According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, no signatory state may claim a celestial resource such as the Moon or a planet. I don't believe it says anything about private territorial claims, though.
We should go to Mars... but now, or later?
- Thread starter Gary7
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Because it shouldn't be the "elite wild west". Like invest 4 billion and net yourself 4 trillion in land rights. But of course, if one has the handicap of not easily visiting that property within a reasonably short amount of time, they can't really enforce much. Recalling the land grabs of the 19th century, the US government did encourage settlement, to a degree. But on Mars, there's no governing body. I don't think anyone should be able to claim any land until a self-sustaining colony is established, and that's a very, very long way off.
Only to say that they visited there. It wasn't a proclamation of "We own this now." There is no prohibition from any other entity visiting those same sites, or even setting up equipment for the long term.
A claim that cannot be enforced is worthless and we shouldn't waste time worrying about it.
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That's good to know. The Moonians will be happy we are not taking their land.
I agree, about the actual act of the claim itself -- but it'll be the time wasting contention on planet Earth that'll be the problem. If it was summarily defined that all claims are worthless until "X" condition, it would free up energies for other considerations. But already there's a "mars for sale" website where you can "buy" Martian real estate. That's just one of several sites. The hucksters are ramping up their ploys... And so many people are going to get pulled into this and duped. There should be a global space conference established and put all of this nonsense to bed.
A "global space conference" won't stop gullible people from being duped by con men.
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Not guaranteed, but they could basically serve like a Better Business Bureau for extra-terrestrial business dealings.
I hate to break it to you, but that's the way space exploration has always been, and it's the way it will always be. Space is not going to be explored by hardy adventurers seeking their fortunes on the frontier, it's going to be conquered by the smartest, strongest, fastest and best trained astronauts on the planet on behalf of the richest billionaires, corporations and countries we have.
This is one of those cases where possession is nine tenths of the law. If you can show that you live on the land and have access to it and are able to go on living there for a long period of time, you have a stronger claim to that land than someone who's never even been there. You need to be able to show some possession and control of the land to be able to claim it. Doesn't matter if the colony is self sufficient, just matters that you and your people actually live there more or less permanently.
So Martian real estate is the new Florida swampland?
"You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stuck-o."
It has always been the way? Interesting. Can you name at least one scenario in the past where a real estate claim external to Earth has been staked physically by machine or person?
in 1976, a group of countries located along the Equator drafted the Bogota Declaration, in which they tried to assert ownership over the use of geostationary orbital positions directly above them. The International Telecom Union quietly overrode their claims and those geostationary slots are now allocated to powerful countries (e.g. the United States) that dominate the longitude closest to those spots. That has actually been the status quo since at least the early 1970s.
In crowded areas like, for example, Asia or European longitudes, there have been many disputes over the allocation of those slots as some countries (India, Russia, China, Pakistan, etc) compete for an effectively finite number of orbital slots as their respective satellite industries grow. There have occasionally been situations where a state or private actor has rejected the ITU's proclamations and tried to assert control over an orbital slot by force; as far as I know this has only happened twice in nearly fifty years, and in both cases the company/government responsible had ALL of its satellite bandwidth completely jammed until they decided to calm down and behave themselves.
That's not exactly the Battle of Wounded Knee or anything, but it's significant that the people currently controlling the allocation of those slots are the people (countries and companies) with meaningful spaceflight capability AND the ability to enforce those allocations. In this case, enforcement simply means that if you don't go cooperate with the ITU, they (meaning, the United States and/or Russia and whoever else's turf you're trespassing on) will jam the frequencies your satellites are using, rendering them utterly useless. If at that point you still manage to fight back -- if your satellite has a fiendishly advanced transceiver and see through the jamming somehow, then someone like Roskosmos or the U.S. space command might do something interesting, like zap it with an unnecessarily powerful blast of radio waves in the microwave band or even send an X37 to "inspect" it. More than likely, though, they'll just sanction you and your company, so even if you get around the jamming, you won't be able to transmit your data anywhere.
The moment extraterrestrial territorial claims become something worth having, that treaty will go bye-bye. It's easy to sign a treaty agreeing to something that does not, at that time, cost you anything or require you to do anything.
Do you have any more information on these incidents? I'm actually curious to learn more, and a quick googling didn't come up with much.
No, and I've always wished I could track it down in more detail from an actual online source. I learned about both of them in college from a professor who had been working for Orbital Sciences at the time, but it's been years since I talked to him. Both of those incidents are sort of "classified" in the funny way that corporate espionage or mob violence is; lots of people know about it, but will pretend not to within earshot of anyone who matters.
I know that the Soviet Union was either trying to claim or was prevented from properly utilizing (depends on who you ask) a portion of the geo belt at its own longitude and that one of the Molniya satellites was briefly taken off the air over USSR's refusal to cooperate. My professor seemed to think it was a really clever and well-timed takedown of some arrogant Soviets trying to bully the international community; I thought it was a dick move based on double standards and American saber rattling. There was also, more recently, a dispute between China and Russia over airspace with both of them trying to stake a claim. Supposedly the argument got a little too heated and some ITU members threw a yellow card and jammed BOTH of them for 24 hours.
I saw there's no time like the present! ...and my mousey friends are busy working overtime to make this a reality:
https://www.nasa.gov/ames/feature/rodents-help-nasa-take-the-next-step-to-mars
https://www.nasa.gov/ames/feature/rodents-help-nasa-take-the-next-step-to-mars
Maybe send all the nazis and racists to Mars
Bad idea...
Nazis are like herpes for planets. There's no cure for Nazis, but if you're careful about managing your outbreaks you can keep them under control, and you should definitely avoid fucking with other planets while you're having a Nazi outbreak.
I own that movie it's kind of funny.
The sequel has Hitler riding a T Rex and living inside the Earth. Also turns out most of the world leaders are reptillian.
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