matter
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and to give us an introduction to what the role was of that area in the biosphere.
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How did it support the biosphere?
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So when I called the bookstores after publishing this,
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they all asked me where should they put it.
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In the gardening section?
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Well, I then went on,
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and meanwhile, Biosphere 2 was being in its fertilization mode.
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It was being designed in its early stages.
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In 1984, it began, and I came across a man who was a Russian that I was introduced to,
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also by John, called Vernosky, Vladimir Vernosky,
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who wrote the first theory of the biosphere in 1929.
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And I published the first English translation of that
00:08:30 ►
in its very abridged form, called The Biosphere.
00:08:34 ►
And I went on to learn more about the Russian legacy.
00:08:39 ►
I then became involved in Biosphere 2 project,
00:08:42 ►
which was the largest laboratory for global ecology ever built. And how many people have heard about Biosphere 2 project, which was the largest laboratory for global ecology ever built.
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And how many people have heard about Biosphere 2?
00:08:52 ►
Wow, good.
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There’s only a few young people here today.
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It’s still there in Arizona. in self-sustainability and human life support
00:09:05 ►
with the endeavor to both develop tools for,
00:09:10 ►
first of all, to test the Vernosky hypothesis
00:09:12 ►
that there is a self-supporting evolutionary system,
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living system on the planet Earth called a biosphere,
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including all of those levels.
00:09:23 ►
So we went on to that for that endeavor for about 10 years
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and published a number of different books on biospherics.
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And that leads me to John being one of the pioneers of biosphere science.
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After Vernatsky, there was also a gentleman called Claire Folsom
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who built the first small one-liter closed systems in Hawaii,
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and he was involved with the project.
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We worked with about 250 scientists from around the world
00:09:50 ►
to create this incredible experiment.
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And obviously, you can learn more about all that.
00:09:58 ►
I won’t go into all that right now.
00:09:59 ►
I’d like John to share some of his experiences and all of his visions of what led him to conceive of such a bold experiment.
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I have recently published the unabridged version of the Vernadsky theory of the biosphere,
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which was quite a large work that he worked on up until his death in 1944.
00:10:23 ►
And so working with the Russians was an incredible experience.
00:10:27 ►
They’re a great adventurous group of scientists and explorers
00:10:32 ►
in the world of Biospherics.
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And Vernadsky’s legacy continues to be developed today.
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And John has many, many, many other worlds to take us through today and thank you
00:10:51 ►
biosphere biosphere biosphere ah yeah thank you
00:10:59 ►
uh there’s four words that help
00:11:05 ►
understand the biosphere.
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That’s huge,
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dynamic,
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evolving,
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and old.
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The biosphere
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is at once old and forever
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new. It’s
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over four billion
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years old.
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It’s over 4 billion years old. It’s perhaps even older than Earth
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because we have a 15 billion year universe.
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So there would be other suns and planets
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that could have had a 5 billion year head start on Earth.
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Now the other thing is, that’s the old.
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Now it’s also evolving.
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For example, the biosphere started out with a non-nucleated bacteria.
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The bacteria didn’t even have a nucleus.
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Then it built a second kingdom, a nucleated bacteria.
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That took about two billion years.
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Then came animals, plants, and fungi, all more or less at once.
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And the fungi clean up the mess that’s left behind by the animals and the plants and recycle it.
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And the sixth kingdom came only about 40,000 years ago.
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That was us, thinking humans.
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Physiologically, humans may have arrived 200,000 years ago.
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But the first sign of actual intelligence carrying out a project is 40,000 years ago
00:12:48 ►
in the great cave paintings. So, yes, it’s old. Now, it’s also evolving. It’s one thing,
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like human beings, we get old, but generally we start deteriorating.
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But the biosphere, in fact, the older it gets, so far, the more ingenious it becomes.
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The more strange new evolutionary occurrences.
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So this evolving is not just that this involves the two bacterias, the plants, animals, fungi, and humans,
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but it keeps involving new kinds of humans, new kinds of plants, new kinds of fungi.
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For example, in humans, now when I first studied anthropology, which was a long time ago, they had basically Neanderthal and one or two other people.
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Now we’ve discovered maybe seven proto-species of our present species, the Homo sapiens sapiens.
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Probably should have been Homo foolish foolish instead of wise wise.
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So this evolution still continues.
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For example, let me throw out a couple of heretical things.
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How many races are there on the planet Earth?
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Are there more than one species of hominid?
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There are many people who think there are, who think they’ve actually seen such events.
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This by no means is accepted, but it’s certainly in the sphere of possibilities.
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The evolutionary genetic mutations and so forth have not stopped. It’s rather foolish to think that we represent the final
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ultimate thing that evolution could do on planet Earth.
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And many people think that we’re already out-evolved.
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Then it’s dynamic.
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At the biosphere, people always say, oh, well, that’s plants and animals.
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That’s not dynamic like an automobile
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in fact an automobile is not dynamic like a plant and an animal
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maybe you get a new model Ford
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or a new model Chevrolet but you don’t get suddenly a whole new species
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so
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it’s extremely dynamic
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the changes can take place rapidly
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a small change in rainfall in a whole district becomes a desert.
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There was a rainforest.
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It comes, a rainforest can appear.
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There’s huge dynamics. Huge is the fourth one.
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The biosphere is so huge that nobody has mapped it.
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There’s unknown species.
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Well, bacteria, for example, are well known to be unknown.
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And furthermore, there’s new species that come into being by evolution.
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There’s huge arguments once you get into real experts
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that is actually know their field.
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Is speciation started with some of the tiger subspecies or not?
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Species itself is sort of a buzzword.
00:16:22 ►
So the biosphere is very old, it’s evolving, it’s dynamic, and it’s huge.
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Now, it’s old and forever new.
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That’s an interesting contrast.
00:16:34 ►
And the biosphere is perhaps older than Earth.
