Bluestar: Taking Wacky to a Whole New Level

My recent suggestion that we colonize the stars with human embryos and robots was intended to be as nutty as I could imagine (the implication being that other popular star colonization schemes, which are even less physically plausible, are also nutty).  But now I've been one-upped.  One upped by a serious plan called "Bluestar" which sought to have a ball of water (evidently free floating in space) with dolphins swimming in it surrounded by a ring of "thinking and laboratory spaces. The dolphins would supposedly be able to think brilliantly in space without the limitations of gravity and they would function as a computer and use their highly advanced sonar skills to talk with humans and other animals.

Here's a video (I've set it up to start a little bit in, where it starts to get relevant):

Doug Michels, Bluestar's creator and advocate was not just a flake -- though he seems a couple sandwiches short of a picnic -- but a recognized artist and architect and one of the two founders of the semi-famous "architectural firm" the Ant Farm. My first inclination on seeing the Bluestar video was sadness what appeared to me to be Michels's desperate and pathetic attempts to create something where he had so little knowledge. Knowledge on elementary subjects like how the brain and thinking work, how gravity works, how computers work, how dolphins function ... the basic details of how animals live. (Since he evidently was creating, he hoped, a sort of space borne aquarium, one must wonder if he ever owned an aquarium. How was he planning on aerating his space aquarium, how was he going to feed the dolphins, where was the dolphin's poop going to go? I can tell you where it would go.) For me that sadness gives way to anger, but I digress ...

(By the way, I originally thought, and the New York Times obit I link above on Doug Michels says, that the sphere of water in the middle of the "Bluestar" is a globe of glass filled with water.  In fact, it seems not to be. If you watch the video closely then examine the drawing it seems to be a free floating sphere of water. In fact, I think that's the genesis of Michel's idea.)