I'm an empiricist at heart, too (at least for some things; everyone is an idealist one way or another). But come on, it has its limits! I think we both already

I'm an empiricist at heart, too (at least for some things; everyone is an idealist one way or another). But come on, it has its limits! I think we both already know that a social experiments colony would be chaos. What I was suggesting would have an outside chance of providing useful information. Given enough time, it would probably provide enough information to prevent the next phase from being a complete disaster. You could say that every nation created (or major political upheaval) is an experiment. The U.S. certainly was. Unfortunately, it takes hundreds of years to start producing useful results, and even then, the results are very muddled.