We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata slogan of the day We shall know what we go to Mars for, only after we get there. You might as well ask Columbus why he wasted his time discovering America when he could have been improving the methods of Spanish sheep-farming. It is lucky that the U.S. government like Queen Isabella is willing to pay for the ships.
– Freeman Dyson, letter to his parents, 19 May 1958
though it is a pity the US and other governments also crowd out private space business alternatives
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I like Freeman Dyson a lot, but his physics background shows a bit here.
Columbus the Genoan went for very practical, financial reasons. The Spanish royal family funded his and other expeditions in the direct hope of two things:
1] a trade route to the spices of the Indies, so they could cut out the Venetians, and, once it became clear a new continent had been found instead
2] gold and silver.
The Spanish obsession with finding and grabbing treasure was famous once they recovered from the disappointment of not having [yet] circumvented the established big names in spice wholesaleing. Very little else interested them, and I rather think the traces of lust and greed in their settling can still be seen in the politics of Spanish-founded Latin American countries.
Going to Mars might prove worthwhile, but it is a travesty to compare it with one of the most venally-motivated missions in maritime exploration.
If only governments were crowding out private space ventures, rather than regulating hem out (or rather preventing them from existing in the first place)… at least there’d be a crowd of government ventures to compete with one another, rather than the four (off the top of my head) we have now (NASA, the Euros with their Arianes, the Russians, and the Chinese… and really none of them are doing much competition, that I’m aware of..)
Look at the date – 1958.
It reminds me of all the old S.F. predictions – we were supposed to have reached Mars (etc) decades ago.
It is now 2003 – is it not time to say that government has failed?
The motto of the Orion Project, the spaceship powered by atomic bombs which Dyson was working on, was “Saturn by 1970).”