Property Rights In Space?

ATKeiper writes "A number of companies have announced plans in the last couple of years to undertake private development of space. There are asteroid-mining proposals backed by Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, various moon-mining proposals, and, announced just this month, a proposed moon-tourism venture. But all of these — especially the efforts to mine resources in space — are hampered by the fact that existing treaties, like the Outer Space Treaty, seem to prohibit private ownership of space resources. A new essay in The New Atlantis revisits the debates about property rights in space and examines a proposal that could resolve the stickiest treaty problems and make it possible to stake claims in space."

Comments

Don't worry, there is plenty

[TheRealMindChild]

There's plenty of space out in space!

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[davester666]

When you are mining an asteroid as it's passing by Earth, ownership is determined by who has the most/biggest guns in the immediate vicinity.

And once you transport it back to Earth, it most definitely is yours.

For the most obvious example, see the treatment by the US gov't of the so-called "moon rocks". They claim ownership of every bit even after giving away a bunch of it to other countries.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[i kan reed]

How does one delineate property borders in space? Orbits with respect to earth's location? The sun's? From Lagrange points? How do I know if you're leaving your space junk in my space-yard?

Serious question.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[aurispector]

Considering the enormous expense and effort that went into obtaining those moon rocks, it's not surprising they were technically "loaned" rather than "given away" as you mistakenly assert.

The point is there needs to be a legal framework in place so such expenditures are protected. The only way to spur private space exploration is to make it possible to profit from it. Otherwise it's simply a huge waste of money - what benefit does humanity derive from, say, letting the hyper rich shoot themselves into orbit for a short while?

Extraterrestrial resource extraction could mean endless supplies of things like rare earth minerals needed for high tech manufacturing. You do like cheap computers and cell phones, don't you?

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[dyingtolive]

Lagrange points?

I hear they got a lotta nice girls there. A HAR HAR HAR HAR.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[Githaron]

When you are mining an asteroid as it's passing by Earth, ownership is determined by who has the most/biggest guns in the immediate vicinity.

In other words, the same rules as we have on Earth. A government claims a land because they want it and they have the means to defend it against other claims. Said government then "sells" pieces of said land to its citizens.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[thereitis]

The point is there needs to be a legal framework in place so such expenditures are protected.

I suggest that for starters treating all space bodies as public domain is the best way to go.

Otherwise, how do you separate people with plans in motion to go there from those who are merely being 'patent trolls' by claiming something and doing nothing with it? Or claiming something with the specific purpose of making sure someone else can't make use of it?

Having ownership in space seems destined to create an 'artificial scarcity'. Maybe I'm wrong, but an ownership based framework seems ripe for greedy people to abuse.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[tattood]

And once you transport it back to Earth, it most definitely is yours.

That presumes that the space pirates don't steal it from you first!

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[GoogleShill]

Think of all the time (money) a company will need to spend to figure out the best place to set up a mine on an asteroid in order to extract enough material to make it worthwhile. Why would they go through those efforts when a competitor can just wait for them to do that, then setup a new mine right next to it? The competitor can then undercut the original company's profits immensely as they have no R&D expenses to pay.

That's what I see happening with the public domain option you speak of, and it is one extreme. The other is allowing anyone to "stake their claim", which won't work as the first company with enough money will just pop around to every asteroid staking it for themselves and wait for someone to actually want to use one of them, then charge them ridiculous rents... Kind of like patent trolls, or the domain registry.

There needs to be something in between these extremes, like "stake your claim, but if you don't actively use it within 5 years, you lose it". Or, "stake your claim, but you must rent it for a reasonable rate".

I'll probably get modded down by the free-market fundamentalists, but there needs to be some sort of regulation to ensure that technical advancement can happen while allowing profit and competition. That's what makes a healthy capitalist economy.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[garyebickford]

There needs to be something in between these extremes, like "stake your claim, but if you don't actively use it within 5 years, you lose it". Or, "stake your claim, but you must rent it for a reasonable rate".

This is more or less how mining claims in the US were originally (are?) handled. If you didn't do some actual mining within a certain time, the claim reverted to the feds. Also, I believe US offshore oil leases are presently handled that way as well.

I heard that a big oil lease in the Gulf of Mexico is problematical for this reason. The company that bought the lease did it with borrowed money, expecting to be drilling and pumping within two years. But after the BP disaster all deepwater drilling was blocked by the US Gov't moratorium. Meanwhile the company's loan was costing them something like $100 million per year in interest, which they were forced to pay each year out of the principal. And now the lease is about to expire, and they don't have the money to start drilling. All they have to do is start, and the lease is continued. But their attempt at getting another loan to start drilling failed, and they are now going into bankruptcy. The first line of secured lenders are looking at getting 25% on their money, the second line will be getting something, the shareholders will get zipadeedoodah.

Too bad domain names aren't the same way!

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[icebraining]

We're talking about actual, physical matter here. Scarcity is a natural property of the system.

And we have thousands of years of experience dealing with such problems. It's not like property is a recent concept.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[icebraining]

Same as on Earth. You get property on a piece of land and on a zone X kilometers above and Y kilometers below it.

Empty space doesn't need property rights.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[khallow]

I suggest that for starters treating all space bodies as public domain is the best way to go.

So that paint speck in LEO should be the property of the world? How about a triage system, If it's small enough (and either natural or abandoned), then it's the property of whoever stuffs it in their hold. If it's bigger than that, but below some arbitrary threshold one can institute a policy of claim staking. Namely, that the property belongs to whoever is using it (with emphasis on "using"). If the object is big enough then make it property of the World. So the Moon is property of the World; a km wide asteroid can be claim staked; and that one meter wide boulder you came across is finders-keepers.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[Dyolf Knip]

Well, stuff in space _is_ scarce, in the sense that it's not infinite, that is. Sure, there's _a lot_ of non-stellar mass in the solar system, but the parts of it that are easily accessible with current technology is really pretty limited. Luna, Apollo asteroids, and the occasional comet, mostly. And to make things even trickier, what happens when people start living out there permanently? That chunk of rock will be just as much 'their' property as any piece of terra firma.

Start with the simplest way to handle ownership claims and see where that goes: You have to go out and stick a flag on it to even have a shot at such a claim being legit. In person, or will a probe suffice? Define "probe"; don't want anyone spamming the surface of Mars with 1" radio cubes and claiming the entire planet as a result. For that reason, I'm inclined to limit ownership claims solely to putting boots on the ground. You own your unmanned probe and anything in produces using unowned resources (so automated factories are allowed), but the body as a whole is still up for grabs.

Of course, how much can you claim? The entire asteroid/cometplanet? Well that sucks. The EU founds a small colony on Mars just a few weeks ahead of the US and Chinese, so they get the whole pie? I guess you could make it a function of how many people you actually have there, but do they have to be there permanently?

And hey, who's going to enforce all this anyway? Considering the potential riches involved, nobody is going to accept a UN ruling that means that country A gets the piece of rock that country B just spent $10 billion putting a mining facility on because A sent a suicide volunteer on a one-way trip to put them on said rock before B.

