Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."
"There are quite a lot of people who think it’s not possible," Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009, according to Details. (His first donation was in 2008, for $500,000.) "That’s a good thing. We don’t need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late."
The Seasteading Institute’s Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.
Thiel made news earlier this year for putting a portion of his $1.5 billion fortune into an initiative to encourage entrepreneurs to skip college.
Another tech titan, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced in June that he would be funding the "Clock of the Long Now." The clock is designed to keep ticking for 10,000 years, and will be built in a mountain in west Texas.
So It Begins: Darpa Sets Out to Make Computers That Can Teach Themselves 2013 06 18 The Pentagon’s blue-sky research agency is readying a nearly four-year project to boost artificial intelligence systems by building machines that can teach themselves — while making it easier for ordinary schlubs like us to build them, too.
When Darpa talks about artificial intelligence, it’s not talking about modeling computers after the human brain. That path fell out of favor among computer ...
Atacama Humanoid: Stanford-Geneticist Says Specimen "not worth scrutiny" 2013 06 18 The documentary SIRIUS has intrigued and shocked many, and has stirred debate about the scientific findings regarding the ’Atacama Humanoid’.
Recently, daily German science news site GreWi.de followed up with Dr. Garry Nolan, the Stanford geneticist that headed the investigation into the mummified remains.
grenz|wissenschaft-aktuell reports:
Since the documentary movie "Sirius" showed the first results of an investigation of a just 15 ...
The Illuminati Depopulation Agenda 2013 06 18 While the global elite construct underground bunkers, eat organic and hoard seeds in Arctic vaults; the global poor are being slowly starved thanks to high commodity prices and poisoned with genetically modified (GMO) food. Austerity measures aimed largely at the poor are being imposed on all the nations of the world. Weather events grow more deadly and brushfire wars more ...
Ron Paul on Syria: This Is How Vietnam and Iraq Started 2013 06 18
President Barack Obama’s pledge to initiate a limited operation in Syria will likely escalate into a full-blown war, with Americans supporting a rebel cause that is backed by al-Qaida, retired Texas Rep. Ron Paul is arguing.
"The president has opened a can of worms that will destroy his presidency and possibly destroy this country. Another multibillion dollar war has begun," Paul ...
Google’s deep CIA and NSA connections 2013 06 18
The Western media is currently full of articles reporting Google’s denial that it cooperated in a government program to massively spy on American and foreign citizens by accessing data from Googles servers and those of other U.S. software companies.
The mainstream media has, however, almost completely failed to report that Google’s denial, and its surface concern over ’human ...