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For example, if the biosphere came here from some exploded sun, which is quite possible,
00:16:43 ►
because there was 10 billion years of the universe before this one started.
00:16:50 ►
Now, on the evolving, the evolutionary process is very deep on planet Earth.
00:16:58 ►
To start off with, the geosphere.
00:17:01 ►
Now, for the geosphere, that is the actual sphere of planet Earth,
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took quite a few million years.
00:17:07 ►
It had to incorporate all sorts of asteroids, comets, and so forth and so forth.
00:17:13 ►
It’s still evolving, the geosphere. We get 100,000 tons a year of stardust and comets coming in. That’s very rich stuff.
00:17:28 ►
And it comes in all the time.
00:17:30 ►
Now the biosphere, there have been
00:17:32 ►
a number of biospheres.
00:17:33 ►
The first biosphere was prokaryotic.
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That means
00:17:37 ►
no nucleated cell.
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They made a biosphere.
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And if you figure out how fast
00:17:43 ►
they breed,
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they could, in 24 hours, if they bred in a straight line,
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go all the way around the equator.
00:17:53 ►
So there was a prokaryotic biosphere.
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That prepared the ground for the eukaryotic.
00:18:01 ►
That is to say, cells with an actual nucleus.
00:18:05 ►
Then plants, animals, and fungi came more or less at the same time.
00:18:06 ►
You see, the fungi had to come for the plants and animals to work.
00:18:08 ►
Otherwise, who would eat up the corpses and the dead?
00:18:12 ►
And then the humans came.
00:18:14 ►
We might say that geosphere to biosphere
00:18:17 ►
to an ethnosphere.
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That is, humans have never developed
00:18:21 ►
a human culture.
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Humans have developed several hundred,
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maybe several thousand cultures on the planet Earth
00:18:28 ►
where you reproduce by meme units of behavior
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rather than by gene units of genetics.
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Now, after the ethnosphere,
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one particular group in particular
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invented the next phase, which is the technosphere.
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That was fundamentally invented in Western Europe. The idea that your techniques could go all the way around and the Europeans invented more or less
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at the same time the sail and the cannon. So you could sail almost anywhere,
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and the cannon could put you in on top
00:19:08 ►
anywhere you went.
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So they produced an ethnosphere
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that is, wherever you went in the world,
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you could find some European empire.
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Now, they spoke to each other.
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They may have fought each other,
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but basically, if you would follow the French
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and the British and the Spanish Empire and Portuguese, you would go anywhere in the world.
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Well, they had Russian.
00:19:32 ►
Then there was the creation of the noosphere.
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That was discovered by Vernadsky, the guy who also created field chemistry and biospherics. And the noosphere is a sphere of intelligence.
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That is to say, if we look at highly intelligent people in positions that control a lot of money and power and thought,
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that is, in other words, people work out, say, a scientific program for five years,
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or they work out an artistic program.
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So that is the noosphere.
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And then there’s a cybersphere.
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A cybersphere is a human body under modern conditions.
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Cyber means feedback.
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And now it is set up where the human body can basically be a total feedback engine itself.
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they can basically be a total feedback engine itself.
00:20:26 ►
This is due to several very interesting inventions,
00:20:31 ►
the most interesting one being lysergic acid-25.
00:20:37 ►
That gets you very close to being a permanent feedback to whatever boom-boom is happening.
00:20:41 ►
Now, of course, it doesn’t mean your feedback
00:20:42 ►
would necessarily be very intelligent to start with,
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but if you’re on a learning curve, you’re certainly getting the feedback quick.
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And there’s a number of other ways you can get rapid feedback.
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For example, you could set up camp in the middle of a fucking desert in the middle of
00:20:54 ►
a fucking Nevada, and you’ve got to put things together.
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That generates intelligence.
00:21:02 ►
Intelligence, gen is generate, tell is value, and end.
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So it means putting value, generating values in a given situation is intelligence.
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Okay.
00:21:14 ►
So that’s the evolving side, the old side.
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Now it’s the dynamic side.
00:21:22 ►
What we geologists call the biosphere is the rock eater
00:21:25 ►
the food that we all have
00:21:29 ►
comes from the biosphere having eaten up
00:21:32 ►
rocks
00:21:32 ►
and then that rocks is for example
00:21:35 ►
a fungi on a rock
00:21:36 ►
so that gradually goes away
00:21:39 ►
and then that’s digested and upgraded
00:21:41 ►
by various ones of the six
00:21:43 ►
kingdoms of life
00:21:44 ►
but he’s rock eater so you get to digested and upgraded by various ones of the six kingdoms of life.
00:21:47 ►
But he’s rocketed.
00:21:50 ►
So you get the speciation.
00:21:59 ►
Now, there’s thousands and thousands of species on the planet Earth.
00:22:05 ►
Each one of these is a specialist in extracting a living from some part of the geobiosphere.
00:22:08 ►
Toolmakers.
00:22:12 ►
Now, that’s really interesting,
00:22:12 ►
making tools.
00:22:15 ►
So suddenly, life has an extension.
00:22:19 ►
They have a non-organic
00:22:22 ►
extension that a human being can make.
00:22:26 ►
Then, there are corporations.
00:22:31 ►
Corporations were invented by the British, naturally.
00:22:33 ►
Nearly everything was invented by the British.
00:22:36 ►
That meant that you had limited liability.
00:22:42 ►
If you put an investment in and you went in with people, you would only lose
00:22:45 ►
what you put in. You wouldn’t lose everything.
00:22:48 ►
Your house and property wouldn’t be taken away
00:22:50 ►
and you could unite.
00:22:51 ►
This was done with a very interesting drug,
00:22:54 ►
coffee.
00:22:55 ►
Coffee went into England and around these coffee
00:22:57 ►
houses, they got so high, they said,
00:22:59 ►
oh, let’s try insurance.