I suspect that in the end, the 'border's will be decided in the traditional way. Namely, guys with guns moving them around until they conclude that getting a bigger piece of the pie for themselves would be more trouble than it's worth.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[mysidia]

The point is there needs to be a legal framework in place so such expenditures are protected.

I suggest: Formation of an international body, to register ownership of materials in space, in exchange for a fee.

(1) Temporary retained ownership/claim to any object or material you owned on earth and sent into space (for a period of time, say 6 years) -- the object must be identified and registered with the authority, paid up annually -- or in advance.

(2) Extended ownership of any human person manned vehicle or object the owner or human representative of the owner interacted with in the past 6 years -- renewal application for the registration every 6 years, with declaration of value and payment of additional fee.

(3) Ownership of the first landing site of a human person manned vehicle most recently after its departure from earth, and the immediate vicinity, within a X foot radius, as long as no portion previously owned; for a 6 year period. A prominent, robust central marker must be installed, with a protective barrier around the landing site; the landing site must be registered within 1 year.

(4) Ownership of any structure fully enclosed on all sides - built by human workers on owner's behalf that continues to be manned and not abandoned, (not caves or normal features of the planet or asteroid); automatic, and indefinite, as long as not abandoned -- must be formally registered within 1 year, renewed within every 10 years.

(5) Ownership of ground and materials in ground beneath owned enclosed structures.

(6) Temporary ownership of fenced in areas around manned enclosed structures, and ground / materials in ground - with registration, and annual payment to the body per cubic mile of surface area claimed, and per cubic yards volume of material claimed.

(7) Ownership of habitation areas - any place where people live and sleep, and the immediate vicinity within 1000 feet - by the people or organization that owned the materials used to build the areas. Indefinite, as long as manned, and not requiring registration.

(8) Transferrance of registry - upon establishment of any colony or settlement on a planetary body of no less than 1000 people, and establishment of local government; the provisional government of that settlement will receive the right to register boundaries of their settlement, which they may update from time to time, and have full control of property rights within the boundaries of their settlement - providing they agree to maintain the existing registrations, and adhere to principles of fairness.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[mysidia]

Otherwise, how do you separate people with plans in motion to go there from those who are merely being 'patent trolls'

I suggest require that anyone who wants to claim something visit the place first, build something, place markers and protective barriers completely around it, and prove that they have marked it, by taking pictures back to earth, with their application, in order to establish a claim.

Those 'patent trolls' would likely not have even tried to visit the site

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[shutdown -p now]

There needs to be something in between these extremes, like "stake your claim, but if you don't actively use it within 5 years, you lose it". Or, "stake your claim, but you must rent it for a reasonable rate".

Or "stake your claim, but now that it's your property, you get to pay a property tax".

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[Thiez]

And who will be the receiver of all these payments? What will they do with the money?

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[heypete]

I'll volunteer to receive those payments.

As for what to do with the money, how about a Scrooge McDuck-style vault?

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[i kan reed]

Tell that to satellite owners.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[icebraining]

Tell what? They don't own empty space itself, just an object that's in it.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[cusco]

And that expensive satellite launched into the wrong orbit or which the uplink receiver failed? Who owns it? Whoever launched it but can't "use" it? Or whoever grabs it, fixes it and can now "use" it?

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[cusco]

The previously mentioned international body, used to enforce the agreements. I personally feel "international" is the wrong place to start, it needs to be completely extra-national or you will end up with something like the UN with its Security Counsel.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[khallow]

And that expensive satellite launched into the wrong orbit or which the uplink receiver failed?

Is it abandoned? There are already rules for when people just leave stuff at sea. I'm sure they'd only need to be slightly modified to cover what you're talking about here.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[i kan reed]

Then along comes another satellite occupying a coterminous orbit. Oops.

Come on, think man.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[mysidia]

And who will be the receiver of all these payments? What will they do with the money?

The entity so appointed. They will use the money to fund their operations, eg to hire employees to process and validate registrations.

And they will also utilize them to conduct enforcement actions -- just because you have claims, registrations and rights, does not mean you won't also have lawbreakers; unless there are mechanisms of enforcement, the claims/rules would simply be ignored.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[mysidia]

The previously mentioned international body, used to enforce the agreements. I personally feel "international" is the wrong place to start, it needs to be completely extra-national or you will end up with something like the UN with its Security Counsel.

It needs to be approved by the nations on earth, and treaties put into place, to ensure the organization can enforce the rules, by penalizing people, organizations, entities, or freezing assets on earth, based on violations of "space law"; eg it needs to be able to make doing so unprofitable.

Once there are enough people not living on earth, the organization has to become not just international, but interplanetary, in order to remain relevant. Which means gaining enforcement arms: police, and military forces in space and stationed on nearby planets, ready to respond to law violations.

Re:Don't worry, there is plenty

[RockDoctor]

Otherwise, how do you separate people with plans in motion to go there from those who are merely being 'patent trolls' by claiming something and doing nothing with it?

Claims to a particular piece of real estate shouldn't be valid until physical contact has been made with the body in question, at the site in question.

You could have a moderately interesting conversation about how big an area each "touch down marker" ("stake", whatever you call it) covers. Whether it would be simpler to define it as a radius around the "marker". Maybe minor below a certain diameter would only need one stake to secure the whole object.

( I just went off on an excursion to try to find the distribution of minor planet diameters. From http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/plot/OrbEls10.gif I get a distribution of absolute magnitudes, and from http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/Sizes.html I get an approximate converter for absolute magnitude to diameter. Combining the two, I get that the commonest brightness for minor planets is around 16.5, corresponding to a diameter of around 1300-3000 m. So a 10 km sphere around a "marker" would cover most asteroids and a little over 300sq.km of a larger object's surface. Meanwhile, landing accuracy ellipses for landers are already comparable to that, and are getting better. )

plan B just patent stuff needed to get to space

[Joe_Dragon]

plan B just patent stuff needed to get to space even if it's just the smallest of things.

Re:plan B just patent stuff needed to get to space

[Githaron]

Those patents wouldn't be worth much if no one can claim ownership of the things that they bring back with the patented technology.

Get off my lawn

[AmiMoJo]

I already bought all the best bits of moon. Now get off my land!

Re:Get off my lawn

[dimeglio]

I claim all inhabitable planets in all galaxies to be mine. Except for two which I offer to my wife.

Re:Get off my lawn

[Shark]

Private property already barely exists on earth... Fat chance of that in space. As a previous poster said, it all boils down to the larger guns and that makes it a government-only game in space and on earth. If your government is nice, it can let you pretend that the property is yours (at a recurring cost of course) so long as it doesn't need it for its own ends.

Re:Get off my lawn

[garyebickford]

I'm not sure how this is relevant, but I'm reminded of the quote by (supposedly) Chief Crazy Horse: "How can you own land? How can you own a piece of the Mother Earth?"

