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Pasadena, late 1930s. 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 begins corresponding with English occultist Aleister Crowley. Several decades later, Parsons' developments will help propel 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 whom contemporaries consider eccentrics. Let's explore how heresy turns into the norm and why pioneers often remain in the shadow of the revolutions they bring about.

Laboratory on the Outskirts

States and corporations are interested in preserving the order that sustains them. Experimentation is a risk without the promise of immediate gain. Therefore, radical novelty is rarely born where power and capital are concentrated.

A small community of like-minded individuals has no reputation to lose and no bosses to answer to for failure. But it does have the freedom to try things that are deliberately "crazy." The periphery becomes a laboratory of the future simply because it can afford to make mistakes.

Jack Parsons is an almost caricatured 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 military academy for setting off an explosion in a restroom. The Great Depression crippled the family's finances: Parsons worked part-time at the Hercules powder plant, dropped out of college due to lack of money, and never earned a higher education.

Parsons' interest in rockets began in childhood. He started his first experiments in 1928 with his school friend Ed Forman, and in 1934 they were joined by Caltech graduate student Frank Malina. Under the guidance of Theodore von Kármán, the trio took up rocket development seriously. Most scientists of the time considered talk of space flight to be fantasy, and the group was dubbed the "suicide squad" for a series of dangerous experiments and accidents.

Parsons' main invention was composite solid fuel: it could be cast into the desired shape and mass-produced. The solid-fuel engines of the Minuteman missile and the shuttle's side boosters trace back to this technology. The "suicide squad" grew into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1943, and a year earlier, Parsons co-founded Aerojet, a pillar of the US military-space industry.

A Double-Edged Sword

By day, Parsons was an engineer. By night, an occultist. He led the California branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis order and professed Thelema, Crowley's doctrine.

In 1946, Parsons wrote the essay "Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword," published only in a collection of the same name in 1989, 37 years after his death. It is a manifesto defending individual freedom against any repressive authority, be it the state, corporation, or church.

For Parsons, freedom is a double-edged sword: on one edge is personal liberty, on the other is responsibility. He was particularly alarmed by the erosion of privacy. In a 1950 preface, he bitterly wrote about "loyalty oaths," security checks, and how the US Senate was making a mockery of private life. Science, which promised to save the world, he said, had been put in a straitjacket, and its language reduced to one word — "security."

He placed his last hope in the "creative minority."

"The ignorance and indifference of today are astonishing. All that is best in our civilization and culture has been created by a few people capable of thinking independently and acting independently. The rest only reluctantly follow them. 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, reliance 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' "creative minority." In 1992, mathematician Eric Hughes, engineer Timothy May, and programmer John Gilmore founded the eponymous mailing list, and a year later, Hughes published the "Cypherpunk Manifesto" with the line "cypherpunks write code." Where Parsons relied on the sword of freedom, they relied on strong encryption. Bitcoin grew out of this environment.

In October 2008, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the white paper for the first cryptocurrency, and in January 2009, mined the genesis block with an embedded headline from The Times about a new bailout for banks. In the early years, the project's fate was decided by a handful of anonymous individuals on forums, and "money without the state" seemed like a toy for geeks. But over a decade and a half, it turned into a 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 the moment its ideas become part of the new order. The free internet became overgrown with platform monopolies, open source code integrated into corporate development, and Bitcoin took its place among Wall Street's favorite assets. Artificial intelligence is following the same path. Not long ago, it was a niche area of research on the periphery of the academic world, having survived several "winters." Today, a race with trillion-dollar stakes has unfolded within it.

Off-Format

Pioneers rarely live to see what their ideas become.

During the Cold War, Parsons was removed from classified work. Declassified FBI documents showed the main reason was his ties to Marxists at Caltech, with occultism serving as a convenient pretext. His career collapsed. Parsons scraped by with odd jobs: working at a gas station and making pyrotechnics for Hollywood film sets.

On June 17, 1952, Parsons died at the age of 37 in an explosion in his home laboratory. The same day, his mother, upon learning of this, took a lethal dose of barbiturates. Initial 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 Black Magic Cult."

The industry preferred to forget its inconvenient founder. Space historian Roger Launius noted that the Caltech team is far less known than von Braun's team, although comparable in contribution. Von Kármán, in a letter to Malina, placed Parsons first on the list of people most important to modern rocketry and the US space program. And in engineer slang, the acronym JPL was decoded as Jack Parsons Lives.

Biographer George Pendle attributed Parsons' low public status to the cultural stigma surrounding occultism: he, like many scientific rebels, was cast aside once he had served his purpose.

By the end of the 20th century, his memory was preserved mainly in the name of a crater on the far side of the Moon, which was named after him in 1972.

Survivorship Bias

From Parsons' story, it's easy to draw too general a conclusion: since the future is born on the periphery, any persecuted idea must be right. But for every idea that changes the world, there are hundreds and thousands of failures. Alchemists never learned to turn lead into gold, inventors of the perpetual motion machine couldn't fool the laws of physics, and phrenology remained a historical curiosity.

Much the same happened in the crypto industry. Dozens of projects promised to upend the market, raised enormous sums of money, and disappeared a few years later. One of the most famous examples was EOS: in 2018, the project raised over $4 billion but never became the "Ethereum killer" its supporters claimed it would be.

The success of an idea is determined by whether the technology works, whether it solves a real problem, and whether someone is willing to pay for its implementation. Being on the periphery provides the freedom to experiment, but in itself guarantees nothing.

If the cycle is universal, it's worth applying to the present. Today, several peripheries are vying for the role of the fringe idea: neural interfaces, decentralized science (DeSci), network states. The most telling candidate is the open AI movement, with its heroes and a common enemy in the form of closed corporate labs. In terms of social mechanics, it's almost literally the crypto community of a decade ago.

History doesn't provide ready-made forecasts, but it allows us to recognize recurring patterns. What looks like a ridiculous sect of geeks today could become an industry with government strategies and trillion-dollar budgets tomorrow.

My analysis: The parallels between Parsons and the cypherpunks are not just a historical curiosity, but a key to understanding how breakthrough technologies are born. Both groups operated under conditions of fierce resistance from the mainstream, and both ultimately changed the world. But it's important to remember "survivorship bias": success is not guaranteed, and behind every triumph lie thousands of forgotten projects. The crypto industry is a vivid example of this: from the ICO bubble to the DeFi winter, we constantly see the "next big thing" turn out to be another disappointment. An investor should look not just for a "persecuted idea," but for one that solves a real problem and has a solid technological foundation.