00:23:01 ►
It’s called Lloyd’s Coffee House.
00:23:03 ►
Lloyd’s Insurance is still there.
00:23:10 ►
Okay, then there’s war makers.
00:23:13 ►
Now, the military, I guess some of you have been in the military.
00:23:18 ►
The military I was, I drafted in. Korean War. Now, the military has very interesting aspects on dealing with the biosphere and the planet Earth.
00:23:31 ►
By association, one of my favorite things was, how do you survive a tank that’s coming at you?
00:23:39 ►
So, anyway, so war has all these effects.
00:23:45 ►
Now, war can be actual physical war or it can be economic war.
00:23:50 ►
The big economic war that put tremendous on scientific improvement on planet Earth
00:23:55 ►
was the war between communism and capitalism.
00:23:58 ►
And the Russian inventions went like this and the American inventions went like that.
00:24:03 ►
Now, huge.
00:24:07 ►
There’s a trillion living tons of matter. And there’s upgrades. As matter dies, it’s upgraded to more concentrated energy
00:24:17 ►
like coal, oil, gas, soils, corals, different kinds of special rocks that are made only by humans.
00:24:26 ►
There’s the carbonates, coal, oil, and gas. All of that is the fossils of life.
00:24:36 ►
Then there’s the technosphere. The technosphere is everything that’s technical.
00:24:47 ►
Techni, by the way, was the first of the seven muses.
00:24:53 ►
You have to have techni, even if you’re the muse of dance or the muse of theater.
00:24:56 ►
Everywhere, all the other muses have to have techni.
00:24:58 ►
They have to have techni.
00:25:00 ►
Okay.
00:25:07 ►
At this point, I would like to read Vernadsky,
00:25:11 ►
a forbidden writer in the United States, practically.
00:25:16 ►
But in fact, biospheres is practically a forbidden subject.
00:25:20 ►
You can see why no capitalist system would like to study the biosphere.
00:25:25 ►
People might know that what they study is an ecosystem.
00:25:27 ►
Now, for example,
00:25:28 ►
say instead of studying your body,
00:25:30 ►
you studied under your fingernail,
00:25:31 ►
you could study an ecosystem.
00:25:34 ►
So an ecosystem means that it is verboten to study
00:25:35 ►
the biosphere under the present capitalist empire.
00:25:41 ►
The intellectuals, the PhDs,
00:25:44 ►
the old joke piled higher and deeper,
00:25:46 ►
go off and study an ecosystem.
00:25:48 ►
An ecosystem, if we under my fingernail,
00:25:50 ►
it could be the end of a block in San Diego.
00:25:53 ►
It’s not an objective, long-lasting entity.
00:25:57 ►
Okay, I’m going to take just a little bit,
00:25:59 ►
so you get a taste of a Russian thinker
00:26:01 ►
on the vegetable kingdom.
00:26:06 ►
Now remember the vegetables, plants
00:26:07 ►
and animals
00:26:09 ►
and fungi all came and said that.
00:26:11 ►
Okay, here’s Vernadsky.
00:26:13 ►
Considering the enormous potentialities
00:26:16 ►
for propagation inherent in living
00:26:17 ►
matter, the actual mass
00:26:19 ►
of it in the biosphere does not seem so
00:26:21 ►
very great. The whole mass
00:26:24 ►
is connected with the vegetable
00:26:25 ►
kingdom, which alone can catch the radiant energy of the sun. Green vegetable matter does not
00:26:32 ►
predominate from the point of view of actual mass, though a consideration from the point of view
00:26:37 ►
of dry land alone might make one think so. It is generally admitted in the ocean animal life predominates. The structure
00:26:46 ►
of the mass of vegetable matter, the transformer of solar energy, is very different on land from
00:26:52 ►
what is in the sea. On land, the most vigorously multiplying types, such as grass, show a fairly
00:26:58 ►
high order of structural complexity. But in the ocean, the most prolific types are the extremely rudimentary and minute
00:27:07 ►
floating green cells, whose speed of transmission of life is hundreds of times greater than that
00:27:13 ►
of grass. In spite of the existence of large sea woods, the tiny floating cells do practically all
00:27:19 ►
the work of transforming the radiant energy of the sun into other forms.
00:27:32 ►
This is because seaweed is found only near the shore in an isolated deposit, while the entire ocean is covered with a layer of minute green cells.
00:27:36 ►
Moreover, on account of the pre-tendrance of ocean over dry land on our planet, these
00:27:41 ►
tiny cells assume the position of the principal
00:27:45 ►
transformers of solar energy for the whole world.
00:27:50 ►
Let’s go into time a little bit. So life is here for four billion years. I started
00:28:00 ►
off with these one cells. Now one cell generally lives for like minutes at the most.
00:28:06 ►
So for four billion years plus,
00:28:11 ►
the basic life, the non-nucleated cell,
00:28:15 ►
has been reproducing every few minutes.
00:28:18 ►
This gives you a lot of evolutionary time.
00:28:23 ►
Now, this is practically never studied as far as I see in people who talk about the environment.
00:28:29 ►
First place, you should never talk about the environment, you should talk about the biosphere.
00:28:33 ►
Because environment means what’s around you and what’s around human beings is the biosphere.
00:28:37 ►
There’s an actual name for it, there’s not a weasel word like environment. Now the prokaryotes gave way to the eukaryotes, that is to say
00:28:48 ►
a cell that actually had a center, a nucleus. These two really colonized the planet for for life. Then this incredible invention that came along,
00:29:07 ►
that animals, plants, and fungi,
00:29:11 ►
three kingdoms more or less at once came in,
00:29:13 ►
that were multicellular.
00:29:17 ►
Now the animal kingdom
00:29:18 ►
managed to make it all the way around the planet Earth.
00:29:25 ►
To the Great Whales, managed to make it all the way around the planet Earth. The great whales,
00:29:28 ►
to the Antarctic seals, penguins, etc.
