Starlab: Deep Future
The 'Noah’s Ark' of scientific research that launched 1,000 startup
ideas
Lab-concocted vodka, time travel and epilepsy treatments:
Welcome to the Moonshot Factory
|
| “ a place where 100 years means nothing … ” |
Financial Times | Sifted | 08 08 2022 — What happens when you round up more than one hundred of some of the
world's greatest scientists, maverick geniuses working on some of
the world’s most groundbreaking ideas, put them together in a
Belgian castle, and let their imaginations run wild?
Fire extinguisher duels, bootleg vodka made with lab-procured ethanol
and worldbeating treatments for epilepsy are just some of what went
down at Starlab: a one-of-a-kind experiment created to unite
some of the world’s most daring technologists.
When it was founded in 1996, Starlab was compared to other top
research institutes — like Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center — that
successfully bridged the gap between idea and market. It was also a
prototype for the ambitious organizations of today like Google’s
“moonshot factory,” X, trying to bring entirely new ideas to
the world.
But the centre’s idealism was to be its downfall; its pie-in-the-sky
approach couldn’t pay the bills, and it went dramatically bankrupt
during the dotcom crash. But what most people don’t know is that
Starlab’s legacy lives on in the picturesque hills overlooking
Barcelona and elsewhere.
Many European VCs and universities claim they’re backing innovations
that will solve humanity’s problems, but huge successes have been
elusive. One of the companies from Starlab’s second generation has
found significant success, but the centre's tale forces anyone
interested in innovation to ask themselves: how do we really bring the
wildest ideas to life — and make them financially viable?
The Noah’s Ark of science
 |
|
Christopher Altman |
“De Brouwer’s ambition was to bring the best scientists in the world together to ‘think thoughts for the very first time.’ It was very interdisciplinary — no walls, no boundaries, no borders …” says Christopher Altman — astronaut, quantum physicist and Starlab veteran.
In its heyday, Starlab was home to more than 130 scientists
from 36 countries, who worked on ideas ranging from time travel and
consciousness to new media and “intelligent” clothing. The majority
lived on site: a neoclassical castle designed in the late 1800s on the
outskirts of Brussels.
|
|
Starlab “Time Travel Party,” May 2001. (L to R):
Hugo de Garis,
Serguei Krasnikov, Roman Zapatrin, Christopher Altman |
“It was like a pirate ship in a way, which is what I think I fell in
love with. Or you could call it a kind of sect,” laughs Giulio Rufini,
neuroscientist and current CEO at Starlab. “We’d stay up all night talking in-depth theoretical implications of
closed timelike curves (time travel). Roman had a centuries-old recipe for homemade vodka and put to use
some surplus ethanol he reappropriated from the biophysics lab down in
the basement,” says Altman, referring to one of his colleagues, a
quantum topologist and mathematician. “One time a few of the researchers covered themselves in yards of
aluminium foil as “armor” and started a duel, complete
with fire extinguishers as weapons, in the courtyard.”