As a matter of fact, your last point is interesting. My father greatly disliked Franklin Roosevelt for many reasons. One of them was that under Roosevelt the structure of the US was changed. As my father put it, prior to some laws passed by Roosevelt when one owned a piece of property, you were sovereign - there were very few, limited cases that allowed the government to use it or take it. But under Roosevelt the government was basically turned into a corporation, and all land became the property of the government. When you 'bought a piece of land', all you were buying is a temporary right to occupy it and manage it within certain constraints. - just as you say.

As someone becoming active in projects related to space development, I'm thinking that some form of international regulatory body will be constructed (by demand of those working in the area more than anyone else), that does provide some form of mining/occupation rights for limited times based on continued use. We do have lots of precedent on Earth, based on international boundaries law, mining law, and maritime law. For example by law if a marine vessel is in distress, all vessels (of whatever size) within a reasonable distance are required by maritime law to provide assistance. That is one reason (in addition to pure niceness and fellow-sailor regard) that you'll hear of a 600 foot container ship detouring 50 miles and spending 1/2 day saving a couple of blokes on a sailboat in the middle of nowhere. I think you'll see equivalent laws, or legal precedents from Earth being applied, in similar circumstances.

However I expect/hope that the Space law will also include reasonable attempts at not messing things up too badly. The present legal situation with regard to space junk is improving, but there's a long way to go. Legally each nation and company is liable for damage caused by their vehicle or parts thereof. But until just a few years ago there was no mandate for each satellite to incorporate a mechanism for it to be de-orbited safely, so a lot of old junk up there will be in the way for many years.

Re:Get off my lawn

[slick7]

I already bought all the best bits of moon. Now get off my land!

That's interesting, America, treaties, and get off my land.You might want to talk to some Native Americans about that.
Treaties, like locks only keep honest people at bay. The arrogant, self-centered, "I'm entitled" types only understand the end of a gun or the end of a rope.

Re:Get off my lawn

[mysidia]

I claim all inhabitable planets in all galaxies to be mine. Except for two which I offer to my wife.

I claim the void space in between Earth and all inhabitable and uninhabitable planets, asteroids, comets, stars, black holes, quasars, dark matter, and other objects, in all galaxies to be mine.

And i'm hanging up no trespassing signs. So if someone wants to get to one of those inhabitable planets other than earth; I will be happy to negotiate that, for the proper toll in rent of extended passage through my property :-)

TL;DR?

[mcgrew]

Short version (it's a very long article)

There is precedent in the U.S. federal government's history of land grants to railroad corporations -- once the corporation owned the land, it had a strong incentive to increase the land's value by laying track. The situations are not quite parallel: in that case, the land rights only covered surface uses, not mineral rights; and of course, in the case of the Moon, the federal government has no land to grant. But while the general recognition of secured property rights would here take the place of grants from a previous governmental owner, the central premise still applies.

In the scenario envisioned here, the government would recognize claims and register titles, and claimants could then begin to grant, sell, and trade property deeds.

Re:TL;DR?

[TheRealMindChild]

So, the moon plot that I bought isn't really mine?

Re:TL;DR?

[candude43]

In the scenario envisioned here, the government would recognize claims and register titles, and claimants could then begin to grant, sell, and trade property deeds.

Whose government?

Re:TL;DR?

[jeffmeden]

In the scenario envisioned here, the government would recognize claims and register titles, and claimants could then begin to grant, sell, and trade property deeds.

Don't forget, that if you are short on cash you can sell the improvements for half their price, flip the deed over and mortgage it.

Oops, this is about the moon, sorry, I had it confused with a different fictional scenario.

Re:TL;DR?

[jythie]

The question would be how to resolve governmental control, which government can grant which chunks of land to who, and what laws people on those plots need to follow.

Arguments about regulation aside... I think most of us can agree that private space countries that do not even have the pretense of a judicial system are a scary concept.... and not one that has historically gone very well.

Re:TL;DR?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Outer space has no owner

Whoever goes there and brings the most guns owns it..

Re:TL;DR?

[mcgrew]

I didn't write the article, I only quoted it.

Re:TL;DR?

[chill]

Only if you go there and plant little flags to mark the boundaries of the claim.

Re:TL;DR?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Silly goofball. And you should be ashamed for assuming primacy of groups of jackasses on Earth labeling themselves "government" and deigning to declare ownership over the solar system, like European countries declaring ownership of the rest of the planet.

Shameful. That attitude needs to die like a pig in Hell.
Go to a new place and plant your flag. That's all you need. Any government that does more or refuses to "recognize" *is* the evil enemy .

Most of the world's polluted, diseased politics needs to stay bound to Earth, with giant lasers shooting any shiploads of people dragging it with them down.

DNA spread yes! Meme spread no!

Re:TL;DR?

[maxwell demon]

Of course if you consider that flag as a sign of ownership, one has to ask how far does the ownership reach. The Sea of Tranquility? All places on moon from where you can see the flag? All places on moon which were visited by astronauts? The complete moon?

Re:TL;DR?

[joh]

Whoever goes there and brings the most guns owns it.

I think if it's going to happen this way it won't happen at all. Everything you're doing there is extremely expensive anyway and having to defend it is going to make it so much more expensive that nobody will bother with it to begin with.

Either we will find better and more civilized ways to manage that or we will just sit here on this rock forever. And we will deserve it then, in my opinion.

Re:TL;DR?

[garyebickford]

A valid question, with an interesting non-answer. IIRC according to the Moon Treaties, no nation may lay claim to any part of the Moon. But there is no language in the treaty regarding private claims. It is not certain that there is any legal connection between a private entity and a nation, especially these days when a corporation may have branches in 100 countries. So at this time nobody can say whether a private claim on the Moon would be legally sound. (Which effectively means, "first come, first served - try and stop me!") This is one of many areas of uncertainty today that are concerning everyone involved in space development.

Re:TL;DR?

[garyebickford]

Nope - according to the Moon Treaties, no nation may lay claim to any part of the Moon. But there is no language, or precedent, applying to private entities. I.e., nobody knows. This is a huge area of concern for everyone involved in space development. One fairly obvious outcome, should this not be resolved soon, will be "first come, first served - who's going to stop me?" And shortly thereafter, declarations to the effect, "We hereby declare the area of Tycho Brache to be sovereign territory." And then the wars. Hopefully a legal structure will be agreed before we get that far - that's essentially what happened in the European colonial period, but over five centuries a large body of treaties, laws and legal precedents were worked out that should be useful as a prototype.

Re:TL;DR?

[garyebickford]

The Greeks were into knowledge as an abstract, and weren't much interested in mining or colonization. Had they been a bit more practical, they might have developed electricity, steam power and much more 2000+ years earlier, and we might already be living on the Moon.

Re:TL;DR?

