[jp555]

Absolutely agree. The idea that we are anywhere close to being able to recreate a perfectly self-sustaining closed-loop ecosystem - do better than billions of years of evolution - is a little far fetched.

I think of Biosphere 2, where trees fell down because we didn't know that we didn't know that wind is required to make trees strong enough to support their own weight. I'm sure there's a lot more we dont know that we dont know.

But I mean more of a self-propagating civilization, a group of people learning to draw on the resources throughout the solar system to stay alive and raise the next generation. More about building a dynamic growing system than a perfectly balanced one. To raise a solar-system sized super-organism of humans. The space termite mound.