The oldest dream of power has never been domination. It has been immunity from consequences. Not escape from enemies or failure — escape from accountability. From the friction of a world where actions have consequences and consequences have owners.
Today, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the broader Silicon Valley elite are rehearsing this ambition at a scale history has rarely seen. They wield private authority comparable to that of states. They shape what billions of people see and think. They command armies of engineers and lawyers, fleets of satellites and data centers, treasuries larger than the budgets of most nations. And they carry an unspoken conviction: we are building the future, therefore the rules that govern everyone else do not fully apply to us.
They are not the first to believe this. They are just the first to have rocket ships.
The Templars Made the Same Mistake
For two hundred years, the Knights Templar were untouchable. They maintained their own army, their own fleet, a treasury that lent money to kings, and an absolute certainty that they were the most righteous men in Christendom. They could do almost anything.
Until one French king, Philip IV, decided they had become more dangerous than useful. In 1307, the Templars were arrested, tortured, and burned at the stake. By 1312, the Pope — under the king’s pressure — had officially dissolved the Order and seized its assets.
Not because the Templars had grown weak. Because political power, when it suits its interests, does not ask permission from those it once elevated.
The parallel is not decorative. The pattern is structural: private power, accumulated under the protection of a larger order, eventually outlives its usefulness to that order — and is cut down. The Templars believed their position was guaranteed by divine righteousness. Today’s tech elite believes theirs is guaranteed by the logic of progress. The alibi is different. The mistake is identical.
Mars Is Not a Backup Plan
The official narrative — that colonizing Mars is about “backing up humanity in case of catastrophe” — is marketing for the credulous.
The actual logic is extraterritoriality.
A colony on Mars would exist beyond the reach of any earthly government, court, tax authority, or labor union. It would be a place where the ethical constraints that limit experimentation on Earth — built up slowly, painfully, through centuries of abuse and reform — simply would not apply. Not because they were abolished, but because there is no one to enforce them.
Musk has reportedly expressed concern that “the American social state” might follow colonists to Mars — with its taxes, regulations, and demands for accountability. The fear is revealing. Mars is not conceived as a new home for humanity. It is conceived as a place where a small group can declare default on their obligations to the rest of it.
Not a lifeboat. An escape hatch.
The Singularity as Absolution
Alongside the spatial escape, there is a temporal one.
The idea of technological singularity — the point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human cognition and transforms everything — functions in this world less as a prediction than as an absolution. If a godlike machine will soon make all decisions optimally, then moral responsibility can be transferred. Not to another person, but to an algorithm. The calculator becomes the confessor.
But a machine, however precise, cannot step outside its own interface. It cannot revise the foundations on which it was built. It can increase resolution and processing speed indefinitely. It cannot ask whether it is optimizing for the right thing. That question requires a human being willing to remain answerable — to stay inside the friction rather than escape it.
The precision of a calculator never compensates for the poverty of its moral base.
The Dream of Motionless Being
There is an older current running beneath all of this.
Medieval theology described divine eternity as the perfect possession of the fullness of life, all at once — without succession, without decay. It was the opposite of the human condition, which is defined precisely by its finitude, its irreversibility, its ordinary Mondays.
The Silicon Valley vision of radical life extension, cyborgization, and consciousness uploading is this same dream, dressed in hoodies and backed by venture capital. The goal is not to improve the human condition. It is to abolish it — to replace the mortal, embodied, accountable self with something that can be endlessly patched and upgraded. Why invest in new generations when the current ones can simply be maintained?
This is not transhumanism. It is the oldest form of cowardice: the refusal to accept that existing in the world means being shaped by it — and answering for that.
There Is No Planet Far Enough
The Templars built something they believed could not be destroyed. They were wrong — not because they were defeated in battle, but because the political order that once needed them eventually found them inconvenient.
Today’s order is making a larger mistake. It is not merely seeking power on Earth while imagining itself immune. It is seeking to physically exit the human world — to establish territory where accountability cannot follow.
History suggests this ends one of two ways. Either the escape fails — the politics, the laws, the consequences catch up, as they always have. Or it partially succeeds, and what is built in that vacuum is not a civilization, but its negation.
They imagine they can declare themselves new gods in the sterile desert of another planet.
It is a utopia. And politics has always been stronger than utopia.