[garyebickford]

I think we have a window of opportunity - a fairly long one. Most companies prefer to work in a predictable, safe environment (not counting the inherent dangers). The days of the East India Company having their own army and navy are past. That's a very expensive way to operate. Both nations and companies operated that way largely because there was little or no legal structure. Today we have a large body of law, treaties and legal precedent such as maritime law, much of which can be extended into space largely by United Nations agreement, so every nation can require every private entity based in that nation to operate according to its laws, which are derived from the UN treaties. There are many significant holes, and there's a lot of work going on in this area, but I think we've all gotten a lot more 'civilized' about this stuff, so I'm hopeful.

Re:TL;DR?

[garyebickford]

Yes, but it's not a flag of claiming - under the Moon Treaties, no nation can claim any part of the moon. OTOH, there is no language regarding private parties - that's where the legal work needs to be done.

Re:TL;DR?

[khallow]

Nope - according to the Moon Treaties

How relevant is a treaty which is signed by only a few countries? Virtually all of the serious space faring countries haven't signed the treaty, meaning they don't have to abide by its restrictions. Only a few of the ESA countries have, France being the most significant.

Re:TL;DR?

[icebraining]

The US didn't sign the Moon Treaty, what it defines is irrelevant to the issue.

Re:TL;DR?

[garyebickford]

Good point. I had forgotten. There are several treaties about space, and I believe the one that says "No nation can claim any part of the moon" was signed by the US. ... Ahh, here it is. The Outer Space Treaty, signed initially in 1967 by US, UK and USSR and over 100 countries since then, is described in Wikipedia as follows. So the interesting question is whether a private party is under the same restrictions by dint of being a subsidiary entity to a nation. The language in the last paragraph cited could be interpreted to mean that a private entity or its equipment or facilities outside the Earth's gravitational well are not subject to any nation's sovereignty.

The Outer Space Treaty represents the basic legal framework of international space law. Among its principles, it bars States Parties to the Treaty from placing nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction in orbit of Earth, installing them on the Moon or any other celestial body, or to otherwise station them in outer space. It exclusively limits the use of the Moon and other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes and expressly prohibits their use for testing weapons of any kind, conducting military maneuvers, or establishing military bases, installations, and fortifications (Art.IV). However, the Treaty does not prohibit the placement of conventional weapons in orbit. The treaty also states that the exploration of outer space shall be done to benefit all countries and shall be free for exploration and use by all the States.

The treaty explicitly forbids any government from claiming a celestial resource such as the Moon or a planet, claiming that they are the Common heritage of mankind.[2] Art. II of the Treaty states that "outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means". However, the State that launches a space object retains jurisdiction and control over that object.[3] The State is also liable for damages caused by their space object and must avoid contaminating space and celestial bodies.[4]

Re:TL;DR?

[garyebickford]

Sorry, I was mistaken about which treaty. I looked it up, and the relevant treaty is the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967 by US, UK and USSR and since then by over 100 other countries. I already posted a quote from the Wikipedia article in another reply so I'll defer this time.

Re:TL;DR?

[Dyolf Knip]

Sure. But what happens if someone else goes there and takes it down?

The flag by itself is meaningless if the US can't contest its removal.

Re:TL;DR?

[khallow]

And the thing about treaties is that they are valid only as long as the signatories choose to abide by them. My view is that the Outer Space Treaty and similar stuff will only last until it's more valuable to withdraw from the treaty.

Things are complicated by the other aspects of the Outer Space Treaty (such as restrictions on militarization of space and responsibility for third party harm caused by a space activity) so it is possible for some powerful party hostile to private property in space to complicate any attempt to withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty.

But in the end, there's a lot of tax to be collected from private activities in space and the other things that the Outer Space Treaty does can be put into a new treaty.

Re:TL;DR?

[garyebickford]

Also, for at least the next few decades and perhaps centuries, possibly long enough for things to have matured, every activity in space will continue to be to some extent dependent on traffic with Earth - components and foods that are not yet made in space, minerals that are hard to find or produce, and not least, the financial transaction network. It's going to be a while before the Bank of Tycho Brache opens for business (hopefully by an organization I'm involved with, but that's another story). So embargoes will continue to be an effective tool for 'encouraging' acceptable behavior.

Even after Earth support is not strictly essential I don't think most sizable organizations in space are going to be interested in going crazy. There will likely be a few loners, and maybe a few gamblers who set up dens of iniquity, but I can't see that ever being more than a side show. Survival and success in space are going to require a lot of cooperation for a long time. You screw your neighbor, or screw up and injure your neighbor, and nobody is going to come to your aid when you need it. That's almost always been the de facto code of exploration and life in dangerous places.

I guess I think that we as a civilization have largely outgrown the ways of the past (despite some counter examples that exist today - but those are almost entirely in 3rd world cultures). Maybe I'm whistling in the dark, but I think it's going to be a long time before anyone who is really outside the bounds of modern corporate and financial norms will be able to get together the money to do anything big in space. I don't see the House of Harkonnen arising any time soon - at least until we have interstellar colonization.

But maybe I'm an optimist. I like to think we've made progress since the 1500s.

Re:TL;DR?

[khallow]

Even after Earth support is not strictly essential I don't think most sizable organizations in space are going to be interested in going crazy. There will likely be a few loners, and maybe a few gamblers who set up dens of iniquity, but I can't see that ever being more than a side show. Survival and success in space are going to require a lot of cooperation for a long time. You screw your neighbor, or screw up and injure your neighbor, and nobody is going to come to your aid when you need it. That's almost always been the de facto code of exploration and life in dangerous places.

I'm a bit puzzled by the apparent emphasis on crazies in space. If one looks at the New World after colonization started, there have been some nasty wars, but most of these have been small in scale (such as King Phillip's War, a particularly notorious example of a large number of wars with American Indian tribes). There have been three notable wars in the New World, the Mexican revolution of 1911-1920, the US Civil War of 1861-1865, and the Paraguayan War of 1864-1870. All had a bit of craziness to them, but only the last one was high grade crazy (Paraguay declared war on its three neighbors, two who were bigger than it was economically, and fought until at least 60% of the population had died).

Instead, one merely needs to look to the Old World to see plenty of high grade crazy wars. The First and Second World Wars started in Europe. There was the Taiping Rebellion in China. The Russian Civil War. The Thirty Years' War. The Napoleonic Wars.

The problem wasn't that the New World was chock full of crazies (it was to some degree and remains so today), but that the real problem for the New World was keeping the craziness (and huge body counts) of the Old World from spilling over.

So by analogy, why it is possible for a space-side power to do considerable damage to Earth (say dropping nukes or asteroids on population centers), I bet most of the trouble will run the other way.

Re:TL;DR?

[garyebickford]

I don't think we are disagreeing - I was thinking back to folks like Pizarro (who I would put in the 'high grade crazy' category, and was certainly European. But looking at your list makes me less confident! I was more or less comforting myself in the relatively uncrazy last few decades - there are some crazy dictators still hanging on in various places but that scene does seem to gradually be fading out. But then we do see apparently civilized places going completely nuts (Nagorno Karabach, for example), so maybe our 'progress' toward the modern world is just a veneer.