00:29:34 ►
Amazing.
00:29:36 ►
Amazing.
00:29:38 ►
So what did humans add to that?
00:29:41 ►
In the first place, we’re very recent.
00:29:44 ►
So a full-fledged human society is only about
00:29:46 ►
40,000 years old. That’s the first cave painting where you see the guy, they paint the guy
00:29:51 ►
lying down, the shaman, and he has all the animals around him. So we know that that was
00:29:55 ►
an advanced human that painted that, because he’s painting a very complex social structure.
00:30:02 ►
Now, how long that social structure was in existence before it first got painted, it could have been another 60,000 years, it
00:30:08 ►
could have been 30,000, and it could have been a very short time because the rate
00:30:12 ►
of invention on anything new is always more or less at the max. Okay, so then
00:30:18 ►
there was a huge struggle for power. Which hominids were going to become humans and also which ones actually did.
00:30:29 ►
There’s a considerable discussion about that matter.
00:30:32 ►
For example, most people now study like Neanderthal.
00:30:37 ►
All right, there’s Cro-Magnon, there’s Neanderthal,
00:30:39 ►
and then there’s modern humans.
00:30:40 ►
Modern humans aren’t either Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal.
00:30:46 ►
Then there’s species before that. Here’s a verboten topic for discussion. How many human species are there on the planet
00:30:56 ►
now? That’s verboten. Forbidden. It’s interesting. You know, everybody wants to study all the things
00:31:06 ►
that they’re supposed to study. But think of
00:31:07 ►
all the things that you’re forbidden to study.
00:31:11 ►
And
00:31:11 ►
number one, it takes a certain amount of
00:31:14 ►
work to see that this is a
00:31:16 ►
subject that is forbidden to study.
00:31:18 ►
Number two,
00:31:19 ►
obviously it was forbidden to study because
00:31:21 ►
somebody in power didn’t like it.
00:31:25 ►
Call censorship, usually.
00:31:30 ►
Now, Lucy, and you remember Lucy was named by this great archaeologist for Lucy and the Sky Diamonds.
00:31:40 ►
You needed to have very alert senses to find the little bone down there in the middle of Africa and say, oh yeah, that’s a human bone.
00:31:48 ►
You know, you don’t just go along and say, oh yeah, that’s a human bone down there.
00:31:51 ►
It’s a little slimmer.
00:31:54 ►
Generally it’s buried, and you have to use something like acetone.
00:31:58 ►
That’s what ruined me in archaeology.
00:32:00 ►
I could never get the acetone and being that careful with it,
00:32:03 ►
so I stayed in culturology.
00:32:06 ►
Just enough to, I just stayed long enough in it to admire archaeologists.
00:32:12 ►
But it’s very tricky.
00:32:14 ►
Now, nobody knows how many of these proto-species or whether any of them were superior to us,
00:32:21 ►
and they disappeared because they were too superior.
00:32:25 ►
As Hamlet said, you know, you can think too much.
00:32:30 ►
The pale cast of thoughts sicklies o’er the ruddy complexion.
00:32:36 ►
So the smartest humans may have disappeared.
00:32:41 ►
And in fact, exactly what humans are is a very interesting question
00:32:48 ►
and how long we’ve been here and is this the end or is there possible evolution beyond that
00:32:57 ►
in effect if you look at the high-tech stuff, let’s take Burning Man, for example.
00:33:09 ►
What I love about Burning Man is it’s super high-tech, and it looks like it’s just a country party.
00:33:18 ►
But any of you who know anything about military logistics or anything can see that this is extremely
00:33:25 ►
sophisticated engineering that’s why we can survive out here in the desert now there’s all
00:33:31 ►
sorts of other very sophisticated uh it means worldly wise sophisticated several other worldly
00:33:38 ►
wise methods of adapting to here and there so it it could be, some people have said, well, maybe physical
00:33:47 ►
evolution of humans is over, but not their technological evolution. In other words, if
00:33:53 ►
you had permanent evolution in terms of something, say, you could walk around with, or just altered
00:34:02 ►
brain cells, oh, yeah, please, I want eight more IQ points.
00:34:05 ►
Oh, yeah, oh, in that region there.
00:34:09 ►
Now, another interesting thing is who actually uses advanced medicine?
00:34:14 ►
Now, if you read American propaganda in the newspapers,
00:34:17 ►
it’s generally somebody who’s suffering,
00:34:19 ►
and they’re saved at the last minute by some gigantic new device of medicine.
00:34:24 ►
They never have a story about anybody who is perfectly healthy using advanced medicine to become smarter.
00:34:32 ►
Well, of course, here, obviously, a lot of people use medicine to become smarter, like LSD or ecstasy or something.
00:34:39 ►
And there are other ways to become smarter.
00:34:42 ►
That is, by actual measurement.
00:34:45 ►
There are other ways to become smarter. That is, by actual measurement. There are other ways to become more empathic.
00:34:49 ►
That is, not only can we increase our thinking brain capacity,
00:34:53 ►
but we can increase the emotional capacity.
00:34:58 ►
These are separate brains inside.
00:35:01 ►
A thinking brain generally lives only at the associative level.
00:35:04 ►
There’s the emotional brain
00:35:06 ►
there’s the sensual brain
00:35:09 ►
a real knockout
00:35:11 ►
punches to the belly
00:35:12 ►
boom
00:35:13 ►
because your entire
00:35:17 ►
moving center
00:35:19 ►
gets paralyzed
00:35:20 ►
then there’s the moving center
00:35:23 ►
now the moving center is interesting. That
00:35:27 ►
operates really off the basis of the spine. That’s why in the army or places like that
00:35:32 ►
they say, get your fucking ass in gear. You get down to the spine. Because that controls the movement.
00:35:46 ►
Then there’s sex center.
00:35:52 ►
Sex center is like creative energy.
