Peter Thiel on Mars
The following is a transcript of remarks delivered by Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, Founder’s Fund and Palantir, on September 19, 2014, as part of a debate with anthropologist David Graeber, best-known for having coined Occupy’s “we are the 99%” slogan. The debate, entitled “Where did the Future Go?”, was mediated by John Summers, then-editor of The Baffler, and generously hosted by The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen in New York City. The remarks have been condensed for the sake of clarity.
“I would say we — I would say in order to get cities on Mars with domes, and to go to Mars, we need to start working on going to Mars. We’re not gonna get to Mars by having endless debates and, um, I think that’s — and I think we will get to Mars by actually working on getting to Mars. If we don’t start working on getting to Mars, and we continue not working on going to Mars, firstly I think we won’t get to Mars, and secondly I think we can reasonably expect we won’t get anywhere at all…all the back-and-forth about whether we can get to Mars, whether or not we should get to Mars, to me seems like a distraction from the task of actually doing it, actually getting to Mars…and another area David and I differ on this, I think, is that David believes that getting to Mars requires this mass movement focused on the importance of getting to Mars, grassroots organizing around lobbying higher powers to get us to Mars, whereas for me the key is really just to bypass all of that and focus on getting to Mars…my philosophy on this is sort of don’t ask for, ask for forgiveness and not for permission, because no one is ever going to give you permission to go to Mars, and if you need permission to go to Mars you’re never going to get there. However, one area where, um, one other area where I think we’re in agreement is that getting anything done as far as a project such as getting to Mars would first require a group of individuals deciding, okay, we’re now going to figure out how we actually would gets to Mars, which is what my PayPal buddy Elon Musk actually has done and went and did…he went and actually talked to top engineers and said, okay, how would we do this, and um, starting small, he started a company and said we’re going to go to Mars, which in my mind puts us closer to getting to Mars then any sort of discussion about the sort of ethics or endgame of getting to Mars ever will…the motive there being, I’m not willing to wait for any mass movement, I want to get this done myself and go zero to one, zero being us not being able to get to Mars, one being us getting to Mars, because zero is never going to get us there, and neither is repressive democratic socialism…I’m actually somewhat in the anarchist camp here because I’m going to act as if I’m free to act as I wish to, and I’m not going to suppress myself from getting to Mars based on the sort of implanted notion that I can’t go to Mars because um, not allowed to. So as far as getting to Mars is concerned and with respect to looking forward to the future and making advances in the playground of atoms, what I’m trying to convince just a small group of people so we can get it going right now, so we can get to getting to Mars, and I’ll leave it at that…”