I did mention to a friend just recently how glad I was that there was a large ocean between me and the one big supercontinent where land armies can run essentially unimpeded from the far reaches of Asia to Europe and South Africa. But getting over here requires additional effort. This is because, if the economic system continues to fall apart on Earth or the food system fails to continue its growth to match demand, things could get ugly real fast. (Though it's worth noting that this year, like most of the previous recent years, is actually the best in history - lowest poverty, lowest starvation, best mean standard of living, lowest death rate, etc.)

One of the reasons I'm an advocate of rapid space development is that, like the New World in the 1500s, space offers both technological advances and increased availability of essential resources (in the longer run), which I believe will make life on Earth easier, and may help to prevent the kind of catastrophe that a couple of bad crop years could generate. (Econ 101: the only way to improve the standard of living in a mature economy is technological advance.) I think a thriving space economy and community will in the long term tend to encourage a more stable Earth culture as well - it's hard to explain, I just think so.

Re:TL;DR?

[cusco]

A nice thing about space is that there is no local population that needs to be slaughtered first.

Re:TL;DR?

[cusco]

And if Kiribati isn't a signatory to the Treaty all Barrack Mining needs to do is found a subsidiary based in a lawyer's office there and they're free to go do whatever they want.

Re:TL;DR?

[cusco]

Except that the cost to entry is a wee bit higher than a team of horses, a Conestoga wagon and a Winchester rifle. Blackwater (or whatever its name is today) will be enforcing the whim of the highest bidder, and it won't take them long before they incorporate their own version of 'Rods From God' into their arsenal (already the world's largest no-governmental weapons cache) too. This is probably the scariest thing about the whole privatization of space to me, that we're removing access from governments, which have at least a nominal responsibility to function for the common good, and handing it over to the corporate sociopaths.

Re:TL;DR?

[cusco]

All the corporate psychopaths have to do is incorporate a subsidiary in Kiribati or some other non-signatory nation and they're not bound by the treaty. Rather like how Exxon can't be prosecuted under US law for hiring Triple Canopy mercenaries to slaughter indigenous peoples in the Niger Delta, since it's a Bermuda subsidiary actually signing the contract.

Re:TL;DR?

[cusco]

Corporation spread - not just 'no' but FUCK NO!!!

Re:TL;DR?

[garyebickford]

Yes, but when they want to order space-qualified repair parts that are only available from US, UK or Russia the embargoes kick in. So if those nations pass laws preventing delivery of those parts to companies that don't follow their rules, such a company would be 'grounded' in the worst possible way - running out of air, and needing a critical valve replacement just for example. IOW, there are ways, if there is a political will.

Note that, assuming the events you describe (which I haven't heard of but don't deny could be), Exxon could be prosecuted in Bermuda. And some of the new laws and regulations in the US make the parent corporations liable for the acts of subsidiaries in increasingly broad ways, at least for civil action and often for criminal action. The real problem is visibility - it can be hard to get actionable evidence in the middle of a jungle. Space activities are going to be very visible for a long time, for reasons I can't take the time to elaborate just now.

I'll just add that the 'corporate psychopaths' are even now a small minority of people running companies, and I think probably smaller than was historically true (vis. the Robber Barons). And the percentage of psychopaths is roughly the same for any type of organization, whether corporation, government, NGO, or union - the scale of the organization is the determining factor. Power seekers will use whatever medium suits them. One might say that the Constitutional separation of powers is a mechanism to prevent psychopaths from taking over government - as is also the right to bear arms and the right to revolution. And, in corporate world, the right to vote a new board of directors and kick out the CEO - an unfortunately rarely used tool.

The tricky thing with space

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that everything is always moving.

other problem

[Trepidity]

all of these — especially the efforts to mine resources in space — are hampered by the fact that existing treaties, like the Outer Space Treaty, seem to prohibit private ownership of space resources

That is one problem, but a somewhat bigger problem is that nobody has yet come up with a plan to mine moon rocks and return them to earth where the cost of the missions doesn't greatly exceed the value of the rocks.

That's why, unsurprisingly, even folks like Jain who claim that "private companies can do things better" are wholly dependent on taxpayer subsidies.

Re:other problem

[X0563511]

Just wait. Eventually various materials will become rare or entirely used, and the value of the rocks won't matter. You need it.

Re:other problem

[w_dragon]

The plan Page/Schmidt had involved using the rocks to build things in orbit, not sending down the rocks. The idea being that creating the heavy infrastructure for space stations could be done without having to get it out of the gravity well. The price they're chasing is the price of launching rockets with giant chunks of space station attached, not the price of raw materials on Earth. Not to say that they're anywhere near capturing an asteroid and figuring out how to refine ores in space, but I hear they have a bit of cash to blow before they give up.

Re:other problem

[jythie]

Maybe, maybe not. Unless there is some breakthrough, moving stuff into orbit will continue to be very expensive, probably more expensive then increasingly advanced recycling techniques.

Re:other problem

[Chris Mattern]

Unless there is some breakthrough, moving stuff into orbit will continue to be very expensive

If only there was stuff already *in* orbit. If only people were planning means of accessing the stuff that's already in orbit. Alas...

Re:other problem

[X0563511]

If you need it, and the only way to get it is expensive launching, then you will either eat the cost or you will find a way to do it cheaper ("you" in this case meaning whomever needs it, or us in general).

Recycling won't get us any more material than we already had. Eventually that will not be enough.

Re:other problem

[cusco]

In my lifetime iron was too expensive to ship from one country to another. Today we hardly mine any of it in the US since it's cheaper to bring it from halfway around the world. When my grandfather was young it was too expensive to ship wheat or corn across the Atlantic Ocean (except during the world wars), only finished goods were shipped from one continent to the other (and not many of those).

Homesteading

[tmosley]

Governments tend to prefer to pretend that natural rights don't exist, imagining that the rights of the people come from THEM. But the truth is that they do exist. Homesteading is one such right. By mixing one's labor with the land, whether it is rolling plain, or an asteroid, one gains ownership of that land.

Governments have the guns though. But then, the space miners would have the asteroids, so I would guess that they would leave them be after the first asteroid made a near miss of the planet.

Re:Homesteading

[SuricouRaven]

Your 'homesteading' right is ultimately defeated by an even more natural right: The right of he who has the sniper rifle to shoot you and your family from a safe distance, then come loot your home and take over your land.

Rights are an artificial construct, and exist only so long as they can be enforced either directly (Employ enough guards to secure your home against any threat) or indirectly (Have a government that will, reasonably reliably, either defend you or remove the economic incentive for attack by finding and imprisoning the attacker afterwards). A right that is not in some way backed up by physical force simply doesn't exist: You can whine all you want about your 'right' to property, but it won't do you one bit of good if there isn't ultimately the threat of violence to back it up.

In space violence isn't very practical, so property rights would be backed up by the threat of governmental seizure of the earthbound assets of offending companies or individuals... and again, you still need the men with guns sitting around somewhere just in case a CEO converts all company product to gold and tries to hide it in an abandoned mine. Not that any of them would be that stupid, because they know that if they defy a court ruling long enough sooner or later violence will happen.