00:35:56 ►
So it may or may not be used in what most people ordinarily call sexual.
00:35:59 ►
It can be used in any kind of creative endeavor.
00:36:03 ►
So these humans, us humans, this invention of different languages, it’s
00:36:15 ►
really quite something. There’s hundreds of different languages. Now, which languages do you learn?
00:36:27 ►
Well, some people say, oh, well, I learn English and Chinese,
00:36:33 ►
or English and French, or sometimes people three or four languages.
00:36:37 ►
But there’s hundreds of languages.
00:36:42 ►
And furthermore, there’s languages which are not recognized by anthropologists.
00:36:46 ►
That is, languages within a profession.
00:36:51 ►
Joe says to Jack, hey, man, that’s cool.
00:36:57 ►
Well, it depends on who Jack is and who Joe is, what cool means.
00:37:00 ►
At least seven different levels.
00:37:07 ►
You’re quote in when you understand which of the seven levels somebody is referring to with the slang. And it’s impenetrable, obviously, to the fucking bourgeois. Did I
00:37:14 ►
say that to the bourgeois? I mean to the middle class. I mean to the people who think money is the end all of BO. Now, all of knowledge
00:37:25 ►
is basically verboten.
00:37:32 ►
All of knowledge
00:37:33 ►
is basically forbidden.
00:37:36 ►
Now, you can get special knowledge.
00:37:39 ►
For example,
00:37:40 ►
I had special knowledge
00:37:41 ►
at one point
00:37:41 ►
about the uranium industry.
00:37:44 ►
But you had to sign this secret deal.
00:37:49 ►
There’s all kinds of things like that that exist today.
00:37:55 ►
And in fact, it’s very hard, very hard to tell what anybody you’re talking to.
00:38:02 ►
I go back when people still spoke English.
00:38:06 ►
It’s very hard to know your ass from a hole in the ground. You get into complex situations at night.
00:38:12 ►
Night means subconscious. But you get into situations that are very difficult for your
00:38:16 ►
subconscious. It’s extremely difficult to apply categories that were made for the conscious mind. Now according to people like Mr. Freud
00:38:27 ►
and Mr. Reich, the subconscious is at least 90% and the conscious is just a tiny little
00:38:33 ►
island on top of that. So we could say that we’re in a very desperate situation, we humans.
00:38:45 ►
we’re in a very desperate situation, we humans.
00:38:48 ►
And I don’t mean collective humans.
00:38:52 ►
I mean, we as individual humans are in very desperate straits to understand anything that’s going on.
00:38:56 ►
We don’t live very long.
00:38:59 ►
We don’t spend very much of that time thinking.
00:39:01 ►
We don’t spend very much of that time actually pure emotion.
00:39:04 ►
We don’t spend very much of that time actually pure emotion. We don’t spend very much of that time in actually pure instinct, you know, that is actually
00:39:09 ►
feeling, smelling, posture, all of that stuff. And we certainly don’t spend very much time
00:39:15 ►
in all of the various sensations. For example, if you’re a good American, you’ve been told
00:39:21 ►
that there are five senses. senses now the standard of American education
00:39:25 ►
is that I’ve never heard anybody
00:39:27 ►
publicly refute that in the United States
00:39:30 ►
occasionally in esoteric
00:39:32 ►
writing you’ll say oh Daniel Boone
00:39:34 ►
really survived you know what he had a sixth sense
00:39:36 ►
that’s 13 altogether by the way
00:39:39 ►
I mean it can be identified
00:39:43 ►
so so I mean it can be identified so
00:39:46 ►
so ignorance is always a good place to start from
00:39:51 ►
I notice today in America
00:39:55 ►
people want to start off with what they know
00:39:57 ►
oh what do you know about that?
00:39:58 ►
you know that, you got a degree in that, you passed in that
00:40:01 ►
well tell me what you know
00:40:02 ►
the cultural
00:40:04 ►
deal that you never ask that it will tell me what you know it’s the cultural
00:40:05 ►
deal that you never ask somebody what they don’t know that’s insulting because
00:40:10 ►
everybody is supposed to know so you see how do you know an American well because
00:40:15 ►
they know so much they think they know so much they feel they know so much
00:40:23 ►
they’re conditioned to say they know so much.
00:40:27 ►
Actually, all of us are in a field of gigantic ignorance.
00:40:32 ►
Socrates maintained that that was the beginning of wisdom,
00:40:34 ►
was to realize that I’m ignorant.
00:40:38 ►
Now, if I’m ignorant, I only have one way to go.
00:40:42 ►
That’s to learn something or not.
00:40:44 ►
And then what’s to learn?
00:40:46 ►
Well, what I was taught was, fortunately, my family were old pioneer family,
00:40:51 ►
was you should start thinking when you’re in something so fucking difficult
00:40:56 ►
that your automatically trained moving center can’t solve it.
00:41:00 ►
If I can handle it anyway, instinctively, then I know it.
00:41:07 ►
That is, it knows it.
00:41:09 ►
And if it knows that much, generally I get interested in it.
00:41:12 ►
Now, the biggest ignorance is biosphere.
00:41:17 ►
Biosphere is systematically destroyed in the United States.
00:41:22 ►
Like Biosphere 2, for example.
00:41:24 ►
It was actually shut down by a SWAT
00:41:26 ►
squad. You never read why it was shut down. That’s because I had to sign a fucking piece
00:41:31 ►
of paper. But why it was shut down was the SWAT squad landed in. The SWAT squad, that’s
00:41:35 ►
to wipe out drug dealers. And then Biosphere was eliminated as a subject of thought, environment.
00:41:48 ►
And what was substituted for the titillation of the intellectual masses was global warming.
00:41:54 ►
Well, what is warming, number one?
00:41:58 ►
The biosphere.
00:42:01 ►
If it is.
00:42:02 ►
if it is.
