After initial transportation failures, sealed terrariums were used by Robert Fortune to send stolen tea seedlings from China to India,[1] thus helping the British to break the nineteenth Century Chinese monopoly on tea production.
The seeds transported on their own would begin to germinate during the long voyage to India. The terrariums allowed the seeds to start sprouting and growing in a healthier environment than in the ships holds.
You can’t steal something that’s not legitimately your property. IP isn’t a justified legal concept, it’s a form of illegitimate regulation used by corporations to cement monopolies and threaten the competition with legistlation
I wonder if part of what makes it work is luck of the draw wrt. the microbial life that was present at the start. You need stuff that will break down the dead plants at a good enough rate but nothing that competes for resources or produces anything toxic to the plant. Or maybe that's a typical microbial makeup for sample of gardener's compost?
I tried this myself and can attest that it worked for at least one year. I basically grabbed some dirt + a ground cover type plant + some water and sealed it in a large glass bottle (1 gallon glass milk jugs work too). So I don’t think you have to be that lucky.
Yeah I don't know if you noticed the white patch on the lower part of the terrarium, that to me looks like a mix of the plants root system and mycorrhizal fungi, so there should have been microbes present within the soil when it was first planted.
demijohn are a bottle in a wicker wrapping. Once you get to large glass bottles like this breakage is real issue so it makes sense to wrap them so they can be moved with less chance of breakage. Note that if you do build one of these, be VERY careful moving them as they can break with a small slip and the large pieces of glass can easily cut tendons, leading to lots of long term issues.
I saw a shop selling these once: https://www.ecospheres.co.uk/ . They contain small marine shrimp, and "The only care the sphere requires is a source of indirect natural or artificial light" and they "have an average life expectancy of 2-3 years however it is not uncommon for them to survive for 7 to 10 years"[0].
If you read up on this, you'll find a lot of not-very-nice things said about ecospheres.
The shrimp inside are ʻōpaeʻula [0] which evolved to live in volcanic tide pools filled by rainwater. Sort of a feast or famine environment where the salinity and nutrients available are very volatile. Because of that, the shrimp have evolved to handle a wide range of temperatures, salinity, and scarcity of food.
The latter means they can go surprisingly long without sufficient food without realizing it. In other words, there's a good chance (according to some) that the shrimp in your ecosphere are actually slowly starving to death and aren't in anything approaching a stable ecosystem.
(Also, they aren't brine shrimp, which are an entirely different class of animal.)
I have one of these sitting on the table right in front of me. We've had it for a couple months, and the brine shrimp are swimming around happily still. I figure it has a 50-50 chance of being broken by my kids before the shrimp die.
It's pretty normal to introduce springtails (small arthropods) to sealed terrariums. Their main purpose is to to eat mold, but they presumably also help with the carbon cycle.
Yeah, my brother did this. He made a self sustaining garden with some bugs in it. The bugs eventually stopped reproducing, possibly because of inbreeding? The plants lasted quite a while until my parents moved and couldn't take it with them.
Based on my layman knowledge of the relevant scientific fields here, it certainly seems plausible. He's not claiming anything that extraordinary. The stakes are also incredibly low, it's not like he's lying about his achievement to get some kind of grant.
People have been building terraria for centuries. You can buy all shapes and sizes in stores, some with fish. Though the fish ones probably don't last after the fish dies.
Gardening is one of the many areas of life where the best information and the bulk of information is offline.
Terminology pedantry since I recently got in "jarrariums" and have been reading a bunch...
Most terraria are not sealed, so while we've been making them forever, that doesn't say much about the viability of sealed ones. As far as I know, research into closed ecosystems didn't start until the 20th century.
If it has fish in it, it's not a terrarium. Terraria are land-based (hence the name). Think garden in a box. The main thing a terrarium gives you over simply potting some plants is that it can increase the local humidity. Also, you can have animals in it (usually invertebrates that eat detritus), which helps it be lower-maintainance.
If it's full of water, it's an aquarium (again hence the name). Most aquaria today don't have living plants and only have animals. That requires mechanical filtration and oxygenation to replicate the side of the ecosystem that plants normally occupy. A "planted tank" is an aquarium with live plants in it. When balanced well, they can be lower maintainance because the plants and animals provide things the other need.
If the box is half-submerged with both aquatic and land-based life, it's a "paludarium".
I mean, sealed terrariums are and have been a known thing for a long time. If you look more into it, 50 years doesn't seem all that implausible. To me, the most amazing part is keeping something around for that long.
You are correct, but there is very little incentive to lie. Maybe a helpful family member watered it a few times and never mentioned it. The concept does at least work for a few years as many sources can confirm, and the story is firmly in the plausible range imho. But in typical fashion, the data is scant and maybe contradictory.
The point on HN seems to be; the takeaway, arguing grammar/numbers/journalistic standard, and cooler-topics recently, and this has all 3. (Hyperbolic comments too, in case the /s is not autodetected by the content-bot mentality)
Why would anyone need to water it? Am I missing something? This is sealed like other terrariums, the water recycles, it has nowhere to escape (unless the plug is poorly sealed). Probably the first time it was opened in 1972 to be watered was because the water level wasn't high enough from the beginning.