Re:Homesteading

[Niris]

Read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein. They had prisoners who mined on the moon, and when they rebelled against the government, they hurled down moon rocks. Good little story.

Re:Homesteading

[jythie]

'natural rights' are meaningless. Rights only exist in so far as something strong enough can stop people from violating them. Take away that state force and it just comes down to people having the resources to stop others.. in other words, become states.

'Homesteading' has nothing natural to it.. it was a piece of paper from the government saying that they would let you go settle in someone else's territory, and if those people got uppity you had the backing of the military.

Re:Homesteading

[elfprince13]

You're confusing homestead grants with the Homesteading Theory of Property Rights.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

You are an idiot. Homesteading has existed for all of history. One guy with a sniper rifle can't take away someone else's land because everyone recognizes the rights of the homesteader, while very few recognize the rights of the thief. The thief/murderer will be killed for his crimes, whether by police in a state, or by aggrieved relatives in an anarchic state.

You shouldn't talk about things you have no background in. Rights are no more artificial than society. They both exist, even if pigheaded fools like yourself claim they don't.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

Looking at something is not the same as mixing your labor with it.

Re:Homesteading

[impossiblefork]

Though, while rights might not come from governments property a thing might still not become ones own because one mixed ones labour with it.

Imagine a class of young children drawing on paper, with paper being abundant. Then there would be no reason for anyone to take anyone elses paper and taking anyone elses paper against their will would be wrong.

However, if paper were not abundant, and one class had drawn- and then declared that their labour had been mixed with the paper and that they had the right to exclude a second class from drawing on the back of their drawings, then surely that would surely not be right. At least not if the paper was running out.

I do not think that it is whether ones labour is mixed with a thing that is the reason why one can say that one owns it (although it may be a part), but instead that a thing is ones own in as much as it does not deprive anyone else of anything. So that abundant things could genuinely be owned, but couldn't once they became scarce.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

Why dumbass? I specifically said that was the case. The government has all the big guns, so they get to violate our rights, to a point. This has all happened before (many, many times), and it will all happen again, until and unless people learn to recognize natural rights as real.

Re:Homesteading

[TubeSteak]

Homesteading is one such right. By mixing one's labor with the land, whether it is rolling plain, or an asteroid, one gains ownership of that land.

Autonomous robotic equipment should be considered as abandoned.
You're not homesteading unless you actually go out there and put boots on the ground.
Otherwise, what's to stop me from sending out swarms of tiny robots with beacons and laying claim to every asteroid within a reasonable orbit?

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

I would suggest you bone up on pre-colonization history. North American Indians were sedentary farmers prior to the arrival of the white men and their horses. They owned land, and were powerful. The only problem was that they had no immunity to the white man's sicknesses, which caused their numbers to decline in advance of the advance of the settlers. Indeed, the settlers described a land that seemed made for human habitation, though mostly empty. Sort of like aliens arriving a few months after a zombie apocalypse and thinking that the great cities they found and repurposed were somehow part of nature here. Then, of course, scoffing at the lawless brigands roaming the roads on souped up motorcycles as savages.

Those men were made into savages by their circumstances, and they forgot about property and natural rights, and as such, were destroyed by those who firmly believed in them. It's one of the saddest chapters in human history.

Re:Homesteading

[pclminion]

You are an idiot. Homesteading has existed for all of history. One guy with a sniper rifle can't take away someone else's land because everyone recognizes the rights of the homesteader, while very few recognize the rights of the thief.

You are missing the point. The guy with the sniper rifle can just kill everyone who disputes his claim on the land. Your "rights" are a gentlemen's agreement between members of society. They can exist only if backed by force. Otherwise, the force user will eliminate those who eschew force. This isn't about civilization, it's about the laws of physics.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

Eh? So I can go take over a GM plant?

Robots are improvements, and are implicitly mixing ones labor (construction of said robot) with the land via the robot's operation (assuming they are improving the land, rather than simply walking around looking at things or just sitting there). If the robots are broken down, and no attempt is made to repair or retrieve them, only THEN do they become abandoned property.

You can send out all the swarms you want, but their simple presence doesn't grant you any rights. They have to work the land somehow. If you produce that much good, then you can own that much land. Work harder, get more. This is the principle that turned America from an agricultural backwater into an industrial superpower. Abandonment of this principle has since turned us from an industrial superpower into floundering consumer kleptocracy.

Re:Homesteading

[perrin]

Natural rights is an interesting topic, indeed. However, if there is ever a right that is entirely artificial, then it is property. The labor mixing argument has largerly fallen out of serious consideration in philosophical circles these days, being subject to way too many intrinsic problems.

Like, if I make a a glass of juice and pour it into the ocean, does that make the ocean mine, or did I just waste it?

Once you start looking at the enormous variety of property claims that exist, then you realize that property is better regarded as a cluster of disparate right claims rather than a single "has" or "has not" claim to owning something.

In context of the TFA, they apparently do not pause to consider that any property has to be grounded in some national law or another, or an entirely new body of law with their own courts has to be created for them.

Space has no need of such antiquated notions of property. Once we start getting there, we need agreements (and contracts) to delineate who can do what where, and those agreements will probably and hopefully cover vastly overlapping areas, not create artificial borders etched in stone like an Africa carved up by Europeans - whichi was and will be a blueprint for endless future conflict.

Re:Homesteading

[jythie]

One is the implementation of the other. The homesteading grants were an attempt to put the theory into practice by adding the necessary government backing to make such 'appropriations' stick.

Re:Homesteading

[Dynedain]

One guy with a sniper rifle can't take away someone else's land because everyone recognizes the rights of the homesteader, while very few recognize the rights of the thief.

Tell that to Palestine/Israel, or any one on a number of disputed regions where people have been arguing ownership rights for thousands of years.

Re:Homesteading

[elfprince13]

Sure, but the theory is based on natural rights philosophy (independent of government meddling) and is a prescriptive theory of how legal systems should operate, rather than descriptive theory of how they do operate.

Re:Homesteading

[shutdown -p now]

"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."

"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."

- Thomas Jefferson

Re:Homesteading

[shutdown -p now]

I see that libertarian history is as disconnected from reality as libertarian economics...

Re:Homesteading

[SuricouRaven]

"One guy with a sniper rifle can't take away someone else's land because everyone recognizes the rights of the homesteader, while very few recognize the rights of the thief."

So? Without the threat of violence, the sniper could just sit back on his newly-conquored land, sip his victory beer and raise his middle finger to everyone else. Why should he care what they think? Only because they have a police force that will physically haul him off to jail.

Re:Homesteading

[SuricouRaven]

That 'civilised way' is still dependant on the use of force in some manner. Otherwise anyone who wanted woul simply 'opt out' of the social agreement when it suited them.

Re:Homesteading

[jythie]

True, though getting back to the earlier comment... the person was saying that the government wants to fool people away from the idea, but the original push for the argument came as counteagument to the 'the king's power comes from god'.. so modern government is not only built on the idea but implements it in everything we do.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

Sorry, where did I say that force doesn't exist?