00:42:05 ►
If you’re a geologist,
00:42:07 ►
you can go back and see that, in fact,
00:42:10 ►
there’s been global warmings before that were real global warmings.
00:42:11 ►
All the ice melted.
00:42:13 ►
All of it.
00:42:15 ►
So nobody’s predicting that yet.
00:42:17 ►
So all those things depend on what you mean.
00:42:19 ►
But what global warming did do
00:42:20 ►
was it made the American intelligentsia
00:42:23 ►
line up about global warming. I would say
00:42:28 ►
step one, you know, would really be understand that we live in a biosphere, that this biosphere
00:42:35 ►
is extremely big. It’s had over 4 billion years to develop an intelligence. And instead of keeping to try inflicting new kinds of techniques on it,
00:42:48 ►
why not learn some real techniques?
00:42:50 ►
I call it echo techniques.
00:42:52 ►
The techniques by which the biosphere produces this incredible nesting of ecosystems
00:42:58 ►
that work together to increase free energy rather than cutting free energy down.
00:43:07 ►
This is from John’s memoir, Me and the Biospheres, his My Dream.
00:43:13 ►
So this ended this book, Me and the Biosphere. My Dream. Twenty years from now,
00:43:20 ►
every country will have their own biosphere. Each biosphere will reflect the biomes in that country.
00:43:26 ►
For example, China would have a rainforest based on Yunnan,
00:43:29 ►
a coral reef from the China Sea, grasslands from the north,
00:43:33 ►
deserts from Mongolia, a marsh from the coast,
00:43:36 ►
and agriculture from each of its various farmlands,
00:43:38 ►
and a human habitat representing the ultimate Shanghai or Beijing
00:43:41 ►
communication technical theater cuisine research layout.
00:43:45 ►
The same would be true for Great Britain, France, Russia, United States, Australia, Brazil, and all the others.
00:43:50 ►
These biospheres will be open to public view.
00:43:52 ►
There are scientific papers available to all.
00:43:55 ►
Those who manage the biosphere and those working in its supporting research centers
00:43:58 ►
will form a school producing practical graduates who understand the biosphere.
00:44:03 ►
They constitute a cadre to work with
00:44:05 ►
in-governments, corporations, non-profit organizations, and popular movements to ensure
00:44:10 ►
that human progress makes a synergy with Earth’s biosphere. Some of these graduates will become
00:44:15 ►
members of the core groups working to understand possibilities for biospheres in Mars, Moon,
00:44:20 ►
and in space. This work will contribute immensely to understanding the glorious uniqueness of our
00:44:25 ►
planet Earth, at least in this solar system. These biospheres will demonstrate the ways that
00:44:30 ►
technosphere and ethnosphere work together with biosphere. From that comprehensive knowledge,
00:44:35 ►
a noosphere, a sphere of intelligence that unifies art, science, and humanity, will emerge on planet
00:44:39 ►
Earth. These biospheres will be open to all, not special preserves for elites to create new bureaucracies.
00:44:46 ►
Farms, parks, cities, universities, and wilderness reserves will reframe their ways to cooperate with and enhance our home, Earth’s biosphere, with a new understanding of ethnosphere create a
00:45:06 ►
co-evolving system of cultures that upgrade their soils flora fauna and human senses and imagination
00:45:13 ►
okay johnny thank you very much um before you go would you like to um take a few questions just
00:45:21 ►
you know this is actually john’s science fiction novel. It takes place 15,000 years in the future,
00:45:27 ►
15,000 light years away, far and far away.
00:45:30 ►
Didn’t get to that.
00:45:32 ►
John’s going to take a couple…
00:45:34 ►
He’ll take a few questions,
00:45:36 ►
and also, just so you know,
00:45:39 ►
there’s some cards up here.
00:45:41 ►
John’s giving a talk also over at Daniel’s camp
00:45:44 ►
on Friday on the ethnosphere,
00:45:46 ►
the sphere of cultures around the planet. There’s cars
00:45:48 ►
up here and also his books and publications.
00:45:50 ►
Help yourself to that. Johnny,
00:45:51 ►
would you take a few questions?
00:45:54 ►
Do you believe in collective consciousness?
00:45:56 ►
That the subconscious knows everything?
00:45:59 ►
Do you believe in
00:46:00 ►
collective consciousness?
00:46:01 ►
I believe in the collective unconscious, yeah.
00:46:05 ►
Daniel? I was very the collective unconscious, yeah. Daniel?
00:46:07 ►
I was very interested in your comment about
00:46:09 ►
LSD25 somehow
00:46:12 ►
being part of this development
00:46:14 ►
of this kind of cybernetic
00:46:15 ►
feedback loop mechanism, but I wasn’t
00:46:18 ►
sure that I totally understood it. Can you
00:46:20 ►
just explain a little deeper how
00:46:22 ►
you see the importance of LSD
00:46:23 ►
in
00:46:24 ►
this human evolution process?
00:46:28 ►
Albert and I were pretty good friends. I wrote him one time, we’re doing this
00:46:32 ►
corporate stuff and we’re really in a mess. It’s your ecology and so forth
00:46:36 ►
and so forth. What do you suggest, Albert?
00:46:40 ►
Special delivery, seven sugar cubes, 200 mics a piece, and we solved that problem.
00:46:46 ►
It’s like any other advanced piece of technology.
00:46:51 ►
You know, if you use it for what it’s designed for, it’s the best in the field, I think.
00:46:56 ►
Although the ingredients of ayahuasca are, there’s a number of close competitors, let’s say.
00:47:05 ►
But LSD is modern chemistry, so you just get it direct.
00:47:12 ►
To actually make ayahuasca, you have to work really hard at it.
00:47:15 ►
It doesn’t just appear.
00:47:17 ►
I think every consciousness-changing substance was developed by some intelligent group of people.
00:47:24 ►
And I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to practically all of those groups.
