The Oxygen Garden

[Image: The Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

The sci-fi film Sunshine – which finally opens in the United States tomorrow – includes a set called the Oxygen Garden.

[Image: The Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

As the film's official website explains: "Oxygen production is vital for manned long-term space flight." Accordingly, "a long-term mission should have a natural, unmechanical way of replenishing its oxygen supplies."
Making a few visual references to NASA's early experiments with "space gardens" – and to other artificial landscapes, such as Biosphere 2 – the film's artistic team thus wired together a network of plants, aeration devices, cylindrical grow chambers, and hydroponic vats.

[Image: The Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

The Garden is "one of the most interesting sets" in the film, the website claims, "as the cold, clean 'spaceshipness' is juxtaposed with the wild, dirty nature – this is the only set where there is anything 'green'. All of the plants you see on the set are real, there's not one plastic fern in there at all. When you walk in you are immediately struck by how the set smells. It smells alive."

[Image: A close-up of the Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

I have to admit to a certain fascination with surrogate earths: those portable versions of our planet, and its climate, that pop up everywhere from hydroponic gardens, terrariums, and floating greenhouses to complex plans for manned missions to the moon.
If only for the purpose of growing vegetables, how can we use technology – fertilizers, UV lights – to reproduce terrestrial conditions elsewhere, in miniature?
Under rigorous interpretations of, say, The Bible or The Koran, would this be considered a sin?

[Image: A glimpse inside the Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

And, finally, what does it mean that the earth itself can enter into a chain of substitutions – a whole economy of counterfeits and stand-ins, referring, through simulation, to a lost original – only to produce something so unearthly as a result?