World spec'mode

Eldorado Laboratory

The Glenorchy Research Center in New Zealand was founded in 2033. It began as a small laboratory with about thirty researchers—mostly biologists—who had come to study the local flora and fauna. But the laboratory eventually became known for some of its unusual characteristics. Indeed, it is a very isolated research center, as there are no roads or flights providing access to it. Furthermore, the center quickly built up a fairly comprehensive archive of scientific publications, particularly in the field of biology, which is rarely matched anywhere else in the world. But above all, due to its deliberate geographic isolation, the community of researchers and trainee researchers living there places great importance on manual labor and self-reliance. The researchers grow some of their own food and have developed skills in carpentry, plumbing, mechanics, and sometimes even electrical work. The lab’s journal, which is published monthly and available for free online, is quite unusual in itself, as popular science articles are interspersed with practical life advice and reflections on existence. Very quickly, the site came to be known as the “Eldorado Laboratory,” since just as Eldorado is—according to legend—the last city built by the Incas to escape their downfall, the Glenorchy center resembled a sort of “end-of-the-world” campus, a final refuge for sustained intellectual pursuits. The campus would eventually triple in size over the course of ten years and come to house a cohort of student-researchers as well as non-biologist scientists, who came, among other reasons, to study the characteristics of a small society of quasi-autonomous researchers—knowledge that could prove particularly useful for space colonization. Especially since, unlike other places of this kind (in Antarctica, for example), resources are available on-site, and the Eldorado laboratory does not rely exclusively on high technology to sustain itself. It more closely resembles a true colony of scientists, where people of all ages are represented and where couples and families can form. The Eldorado newspaper has also gained a certain degree of fame, so much so that compilations of its articles serve as a veritable “scientific bible” for some, in which the most essential knowledge, as well as the most useful philosophical reflections and life advice, are summarized with a level of detail considered “perfect”: concise enough not to lose the reader, yet precise enough not to compromise scientific rigor. Over time, students on campus have developed a new tradition: memorizing the contents of these journals in case all the archives are ever destroyed. Add to this the many important activities in the student curriculum—which are unusual at most other research centers around the world (calligraphy, permaculture, carpentry, papermaking, survivalism, etc.)—and it is no surprise that the Eldorado laboratory has so quickly become an attractive and intriguing place for the rest of the world.