00:47:28 ►
And, boy, the difference between the shaman or whoever it is that knows how to utilize that and other people is noticeable.
00:47:40 ►
Let’s say Burning Man is noticeable, for example.
00:47:42 ►
Let’s say Burning Man is noticeable, for example.
00:47:49 ►
And I really like this because I think somewhere we have to recover the tribe.
00:47:54 ►
The tribe was the most intelligent human invention that was ever made.
00:47:57 ►
And the tribe is composed of at least two clans.
00:48:00 ►
So clans were the first invention.
00:48:04 ►
And then tribes were made as clan.
00:48:05 ►
Now this is going to be very interesting like for us people in the so-called modern conditions because the
00:48:11 ►
old clans were based on blood genes and the new clans will have to be based on
00:48:17 ►
memes so your DNA would have to be like an installed DNA, a given thought system.
00:48:28 ►
Do you mean that you can create this through meditation, evolution of DNA?
00:48:34 ►
Evolution of DNA through meditation? Possible?
00:48:39 ►
Well, you see, there’s three stages, concentration, meditation, and contemplation.
00:48:46 ►
And we need more of all three of them.
00:48:48 ►
Okay, are there any other questions?
00:48:50 ►
So since you believe that there’s a collective unconscious,
00:48:52 ►
do you believe that you can have unrestricted access to it?
00:48:57 ►
Do you think that there is unrestricted access to the collective unconscious?
00:49:02 ►
What?
00:49:04 ►
Unrestricted access to the collective unconscious. What? Unrestricted access to the collective unconscious with intention.
00:49:11 ►
I think it depends on your culture.
00:49:18 ►
So the collective unconscious, for example, of a Lakota Indian
00:49:21 ►
is different than the collective consciousness of a French culture.
00:49:28 ►
But I think, yeah, you can contact that.
00:49:31 ►
Any good shaman does that.
00:49:35 ►
What if you have many teachers, then would you have access to more collective unconsciousnesses?
00:49:41 ►
Well, there are seven different levels of consciousness.
00:49:49 ►
It’s been identified in long-lasting traditions.
00:49:51 ►
And of course each of those levels has, you might say, sub-levels.
00:49:56 ►
So one of the big things that screws Americans up and a lot of Europeans is they say, are you conscious or unconscious?
00:50:08 ►
Nearly everything is made into a dyad.
00:50:11 ►
So more complex systems, which have three independent units, four, five, six, or seven, are almost untouchable by somebody who’s really addicted to the either-or mode.
00:50:24 ►
Although either-or is certainly better than this-is-this.
00:50:28 ►
I was just wondering if you felt comfortable telling us about
00:50:32 ►
how the SWAT team stopped your studies in more detail.
00:50:39 ►
Biosphere 2 was built as a cooperation of USSR and USA Science
00:50:43 ►
with some help from the British
00:50:45 ►
Royal Society.
00:50:50 ►
When the Soviet Union
00:50:51 ►
collapsed, the American ruling
00:50:54 ►
class figured that that meant that
00:50:55 ►
they had carte blanche to run the world.
00:50:59 ►
Biosphere 2
00:51:00 ►
was built
00:51:01 ►
I had a group of
00:51:04 ►
scientists that included the Soviets
00:51:05 ►
the Americans, the French, the British
00:51:08 ►
and some tribal groups
00:51:09 ►
so
00:51:11 ►
what that meant was
00:51:15 ►
that those rulers of the American capitalist class
00:51:18 ►
who find it inconvenient
00:51:19 ►
to acknowledge that there’s a biosphere
00:51:23 ►
use the fall of Russia
00:51:25 ►
to eliminate everything they could around the planet
00:51:29 ►
that had to do with biospheric study
00:51:31 ►
and eliminate a lot of other things too.
00:51:35 ►
Had the Russian Empire continued
00:51:37 ►
as the American Empire continued,
00:51:40 ►
we had a lot of talks about this,
00:51:42 ►
that very probably the American Empire
00:51:44 ►
would not allow Biosphere 2 to last very long.
00:51:48 ►
So we had it all worked out to put it in Georgia,
00:51:52 ►
the Republic of Georgia in the Soviet Union.
00:51:55 ►
But the Soviet Union collapsed.
00:51:57 ►
As the Soviet Union collapsed,
00:51:59 ►
the American right wing took that as the belief
00:52:02 ►
that this showed the superiority of American culture
00:52:05 ►
go all the way. We don’t need any deviants, anything else. We just move straight ahead.
00:52:10 ►
Opposition is gone. Now, biosphere is not something that if you were a full, hardcore
00:52:18 ►
capitalist that you could be very interested in, because there would be all sorts of things you couldn’t do. There would be all sorts of things you could do, but a lot of things, openly polluting
00:52:32 ►
stuff, obviously you couldn’t do, or even wouldn’t do if you had a biospheric education.
00:52:40 ►
So behind that was not just Biosphere 2.
00:52:45 ►
It was the entire change of policy that occurred in the United States when the Soviet Union collapsed.
00:52:52 ►
This was hardly ever dealt with.
00:52:57 ►
The Soviet Union was so balanced that everything they did was critiqued by the United States,
00:53:02 ►
and everything we did was critiqued by them.
00:53:04 ►
Everything they did was critiqued by the United States, and everything we did was critiqued by them.
00:53:10 ►
So when they collapsed, there were no more critiques left external to the United States.
00:53:16 ►
And they took full advantage of that to eliminate any critiques inside.
00:53:23 ►
Now, a biospheric approach is, if you look in practical terms, is a critique of capitalist economy.
00:53:25 ►
If life becomes your number one goal, then capital can’t be.
00:53:27 ►
That doesn’t mean you’re against capital.
00:53:30 ►
I’m a semi-capitalist myself.
00:53:32 ►
But a capitalist
00:53:33 ►
within some kind of useful limit.
