About the experience

ERA was conceived as an experiment to test new models and devices to immerse an audience into future scenarios to see if we could find new ways to teach people about critical topics and connect them to the issues we face today here on earth. Inspired by immersive theatre and interactive, participatory installations the teams worked together under a common theme of space exploration (not the billionaire colonizing kind) but focusing on other aspects around blue-collar worker lifestyles and ethical choices we might have to make if we truly become a space-faring civilization. Each chapter is a vignette or window into moments in the future where we are faced with decisions we might have to make concerning scarcity of food systems but also speaks to traditions and culture and some of the mundane activities we might engage in. Designed as both a theatrical and exploratory platform, ERA sought to give our guests the freedom to play and discover while operating under some of the strict conditions we have to face when living in space. Some of the experience was designed with detail, other parts were left to the audience to decipher.

Chapter index

Turns out relying on an overly homogenous selection of crops wasn't the best idea. When traditional techniques aiming to maintain ecosystem balance are dismissed as unproductive, it's a slippery slope towards soil depletion and sensibility to parasites. For as long as technological solutionism maintains the illusion of solving the problem by postponing its effects, we're kinda fine. But then it reaches a tipping point: the soils can't regenerate, and intrants can't help anymore. By then, aquifers are polluted, biodiversity lost, wildfires frequent, and conflicts on the rise. We've seen it in the American Dust Bowl of the 1930's, which could only be reverted by more sustainable agricultural practices. We're there again, at a far more global level.

As a result, sustainable practices are being developed, with an investment in growing more resilient species with a focus on increasing diversity. Agroforestry and permaculture receive massive investments. But the world's population increased with the promise that a few superpowered species would fill their stomachs. Several billion people need the calories a convalescent earth just can't provide anymore, and the reconversion of agriculture will take time. Meanwhile, people resort to foraging whatever still grows in their surroundings. Mushrooms, somehow, are doing good.

To speed up the recovery effort, minerals that have been drawn from the soils become sought after. Corporations and governments alike divert efforts away from other industries to focus on extracting these crucial resources by any means necessary. Some of these being abundant in space, Asteroid Harvesting missions are set up to collect them from celestial bodies. These missions are operated by crews of blue-collar workers whose hope is that the bonuses they will gain will provide for their families. The present story is that of a mission operated by the Catalan Space Agency.

None Of This Was True

Although devised as an interactive experience, the purpose of this fiction was not to solely entertain. Through the parable of a space mission dedicated to rescuing earth’s collapsing ecosystems, we wanted to draw attention to specific topics through the lens of acute emergency. By using a speculative setup, our aim was to create this paradigm shift, the time of an experience, while also hinting at possible issues and techniques that might become relevant in the future.

The context might be fictional, but the information used in the process of creating it is correct. Some of it was distilled in small doses throughout the experience, and you might have picked on chunks of it. This next part exists to give you additional resources for making sense of the experience.

This, however, is true

  • Biomes migration - Every decade, biomes migrate approximately 3.8 miles toward the earth’s poles. Range shifts result in new associations among species, and promote interactions that have not existed in the past. Novel species assemblages can substantially alter ecosystem structure and the distribution of ecosystem services.

  • Traditional knowledge of the use of plants - For millennia, human populations developed techniques and knowledge in producing food, shelter, and medicine from the natural environment. Those are often specific to a geographical are and culture, but globalisation and copyright laws designed to support innovation have incentivised their unlawful patenting, known as biopiracy.

  • Migrant work - In 2019, there were 169 million international migrant workers in the world and they constituted 4.9% of the global labour force in the destination countries, where they are often employed in sectors suffering from a local employment shortage, such as construction, agriculture, care, or education.

  • Biomining - Bacterial mining uses microorganisms to extract metals from rock ores or mine waste, or to clean up sites that have been polluted with metals. Today, about one fifth of the world’s copper is mined with bacteria, and biomining is seen as the most viable approach to harvesting minerals in space.

  • Asteroids mining - The idea that resources might be harvested in space came hand in hand with the beginnings of space exploration. It is also explored as a way to create extraterrestrial soils from carbon-rich asteroids, using fungi to physically break down the material and chemically degrade toxic substances. 

  • Gut-soil microbiome relationship - There exists an area of research dedicated to the connection between soil and gut microbiomes, highlighting a need for strengthening our relationship with the environment. A connection between human gut and ocean microbiomes has also been discovered, the two sharing about 73% of microbes.

  • Geophagy - The consumption of minerals has been documented around the world in traditional rural societies, and still exists in many regions where clays like kaolinite are eaten for pleasure or to suppress hunger. While soiled clay can represent a health risk, especially during pregnancy, some minerals are used as a base for medicine.

  • Life in orbit & space food - Specific routines are followed aboard spaceships. It involves 2h of daily exercise to avoid the decrease in muscle and bone density caused by weaker gravity, and body washing using wet wipes. Food is designed to avoid crumbs that could fly around and interfere with equipment. The sense of taste is significantly altered in space.

  • Seed vaults in Space - After the flooding of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster, a new Lunar Seed Vault project has been proposed by scientists from the University of Arizona. Its goal is to provide a genetic backup for the planet in the event of a doomsday scenario.

  • Ecosystem contamination - Food chain disruptions by species migrating, and species migrations caused by food chain disruptions, are nothing new and predate Humans. Our species, however, interferes with food webs through globalised trade and climate change, and there is concern that ecosystem pollution also contributes to the spread of invasive species.

  • Animal cloning - World-famous Dolly wasn’t the first cloned animal. Her true title is of ‘first mammal cloned from an adult cell rather than an embryo’. While this attempt was attempting to reproduce an entire individual, most applications of cloning focus on specific genes, with therapeutic applications as the main goal.

  • Organism survivability in space - Conditions in the vacuum of space entail extreme dehydration, extreme temperature, and exposure to cosmic radiation. So far ESA experiments have demonstrated that precious few organisms—lettuce seeds and lichen, some bacterial spores, and the famed tardigrades—are able to cope with such conditions.