The Traveler

In my first blog, I wrote about how much I love my blue hybrid Subaru. In this, my third entry, I will describe how much I’ve been enjoying the Sirius XM radio subscription I purchased along with the car. Not that I’ve explored that many stations these past two years. John and I have tried out “80s on 8”, “90s on 9”, “Classic Vinyl” and “Classic Rewind”…but mostly settled on these four stations only: “First Wave”, “Lithium”, “Yacht Rock” and “Liquid Metal”. First Wave (which is actually spelled “1st Wave”, but that’s harder to type) is all the classic New Wave pop that I remember from radio and MTV during the early to mid 1980s.  The Police, Duran Duran, the Talking Heads, The Cure, The The (that’s a real name, yeah. It was really just Matt Johnson), Erasure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, OMD, Yaz…I’m sure I can list more than these nine names. Lithium, in addition to being a Nirvana song title, is all the “alternative grunge rock” of the 1990s. So of course Nirvana and other successf...

“Why is it called Biosphere 2?” you may ask. “Was there a first one, like the four previous Babylon space stations in’Babylon 5’?” Not quite like that. Biosphere 1 is the Earth. Biosphere 2 is, or was intended to be, a sealed off mini-Earth about 3 acres from end to end, located a little way north of Tucson, Arizona. The structure was completed and stocked with plant and animal life by the spring of 1992. It was funded primarily by a wealthy oil baron in Texas who, I’m guessing, wanted to help save the Earth from ecological disaster by supporting four men and four women willing to live for two years in a giant greenhouse that supplies and recycles all its own air, water and nutrients. The ultimate goal was to see if we can build habitable Earth domes on other planets and moons. A secondary goal was to see if maybe we can fix our own planet while we’re at it. And so eight human beings entered this structure and sealed it up, knowing full well that any number of things could go wrong. As...