00:53:37 ►
so that was part of
00:53:41 ►
this total crackdown. It was led by
00:53:44 ►
Columbia University.
00:53:46 ►
Now, since some of you actually seem to be interested in esoteric America,
00:53:50 ►
an Ivy League like Harvard or whatever will hardly take directly the orders from the Pentagon.
00:53:57 ►
Columbia University will.
00:53:59 ►
Now, you say, where’s the evidence of that?
00:54:01 ►
The submarine that picked up the Soviet submarines that sank
00:54:05 ►
was Columbia University’s submarine.
00:54:08 ►
They did a lot of stuff that required a university,
00:54:12 ►
and the Cold War was done by Columbia University.
00:54:16 ►
Columbia University was the one selected to take over
00:54:19 ►
and destroy the biosphere part of Biosphere 2.
00:54:23 ►
And the same guy that did that was sent down there from Harvard, an economist.
00:54:28 ►
He’s also the guy that gave the advice to the Russians who practically destroyed Russia.
00:54:33 ►
Namely, he said, okay, you’re going to capitalism.
00:54:35 ►
They said, how can we do that? How can we do that?
00:54:37 ►
You’re advanced America. Oh, you’re from Harvard, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:54:40 ►
He said, give a share to every worker.
00:54:43 ►
That’s how they get all these Russian billionaires,
00:54:45 ►
because the worker gets this little share, right?
00:54:47 ►
It means nothing.
00:54:48 ►
So they picked up all these little shares,
00:54:51 ►
and then you had the new class of Russian billionaires
00:54:53 ►
suddenly emerge like that, boom,
00:54:55 ►
which suited United States policy perfectly.
00:55:00 ►
Okay, there’s one more question, John.
00:55:04 ►
John, you talked about the importance of the biosphere
00:55:07 ►
and that that would really be the place to start
00:55:11 ►
to understand an intelligent understanding of what is going on.
00:55:17 ►
Where would you have some individual who wanted to pursue
00:55:21 ►
where intelligence begins?
00:55:23 ►
Well, it’s always biosphere one.
00:55:24 ►
That’s the one we’re in.
00:55:28 ►
So actually, I would say study the data from Biosphere 2, study Vernadsky, and start applying
00:55:33 ►
that to this biosphere. Now, I think we do need another model, and if things work out,
00:55:40 ►
because you study things with a model, you can’t study with reality. But for example, practice looking at planet Earth as a biosphere.
00:55:49 ►
And you’ll find so many things will clear up for you.
00:55:54 ►
And it’s got to be a biosphere because that’s the definition of the biosphere.
00:55:58 ►
That’s why we call it Biosphere 2 down there.
00:56:00 ►
But this isn’t just Biosphere 1.
00:56:04 ►
Really, we’re being technically evolutionary. This is Biosphere 1. Really, we’re being technically evolutionary.
00:56:06 ►
This is Biosphere 7.
00:56:09 ►
Because the first one, remember, was non-nucleated bugs.
00:56:16 ►
The second one was nucleated bugs.
00:56:18 ►
And each of these biospheres built.
00:56:21 ►
It built soil.
00:56:22 ►
It built atmosphere.
00:56:23 ►
It built soil, it built atmosphere, it built changes so that the next
00:56:25 ►
new biosphere that came in
00:56:28 ►
could be a different order of complexity.
00:56:33 ►
Okay.
00:56:35 ►
Pez, thank you so much
00:56:36 ►
for having us here today. Thank you all for being here.
00:56:38 ►
Please pick up a card and
00:56:39 ►
be in touch with John
00:56:42 ►
and his publications, his work.
00:56:44 ►
Our websites are over there.
00:56:45 ►
Grab a card and catch him on the atmosphere on Friday.
00:56:49 ►
Pez, do you want to wrap up?
00:56:51 ►
Thank you both for being with us.
00:56:53 ►
It’s a great honor.
00:56:55 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:56:57 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:03 ►
So, are you now going to remain more aware of our biosphere?
00:57:08 ►
I know that I am, particularly now that I’m beginning to think in terms of the entire
00:57:13 ►
biosphere and not just local ecosystems.
00:57:17 ►
Although I’ve been aware of the distinction for a long time, well, John’s particular focus
00:57:22 ►
on that issue has been quite helpful to me.
00:57:24 ►
time, well, John’s particular focus on that issue has been quite helpful to me.
00:57:30 ►
Also, I have to admit to having heard a lot of other conversations about everything that took place during the various phases of Biosphere 2, but John’s comments about the time when
00:57:36 ►
Columbia University was managing the site were completely new to me.
00:57:40 ►
Apparently, the university managed Biosphere 2 for about eight years, ending sometime in 2003.
00:57:48 ►
And according to Wikipedia, students from Columbia would sometimes spend an entire semester at the site.
00:57:54 ►
Now, I don’t think that means they were actually sealed in the site, but rather were just working on it.
00:58:00 ►
But my guess is that one of our fellow slaunters either was one of those students or knows one of them.
00:58:04 ►
But my guess is that one of our fellow salonners either was one of those students or knows one of them.
00:58:09 ►
And if that happens to be you, I’d love to hear from you and learn more about what,
00:58:13 ►
well, I guess we should call the Columbia years of Biosphere 2.
00:58:21 ►
Another thing that may be of interest to you is to take a look at the Biosphere 2 site on Google Earth.
00:58:26 ►
I just now typed in Biosphere, followed by the number two, and it took me right there. And if you do that yourself, I think that you’re really going to be amazed at the size of
00:58:31 ►
the site and the scope of that project. I don’t know if there is anything else on that scale being
00:58:36 ►
done in the earth sciences today. But speaking of scale, instead of keeping you any longer,
00:58:46 ►
Speaking of scale, instead of keeping you any longer, I’m going to spend that time scaling up for my next podcast.
00:58:51 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:58:53 ►
Be well, my friends.