People behave according to certain rules. These simple rules are applied to a complex world to give us a nearly unlimited variety of outcomes, but that set is also governed by those basic rules. No more can a man float in the air by sheer force of will than can he take something that belongs to someone else without being seen negatively by others. Of course, a man can float in the air using clever apparatus, and so also can he steal things from others and be seen as a "necessary evil" or even as a "hero" by others. But such artifices have their limits.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

I wasn't aware that one of those groups of people consisted of a single individual.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

By that definition, society is also an artificial construct. Use of terms such as "artificial construct" imply that those constructs aren't real and can be ignored. They can't. No more than you can ignore an artificial semi tractor trailer coming down the highway at 70 miles and hour as you attempt to cross the road. Ignoring the rights of the people will lead to a similar outcome for any government who takes such action. Even if they clad themselves with tanks, attack helicopters, and assassination drones, the mass of semi tractor trailers won't stop impacting them, and they will eventually be destroyed.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

The Indians died off primarily due to the diseases the white men carried with them which they had no immunity to. The survivors abandoned the land their forefathers had worked, and those claims were picked up by the whites. The survivors of that tragedy were made savage by circumstance, and no longer recognized natural rights, either among themselves, or among the settlers, who they stole from, kidnapped, and murdered. The response to such actions was violence. The Indians were almost completely destroyed because they no longer had any infrastructure left with which to mount a war effort.

Contrast this with the experiences of the Nauhatl people (colloquially known as Aztecs), who recognized and protected SOME natural rights (namely property rights) to a much greater degree. Of course, Tenochtitlan was hated by all around her because of her wholesale slaughter of the children of surrounding areas for religious purposes. This is why a few sailors with a canon were able to conquer an army of 100,000 seasoned warriors. Though their leaders fell, their people survived. Other places which had stronger protections of rights were able to survive to even greater degrees. Those who fully adopted such philosophies (ie Japan) catapulted themselves into modernity and were able to match and often exceed Western military power.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

Why do you think that rights are not associated with violence? Denial of natural rights ALWAYS results in violence. This is why your sniper can't just take someone's land with or without a state. He would be murdered.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

How so? I hadn't realized Guns, Germs, and Steel was written by a libertarian.

Re:Homesteading

[tmosley]

You are laboring under the mistaken assumption that "rights" are things that are not enforced. As in by violence.

Rights exist whether you recognize them or not, same as the train coming down the tracks exists, even if it is artificial. Ignore it, and you will be destroyed by the violence that follows.

Re:Homesteading

[shutdown -p now]

I don't know whom it was written by, or whether it even says what you claim it says, but the notion that "North American Indians were sedentary farmers" is plainly wrong. Yes, they didn't have horses before Europeans arrived, which is why they used sled dogs instead. They most certainly never had the notion of individual land ownership, either - it was all collectively owned by the tribe. Pretty much no known culture at this level of development groks private ownership on land - this pattern was repeated again and again elsewhere in other colonies, e.g. with Australian Aborigines and Maori.

Re:Homesteading

[pclminion]

The violence is quite real. The "rights" are just the abstractions that people say they are defending when they employ violence. You can put your hand on your heart and gaze into the sky with great pomp and seriousness if you want to, but that doesn't make your rights anything more than flutterings in your brain.

If you can defend it, it's yours

[Attila Dimedici]

There are currently no governments with the ability to enforce their laws in space. Therefor if you can get to it in space and defend it from those who want to take it from you, it's yours. Of course, if you want to sell some of it back on earth, you will need to get governments to agree to let you sell it (unless of course you smuggle it in, but that is yet an additional expense).

Re:If you can defend it, it's yours

[jythie]

In other words, form a government and get recognized by other governments.

Re:If you can defend it, it's yours

[Khashishi]

That's incorrect. As long as the government has its headquarters on Earth, it is vulnerable to attack.

Re:Or every private endevor in space can lease fro

[spire3661]

That is you enslaving men even as they venture out into the stars. "Dont go too far bold adventurer, you owe us and we shall be paid, no matter how far afield you wander." Fuck you.

Similarity to the New World...

[Tomster]

Property rights in space will likely be determined by who gets there first, and who can muscle away the competition, either by military or political means.

Personally, I'm terribly excited about the upcoming prospects for things like asteroid mining and permanent settled colonies on the Moon and Mars (as a couple good early candidates). It looks like we are on the cusp of an explosion in private commercial space flight, exploration, and development. And with China getting into the game, we may have another space race.

Re:Similarity to the New World...

[synapse7]

So is there anything worth mining on the moon?

Re:Similarity to the New World...

[Fluffeh]

I'm pretty sure but not 100% sure helium 3 is there in some abundance.

Actually, the amount of it is amazingly tiny (one to fifty parts per billion) but that is vastly more concentrated than anywhere on earth.

Re:Similarity to the New World...

[compro01]

Significant amounts of chromium, magnesium, aluminum, and titanium, though barring a desperate shortage of said materials on Earth, it would be massively unprofitable to send it back.

Re:Similarity to the New World...

[R3d M3rcury]

And therein lies the rub.

Consider something like gold. Let's say you find yourself a solid gold asteroid, mine it to rubble, and come back to Earth with a hold full of gold. What happens?

That pesky "supply and demand" problem. Suddenly there's a great big supply and the price, therefore, plummets. So your gold isn't that valuable anymore. Which means mining gold--or other valuable minerals--may not be so profitable either.

Re:Similarity to the New World...

[shutdown -p now]

As soon as price plummets below what it takes to mine it there and transport it to Earth, people will stop mining it, and supply dwindles again. It's a self-regulating thing.

Re:Similarity to the New World...

[ShadyG]

Perhaps consult with the DeBeers company regarding strategies to mitigate your problem.

Trickle Down Theory?

[Bob9113]

There are asteroid-mining proposals backed by Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, various moon-mining proposals, and, announced just this month, a proposed moon-tourism venture.

Just shows that Reaganomics got it part right -- if you keep giving more and more money to a smaller and smaller sliver of society, they will find things to spend it on. Unfortunately, not cost efficient things that trickle down to smaller businesses, entrepreneurs, and working people. They spend it on ever more gigantic toys. "Oooh, Larry, let's build a billion dollar spaceship!" Great. Too bad we don't have a thousand small businesses spending that money on labor, rent, stock, and taxes instead.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[dywolf]

Someone has to build the space ship. Is the rich guy gonna do that?
Someone has to design it. Is the rich guy gonna do that?
Someone has to fly it. Is the rich guy gonna do that?
Someone has to maintain it. Is the rich guy gonna do that?
Someone has to launch it. Is the rich guy gonna do that?

I guess all those guys work for free though, right?

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[dpidcoe]

They spend it on ever more gigantic toys. "Oooh, Larry, let's build a billion dollar spaceship!" Great. Too bad we don't have a thousand small businesses spending that money on labor, rent, stock, and taxes instead.

