Is the Future of the Outdoors...Indoors?

The premise of the critically panned 1996 film Bio-Dome is closer to our reality than I’d like to admit. In it, the planet has become so polluted it’s rapidly becoming unsuitable for human life. (Sound familiar?) With the backing of a powerful investor, a group of environmental scientists seal themselves in an enormous enclosed terrarium for a year as part of a climate experiment. In true ’90s slacker comedy fashion, the two stoner protagonists accidentally get themselves locked inside the Bio-Dome, and, of course, wreak havoc.

Though the film’s plot is fictional, its premise is loosely based on the real-life Biosphere 2, a $150-million hermetically sealed environmental system in Oracle, Arizona, with wilderness biomes including a rainforest, desert, grassy savannah, mangrove wetlands, and a 25-foot-deep ocean with a coral reef, in which eight researchers actually lived between 1991 and 1993. The experiment famously ended in disaster when rising carbon dioxide levels and crop failure threatened the participants’ lives. While geodesic domes with controlled environments designed to replicate Earth’s ecosystems seemed eccentric in the early 1990s, when climate change was just starting to enter the mainstream discourse, in the decades since, multimillion- or billion-dollar developments that bring the natural world—or simulations of it—inside have become increasingly common. In some cases, like with "the world’s largest indoor desert" in Omaha, Nebraska, or Montreal’s Biosphère (housed in the Expo 67 geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller), these attractions are centered around education and research. Then, there’s a slightly different iteration developed purely for recreation. As global temperatures rise and "unprecedented weather events" occur with increasing regularity, there might be a future where more of our outdoor recreation will be relegated to indoor simulations. In some ways, these built environments are case studies for how successfully (or unsuccessfully) natural environments can be replicated to facilitate the human pastimes—like surfing or skiing, even hiking—that rely on them.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Group’s Seagaia Ocean Dome was an early example of the over-the-top-faux-natural-environment-as-amusement-park phenomenon. Opened in 1993, the $1.8 billion facility, which was situated less than .2 miles from an actual beach in the coastal city of Miyazaki, Japan, was a Polynesia-themed marvel with a 129,166-square-foot man-made beach with sand from crushed marble and a wave machine capable of 200 surfable variations (in unsalted, chlorinated water). It closed in 2007, faltering under steep ticket prices and operational costs, but that wasn’t the end of the road for artificial beaches. There’s one at the colossal New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, with space for more than 6,000 beachgoers to lounge under its fake sun. At Berlin’s Tropical Islands, which is housed in a 1938 airfield hangar, a massive screen with a photo of a blue sky hovers above a "sea" made up by three Olympic-size swimming pools. The indoor air temperature is kept in the high seventies.

On the other end of the weather spectrum, there are indoor ski resorts like Ski Dubai, a 242,000-square-foot "snow park" in the Mall of the Emirates, where 30 to 40 tons of new snow are produced nightly to blanket five imitation ski slopes, or Big Snow American Dream, North America’s only indoor ski resort, in New Jersey. Ironically, the environmental impact of many of these climate-controlled facilities is significant; a 2013 report, for example, estimated that Ski Dubai’s annual greenhouse gas emissions equate to 900 annual round-trip flights from Dubai to Munich. Massive developments like Ski Dubai or Paradise Island Water Park that simulate natural environments in contained spaces pump tons of carbon into the atmosphere, only exacerbating the factors that increasingly threaten those places and make their conditions more hostile.

Christiana Moss of Studio Ma, an award-winning architecture and environmental design studio in Phoenix, Arizona, has some ideas about the way we should be approaching buildings that bring the outdoors indoors. As temperatures increase, especially in places like Phoenix, Moss believes more structures need to be suited to not only controlling contrasting indoor climates, but tempering them with the heat outside. "Increasingly, the realm of what you would consider indoors and what we consider outdoors needs to be expanded and blended to temper exterior temperatures," she says. "It’s about the layers of interior and exterior space.... It’s a huge opportunity for really rethinking and redesigning what we consider to be indoors and outdoors, what we consider to be responsible cities, and how we think about access to shade in daylight."

Another major factor to consider is the growing body of research supporting the benefits of access to nature on physical and mental health. "In Eastern megacities, an indoor/outdoor environment is an easier way to access ‘natural’ space," says space architect Vittorio Netti, who works as a professor at University of Houston and also as an aerospace engineer at Axiom Space, referring to how for someone living in a cramped megacity, indoor "beaches" with real sand or enclosed "forests" with actual flora can provide easier access to elements of the natural world.

Netti, who has spent significant time testing out simulated spaces for his work, believes that future luxury and quality of life will be defined by access to natural spaces. He stresses there are two overlooked areas in considering the design of enclosed "nature" simulations for humans: circadian rhythm and smell. To be truly convincing, faux natural environments should incorporate changes in light and darkness over a roughly 24-hour cycle. And they shouldn’t be sterile.

The original Biosphere 2 experiment failed colossally when carbon dioxide levels in the self-contained bubble rose 10 times the normal atmospheric amount, making the enclosed ecosystem uninhabitable. In 2021, a Scientific American article that referred to the live-in terrarium as "effectively like a time machine that can preview a climate-altered Earth" detailed how, after a few decades and some significant retooling, the facility is finally living up to its potential as a site for important climate research. But the focus of its experiments are now centered on narrower questions about our real planet, rather than a man-made re-creation. According to astrobiologist Jacob Haqq Misra, who studies planet habitability and authored the book Sovereign Mars: Transforming Our Values Through Space Settlement, a dystopian vision of a future reliant on sealed ecosystems for "outdoor" recreation is more something of the public imagination than a prediction from actual experts. "The good news is, it would take a lot to make planet Earth uninhabitable," says Misra.

Top photo of Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona, courtesy the University of Arizona Biosphere 2

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