On the restarting, I completely agree. You'd need to restart the whole thing multiple times as your knowledge increased. Maybe somebody else is doing large sc

On the restarting, I completely agree. You'd need to restart the whole thing multiple times as your knowledge increased. Maybe somebody else is doing large scale closed system human habitats, but I haven't heard of any. edit: A bit of googling led me to the Russian one and some books on the problem generally. It sounds like a great speciality but probably hard to get a gig in. If I had a multi-decade old terrarium, I'd be darn tempted to think of sensors you could stick in there and see if there's some sort of cycle going on.