Pasadena, the late 1930s. The young self-taught chemist Jack Parsons launches homemade rockets in the Arroyo Seco canyon near Los Angeles. At night he immerses himself in the world of esotericism, and soon he begins corresponding with the English occultist Aleister Crowley.
Several decades later, Parsons’s developments will help take humanity into space. He will become one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and his contribution to rocketry will form the basis of the American space program. A crater on the far side of the Moon will be named after him.
Ideas that change the world are almost always born on the periphery — among people their contemporaries consider eccentrics. We examine how heresy turns into the norm and why pioneers often remain in the shadow of the revolutions they brought about.
A laboratory on the outskirts
States and corporations are interested in preserving the order that feeds them. An experiment is a risk with no promise of immediate gain. That is why radical novelty rarely emerges where power and capital are concentrated.
A small community of like-minded people has no reputation it is afraid to lose, and no superiors it would be ashamed to fail in front of. What it does have is the freedom to try deliberately "crazy" things. The outskirts become the laboratory of the future simply because they can afford to make mistakes.
Jack Parsons is an almost cartoonish archetype of such an outsider. He was born in Los Angeles in 1914 and from childhood devoured science fiction — from Jules Verne to Amazing Stories magazine. He was expelled from a military academy for an explosion in a restroom. The Great Depression undermined the family finances: Parsons earned extra money at the Hercules powder plant, dropped out of college for lack of money and never received a higher education.
Parsons’s interest in rockets appeared back in childhood. He began his first experiments in 1928 together with his school friend Ed Forman, and in 1934 the Caltech graduate student Frank Malina joined them. Under the guidance of Theodore von Kármán, the trio took up rocket development in earnest. Most scientists of the time considered talk of space flight to be fantasy, and for a series of dangerous experiments and accidents the group was nicknamed the "Suicide Squad."
Parsons’s main invention was a composite solid fuel: it could be cast into the required shape and produced in series. The solid-fuel engines of the Minuteman rocket and the side boosters of the shuttle trace back to this technology. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory grew out of the "Suicide Squad" in 1943, and a year earlier Parsons became a co-founder of Aerojet — one of the pillars of the US military-space industry.
According to the publisher and counterculture historian Richard Metzger, Wernher von Braun once expressed the view that it would be more correct to call Parsons the "father of rocketry."
A two-edged sword
By day Parsons was an engineer. By night, an occultist. He headed the California branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis and professed Thelema, Crowley’s teaching.
In 1946 Parsons wrote the essay "Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword," published only in the eponymous collection in 1989, 37 years after his death. It is a manifesto in defense of individual freedom against any repressive power, whether the state, a corporation or the church.
For Parsons, freedom is a two-edged sword: on one edge personal liberty, on the other responsibility. He was especially troubled by the erosion of privacy. In a 1950 preface he wrote with bitterness about "loyalty oaths," security clearances and about how the US Senate turns private life into a mockery. Science, which had promised to save the world, had, in his words, been put in a straitjacket, and its language reduced to a single word — "security."
He placed his last hope in the "creative minority."
"Today’s ignorance and indifference are striking. All the best in our civilization and culture has been created by the few people capable of thinking for themselves and acting independently. The rest merely follow them reluctantly.When the majority is deprived of freedom, barbarism appears on the horizon. But when the creative minority renounces freedom, the Dark Ages set in," — Parsons warned.
Surveillance, vanishing privacy, a bet on a handful of dissenters. Half a century later these ideas would become the creed of a movement that would give the world bitcoin.
Cypherpunks write code
The cypherpunks of the 1990s became an almost literal embodiment of Parsons’s "creative minority." In 1992 the mathematician Eric Hughes, the engineer Timothy May and the programmer John Gilmore founded a mailing list of the same name, and a year later Hughes published "A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto" with the line "cypherpunks write code." Where Parsons relied on the sword of freedom, they relied on strong encryption. It was from this milieu that bitcoin grew.
In October 2008 the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the white paper of the first cryptocurrency, and in January 2009 mined the genesis block with an embedded headline from The Times about a new bailout of the banks. In the early years the fate of the project was decided by a handful of anonymous users on forums, and "money without a state" seemed a toy for geeks. But over a decade and a half it turned into an exchange-traded asset: in January 2024 the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which had rejected such applications for ten years, approved 11 spot bitcoin ETFs at once.
A revolution ends at the moment its ideas become part of the new order. The free internet became overgrown with platform monopolies, open-source code was built into corporate development, and bitcoin took its place among Wall Street’s favorite assets. Artificial intelligence is following the same path. Until recently it was a niche field of research on the periphery of the academic world that had survived several "winters." Today a race with trillion-dollar stakes has unfolded within it.
Off-format
Pioneers rarely live to see what their ideas turn into.
During the Cold War, Parsons was removed from classified work. Declassified FBI documents showed that the main reason was his ties with Marxists at Caltech, while the occultism became a convenient pretext. His career collapsed. Parsons got by on odd jobs: he worked at a gas station and made pyrotechnics for Hollywood shoots.
On June 17, 1952, Parsons died at the age of 37 in an explosion in his home laboratory. On the same day his mother, on learning of it, took a fatal dose of barbiturates. The first newspaper reports paid tribute to the rocketeer, but within a couple of days the press blew up a mystical sensation. The LA Mirror headline read: "Slain Scientist — Priest of a Black Magic Cult."
The industry preferred to forget its inconvenient founder. The space historian Roger Launius noted that the Caltech team is far less well known than von Braun’s, although it is comparable to it in terms of contribution. In a letter to Malina, von Kármán placed Parsons first on the list of people most important to modern rocketry and the US space program. And in engineers’ slang the abbreviation JPL was decoded as Jack Parsons Lives.
The biographer George Pendle explained Parsons’s low public status by the cultural stigma around occultism: he, like many scientific rebels, was cast aside as soon as he had served his purpose.
By the end of the 20th century, the memory of him survived mainly in the name of a crater on the far side of the Moon, which was given his name in 1972.
Survivorship bias
From the story of Parsons it is easy to draw too sweeping a conclusion: since the future is born on the outskirts, then any persecuted idea is right. But for every idea that changes the world there are hundreds and thousands of failed ones. Alchemists never learned to turn lead into gold, inventors of the perpetual-motion machine could not cheat the laws of physics, and phrenology remained a historical curiosity.
Roughly the same thing happened in the crypto industry. Dozens of projects promised to overturn the market, raised enormous amounts of money and disappeared a few years later. One of the most famous examples was EOS: in 2018 the project raised more than $4 billion, but never became the very "Ethereum killer" its supporters called it. How many of them vanished without a trace, ForkLog showed in a separate analysis.
The success of an idea is determined by whether the technology works, whether it solves a real problem and whether anyone is willing to pay for its adoption. A position on the periphery gives the freedom to experiment, but in itself guarantees nothing.
If the cycle is universal, it is worth trying it on against the present. Today several fringes lay claim to the role of a peripheral idea at once: neural interfaces, decentralized science (DeSci), network states. The most telling candidate is the movement for open AI, with its heroes and a common enemy in the form of closed corporate labs. In its social mechanics it is almost literally the crypto community of a decade ago.
History offers no ready-made forecasts, but it allows us to recognize recurring storylines. What today looks like an absurd sect of geeks may tomorrow become an industry with state strategies and trillion-dollar budgets.
Source: ForkLog
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