I'm thinking we each make our own little ecosystem, maybe a half an acre would be enough. Maybe make it double walled, just in case, and then say screw it to everyone else as climate change and various other big things occur on the outside.
You might be interested in Biosphere 2 [1], a 3 acre hermetically sealed dome stucture designed to house about 8 people with an ecosystem to provide them with everything they need to survive.
They didn't quite get oxygen and food production to the required level, but if you add another acre or so it should work. With renewed interest in moon and mars colonies somebody is bound to revive that line of research.
The first experiment was hampered by them not realising the cement needed CO2 to cure, to be honest I would have halted the experiment to find out what the issue was then restarted it. Although they might not have realised this at the time, but then they weren't really testing a proper closed system.
It would have been useful if they were able to test a closed system without the cement sucking up the CO2.
If you want similar projects that weren't influenced by Hippy culture to try and emulate a complex system that nobody really understands you should look into the stuff the Soviet Union did. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS-3 is much more interesting imho. Looking into the minimum number of species you need for sustainability and not being afraid of using technology to augment the system is the better way for reaching truly closed systems.
I've a vague fantasy about returning to the remote Scottish island where I was born, which is pretty windswept with almost no trees, and building a house and garden inside a large Solar Dome, growing trees and plants that otherwise wouldn't survive in such a hostile environment. Apparently it has been done to some extent[0]. Side note - they discovered in the Biosphere 2 that trees need some wind, because the stress helps form reaction wood to strengthen the tree[1].
It would get too hot in most places, I think. Glass, especially if double walled, stops the heat getting out, but most of the heat from the sun will be able to get in (as infra-red). So you'd need supporting systems (i.e. air conditioning) outside.
AFAIK, at a certain depth below ground-level, the temperature is constant all-year-round. Something like that in two meters the ground is constantly around 14°C or something like that.
...so basically all you'd need to do is just dig a hole, put a bunch of metal pipes inside, seal it all up and run cooling water through and couple it to a closed-loop temperature control and you're done.
The idea is from an article from overclockers.com from the mid-2000s, about a dude who built his own water-cooling system and wanted a more efficient radiator. Not sure if I can find it again...
Readit News
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00H9J1AM2/
I recall the issue was with the transported seeds failing to germinate after arrival in India.
This NPR article is a review of the book linked to above and has more details, including an excerpt:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125237...
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/how-a...
IP rights are an exchange of temporary protection for ideas and implementation, in order to encourage both innovation and disclosure.
I'm not sure the author knows what a century is.
Deleted Comment
Edit: its called a demijohn if anyone else was curious, used for making wine
[0] https://www.ecospheres.co.uk/what-is-an-ecosphere/
The shrimp inside are ʻōpaeʻula [0] which evolved to live in volcanic tide pools filled by rainwater. Sort of a feast or famine environment where the salinity and nutrients available are very volatile. Because of that, the shrimp have evolved to handle a wide range of temperatures, salinity, and scarcity of food.
The latter means they can go surprisingly long without sufficient food without realizing it. In other words, there's a good chance (according to some) that the shrimp in your ecosphere are actually slowly starving to death and aren't in anything approaching a stable ecosystem.
(Also, they aren't brine shrimp, which are an entirely different class of animal.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halocaridina_rubra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
Gardening is one of the many areas of life where the best information and the bulk of information is offline.
Most terraria are not sealed, so while we've been making them forever, that doesn't say much about the viability of sealed ones. As far as I know, research into closed ecosystems didn't start until the 20th century.
If it has fish in it, it's not a terrarium. Terraria are land-based (hence the name). Think garden in a box. The main thing a terrarium gives you over simply potting some plants is that it can increase the local humidity. Also, you can have animals in it (usually invertebrates that eat detritus), which helps it be lower-maintainance.
If it's full of water, it's an aquarium (again hence the name). Most aquaria today don't have living plants and only have animals. That requires mechanical filtration and oxygenation to replicate the side of the ecosystem that plants normally occupy. A "planted tank" is an aquarium with live plants in it. When balanced well, they can be lower maintainance because the plants and animals provide things the other need.
If the box is half-submerged with both aquatic and land-based life, it's a "paludarium".
I've come to realize this is true, but why?
The point on HN seems to be; the takeaway, arguing grammar/numbers/journalistic standard, and cooler-topics recently, and this has all 3. (Hyperbolic comments too, in case the /s is not autodetected by the content-bot mentality)
They didn't quite get oxygen and food production to the required level, but if you add another acre or so it should work. With renewed interest in moon and mars colonies somebody is bound to revive that line of research.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
It would have been useful if they were able to test a closed system without the cement sucking up the CO2.
[0] http://www.solardome.co.uk/case-study/the-nature-house-north...
[1] http://awesci.com/the-role-of-wind-in-a-trees-life/
...so basically all you'd need to do is just dig a hole, put a bunch of metal pipes inside, seal it all up and run cooling water through and couple it to a closed-loop temperature control and you're done.
The idea is from an article from overclockers.com from the mid-2000s, about a dude who built his own water-cooling system and wanted a more efficient radiator. Not sure if I can find it again...