“This is the Tea Party with better gadgets.” Natasha Tiku

Neil deGrasse Tyson says that space is dangerous. Tyson argues that we won’t go to space unless it makes some kind of rational sense.

Tyson is criticizing the ideas of SpaceX’s Elon Musk, who is working to create cheaper rocket fuel tanks, lowering the cost of entry to space. Musk wants to put humans on Mars in just 12 years.

WATCH: Drone Copter Chases Rocket Launch – Race To Colonize Space is Underway!

“It’s not possible. Space is dangerous. It’s expensive. There are unquantified risks. Combine all of those under one umbrella; you cannot establish a free market capitalization of that enterprise,” Tyson says.

So we need the government to take expensive, unquantified risks that don’t make sense? Sounds like standard operating procedure.

VIDEO: Neil deGrasse Tyson on free market space travel
 

Wrong, Mr. Tyson!

One young entrepreneur gave a speech recently at a web startup conference called, “A radical dream for making techno utopias a reality.” Balaji Srinivasan spoke about “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit”, where entrepreneurs might escape to space in order to avoid regulations that cripple innovative startups. “We need to build opt-in society, outside the US, run by technology.”

WATCH: “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads!” (VIDEO) 

Srinivasan spoke about his idea for self-sustaining experiments where people would live under a government run by Silicon Valley. He looked at the accomplishments of the tech sector as an example for how society should be run. “We didn’t securitize mortgages, order bailouts, [or] start wars,” his slides read.

VIDEO: “A radical dream for making techno utopias a reality.”

 

Srinivasan complained that with the rise of 3D printing, regulation is being turned into “Digital Rights Management”. He expressed fears for the pushback from governments against digital currencies like Bitcoins using “packet filtering”, a fancy word for blocking traffic from sources that authorities deem inappropriate. But Srinivasan wants to escape this world, and he has hope for the future if we can accomplish it.

“The best part is this, the people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology, won’t follow you there,” he says. But some people aren’t so convinced.

READ: Snooty Yale Professor Shocked to Learn that Tea Party Understands Science!

New York Magazine’s Kevin Roosk worries about this attitude in light of the recent U.S. government shutdown. He writes that, “a certain strain of influential Silicon Valley thought has moved past passive political apathy and into a kind of anarchist cheerleading. Dysfunction and shutdowns are good, this line of thinking goes, because it hamstrings Washington’s ability to mess with the private sector’s profit-making schemes. And as long as the Bay Area is still churning out successful start-ups, what does it matter if hundreds of thousands of government workers are furloughed, essential services are cut off for low-income Americans, and the threat of a sovereign default endangers the entire economy?”

That’s silly. In space we don’t need government workers. The only essential services will be life support systems that would naturally need to be self-sustaining. Profit and loss might mean life or death in space, where people would be incentivized enough to provide for their own security and safety.

Valleywag’s Natasha Tiku writes:

This is the Tea Party with better gadgets. It’s probably no coincidence that Srinivasan’s genetics startup (started in a Stanford dorm room, naturally) has raised more than $65 million in funding from investors like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Thiel, of course, was a big backer of Ted Cruz and single-handedly funded a Ron Paul super PAC before the last presidential election.

Time For Libertarians To Go Galt? 

Libertarian activists have been pushing for seasteading for years, believing that the way to escape crippling government sanctions is to spread out into international waters. These kinds of projects have received seed capital, but not yet come to fruition. But if Elon Musk is successful in getting to Mars, that might be the more practical alternative.

My only question is… if all the people who loved freedom ever left the earth… who would be taxed to securitize the mortgages, order bailouts, or start the wars?

Now is the time to go… before it’s too late.