All life as we know it exists within in the context of a system of living things, a biosphere. An original purpose of the Biosphere 2 project was to test the idea that small man-made biospheres were viable. While the project encountered many problems related to the specific design of Biosphere 2 (such as oxygen loss and inadequate food production), it has been determined that these problems are not characteristic of closed systems in general. The Biosphere 2 project shows that materially closed bio-regenerative systems can be successfully built and operated for long periods of time. The design of these systems is also very flexible, covering a large range of applications, sizes and complexities--including systems designed exclusively for human life support.
