If the United States is becoming more repressive, where can one go? Other English speaking countries such as Australia, England, and Singapore have problems with freedom of expression.
scnr
He rejected it for his own reasons.
I think it is a safe bet that they knew what Snowdens values were before making the offer and they fully expected him to turn it down. Or they knew it for certain...
America used to be the place where things like this could happen, but that's not so much anymore. There's still innovation, but the trend doesn't look good and most of the world just doesn't care.
The George Washington willing-to-cede-his-throne type will be just as rare on Mars in 2095 as it is today, as it was throughout history.
In any case, it would be a bold experiment. To go in with the intention of building a better social contract, or to rethink what that even means, is something that we should keep in mind. Mars shouldn't just be a joyride in 0.4 g, but an intentional effort to rethink society.
Well congratulations. You now live in a tube or box in a freezing, unbreathable, radiated, barren desert. The only way you can go outside is by donning a bulky environmental suit and breathing apparatus. You may have brought a dune buggy of some kind along for exploration, but you can't go very far. If something happens to it, your spare parts are numbered and you probably won't survive the night out there, spending your last moments staring at yet more sand and rocks.
You don't have real mining or manufacturing capabilities and a resupply takes years. At best, you might have a high-end industrial 3D printer for parts, but your (specialty!) raw materials will run out very quickly, and you can't 3D print truly complicated things.
The remainder of your life now depends on you maintaining a delicate, miniature artificial ecosystem inside, so you can produce food and oxygen indefinitely. This is a feat which, when we tried it back here on Earth, failed miserably (Biosphere 2). That was with the luxury of Earth-based construction, at atmospheric pressure, without having to ship materials out and in of two enormous gravity wells. Environmental integrity was a question of science, not one of life and death. Besides, there is no reason to believe that Earth's ecosystem itself is stable long-term, never mind an artificially picked subset of it.
Once the honeymoon period is over and you've settled in, you will slowly come to understand what it means to be truly alone. You will never again see the people you left behind. You cannot move away if you get into irreconcilable conflict. Your survival depends on maintaining social cohesion above else, despite none of the usual comforts being available.
If, above all odds, people manage to not go insane on their own, there's always Dunbar's number: a suggested upper limit on the size of stable social groups. In case of ideological rifts, it is impossible for people to move away and start over: unlike on Earth, a new colony can only be started with the full and unconditional cooperation of an existing one.
If you want to try new things, Mars is the last place to do so. Whoever goes there will be clinging to the way things were.
We already have a vague approximation of colonizing Mars anyway: Antarctica. Go read about life on McMurdo base for example, or this: http://www.theage.com.au/environment/big-stink-brews-in-anta...
The point is that I'm not talking about a society a year or even a decade into a mission. Once the groundwork is laid, though, the possibilities emerge. The colonies didn't revolt until 169 years after Jamestown was founded. I'll finish by saying that your pessimism is unfounded, as very smart people have figured out solutions to most of the problems you have presented. Furthermore, just because you personally do not find such a situation to your liking doesn't mean that others feel the same way.
"We need a new planet so we can try new things, create new ideas, and generally liberate ourselves of traditional conventions."
Of all the places to try out 'new conventions', the harshest frontier in human history does not sound like a good idea. And I agree, BioSphere was terrible, but the important thing is that it failed (mainly) for human reasons, not scientific ones. I think it is entirely possible we lack the capacity as a species to thrive outside our world.
I don't think the scientific problems are impossible to overcome, but I do think anyone who flies there with any notion of romantic exploration and a new beginning is going on a suicide mission.
Declare the East Coast US States independent and be done with it; I am tired of waiting.
How does that solve this problem? I mean, I can't even guess which side of this issue you think the "East Coast" is on.
Now one may argue that that is already defined in the Constitution and that even if it wasn't, more local politics could be enforced by law by reducing the reach of the federal government. But I doubt either of us are that naïve.
The USA have proved that democracy does not scale well. And that is why it has moved to centralise power ever since the Constitution was signed.
It may not be a victory for privacy, but it would be a victory for democracy.
One of the few plausible ways out of the mess we find ourselves in right now is a strong movement towards states rights. Nominally, the states have a lot more power in our system then they are currently exercising, so it doesn't require any new law, just some assertions of what already exists (albeit in the form of Constitutional Conventions rather than simply asserting laws, which would be simpler). It's not my perfect ideological solution by any means, but it's one of the few practical ones, inasmuch as it does involve walking up to a group of people and asking them to go grab more power as competing interests, rather than asking people with power to unilaterally disarm, which is pretty much a "fat chance" option.
Secession is in some sense the ultimate State's right extreme, but I wouldn't advocate it until more normal avenues were tried and failed. It has... proved hazardous, to say the least.
I imagine it would be like this; a state (or more) announce that they will hold a referendum on independence, months (or even years) before the actual referendum will take place (similar to how it will take place in Scotland). This will give the President and the Federal Government time to react without having to sort to arms right away.
Furthermore, a referendum is particularly what will set it apart from the American Civil War; this will be the will of the people (of that state, obviously) and not merely the will of the state (which was the case during the American Civil War, it was merely the legislatures that decided to secede, and not by referendum).
This will make it much harder to justify for the federal government to intervene with military. Seeing as the process will open and peaceful, it would be seen as a considerable overreaction by the federal government to strike down with force on a seceding state.
In addition because war has gotten so much more terrible, and I doubt you'd even convince the army of doing so.
In short; I do not believe that you should be afraid of a military response to an independence, as long as you play fair. That's just intimidation. It would be sad to see that the only thing keeping the American states united was fear.
However, I do agree with you that independence should be the last resort. But considering the last few decades, it seems many things have already been tried.