Unless they can wave a magic wand and have the spaceship assemble itself out of the dollar bills that they keep in their swimming pool, it would be pretty hard to keep the money from spreading out everywhere. I'm pretty sure that the billions they spend on the rocket go to all sorts of useful things such as workers to build the rocket, the space to build it in, the engineering firms to design it, the small companies that make crazy one-off things that really only have use in a rocket (don't underestimate how much stuff that no one has ever built before is required), and the payroll taxes to hire all those people.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[dywolf]

You make it sound like the Reagan years and policies were bad.

The economy grew, faster and bigger than it did before and after his term
The poverty level and the population in it shrunk.
The avg family income grew.

"Interest rates, inflation, and unemployment fell faster under Reagan than they did immediately before or after his presidency. The only economic variable that was worse in the Reagan period than in both the pre- and post-Reagan years was the savings rate, which fell rapidly in the 1980s."

Basically nothing you said had anything to do with the 80's.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[Bob9113]

Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it. Every transaction has subsequent transactions that support the economy, and they cancel out. The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[Bob9113]

They weren't "given" money. They organized land, labor and capital in such a way as to create wealth for themselves, their partners/investors, employees and customers that would not otherwise have existed.

That's only perfeclty true if the system is perfectly efficient. If the system is biased against the wealthy, they get paid less than they earn. If it is biased in their favor, they get paid more than they earn. Both cases, interestingly, have occurred in the US within the past 70 years. Check the IRS SOI for back records on income concentration, then compare that to GDP per capita growth rate -- if we have increasing concentration and a decreasing growth rate, it would mean we are paying the wealthy more and getting less growth -- ie: inefficiently distorted in favor of the wealthy. For a second dimension along which to measure, check GDP per capita versus Gini of the world's nations. Here's my chart on PPC/Gini, and I've done the math with the SOI -- but don't take my word for it. Do the research yourself to confirm.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[Bob9113]

Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it. Every transaction has subsequent transactions that support the economy, and they cancel out. The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[Bob9113]

The economy grew, faster and bigger than it did before and after his term
The poverty level and the population in it shrunk.
The avg family income grew.

Same is true of Clinton, but he did it while running a surplus instead of a massive deficit. Oh -- except the part about poverty -- Clinton didn't just shrink it, he set records for shrinking it.

Now, giving Clinton credit for the tech boom isn't fair, but failing to account for Reagan's reckless stimulus spending is equally inappropriate.

Basically nothing you said had anything to do with the 80's.

There is some truth to that -- we did start stimulating the top incomes before Reagan, as a result of failing to adjust the brackets for inflation, which caused them to start to eat into the entrepreneurial set, but Reagan did at least as much more on top of that.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[asylumx]

I know it's been said a dozen times in response to you, but you described exactly what is necessary for trickle-down to work. If the rich guys are spending money, then that money is circulating and doing our economy good. If the rich guys are sitting on a pile of cash in the bank and not spending it (or investing, or anything else to keep it moving) then that is when it actually hurts the economy. Having them spend metric buttloads of cash on crazy inventions is not only good for the economy and the lower-class folks in it, but it's also good for society because, heaven forbid, they might actually discover something useful -- even if it's not quite what they were trying to do.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[James McGuigan]

Most of the time people work because they need money to pay for the requirements of basic survival, things like food, rent and hopefully afford a few extra western luxuries.

Rich guy comes along, he is no longer motivated by the requirements of ensuring basic survival, and could become a professional layabout if he so wished (the idle rich don't get as much publicity). But instead he says, I have a bat shit crazy idea, lets build a moon rocket. Not only that, I'll flow enough money towards the project that food and rent won't be a limiting factor to anybody who wants the fun job of making this happen.

As the poor little peon on the ground, what you mean I get to design a moon rocket and get paid money at the same time?

As for what does the rich guy do personally, well whatever jobs he feels like are most fun, and because he is the one paying the bills, nobody is going to tell him "you are not qualified". Oh, I get to design a spaceship, that sounds like fun... almost as fun as getting to fly one of these things.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[StormyWeather]

Yea, we should definitely take that money away from people who want to build spaceships and further the entire human existence, and give it to small business owners selling beanie babies on eBay, new fad get skinny quick schemes, and plastic disposable toys retailers. /me slaps you with a fish

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[DM9290]

I know it's been said a dozen times in response to you, but you described exactly what is necessary for trickle-down to work. If the rich guys are spending money, then that money is circulating and doing our economy good. If the rich guys are sitting on a pile of cash in the bank and not spending it (or investing, or anything else to keep it moving) then that is when it actually hurts the economy. Having them spend metric buttloads of cash on crazy inventions is not only good for the economy and the lower-class folks in it, but it's also good for society because, heaven forbid, they might actually discover something useful -- even if it's not quite what they were trying to do.

If the government is spending money, then that money is circulating and doing our economy good. If the government is sitting on a pile of cash in the bank and not spending it (or investing, or anything else to keep it moving) then that is when it actually hurts the economy. Having it spend metric buttloads of cash on crazy inventions is not only good for the economy and the lower-class folks in it, but it's also good for society because, heaven forbid, the government might actually discover something useful -- even if it's not quite what it was trying to do.

if I have a choice between letting rich guys waste money and letting the government tax the rich guys and waste the money. I have more reason to support the system that actually lets me vote and participate and is at least officially supposed to be looking out for the publics best interests and not merely itself. That system is a democratic government - not private ownership.

Hell... with enough courage the government might even figure out how to put a man on the moon someday. oh wait.. it did that already!

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[dpidcoe]

The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")

Firstly, good on you for clarifying that (seriously, more discussions need to be that way).

Secondly, the efficiency of the transaction is going to be an extremely complex analysis, especially as you'll have analyze the 1000 small businesses that it's to be compared against (what kind of businesses? how saturated is their market? how interested are the business owners in their business?)

Speaking from my experience working R&D in a company that builds things that no one else has ever built before, I know that a project such as a spaceship isn't going to get completed without involving tons of small businesses. Even small R&D projects usually end up contracting tons of outside machine shop work (even though we have our own machine shop, a lot of places do it better/faster/cheaper, or do things we flat out can't do), and all sorts of obscure businesses that you'd never even think would have anything to do with the project (example: contracting one of a kind high pressure tanks for compressed gas from a 20 person company that manufactures rockets. It was part of a project to make a better high energy density battery).

While contracting those businesses to build something new doesn't necessarily increase wealth in the strict economic definition, it does several things that aren't going to be directly factored into any economic calculations:
- Provides an income stream to small businesses who rely on this sort of stuff in order to stay in business. They might in turn use that money to create wealth according to the definition used in economics.
- Creates innovations that other people/businesses can then leverage to produce wealth. e.g. once an awesome high energy battery hits the market, someone else can use it to found a new company that makes powered exoskeletons for paralyzed people.
- Keeps people employed. If those people don't have money to spend, the economy will tank no matter how much "wealth" you've created.

As for small businesses, it really depends on the business. Years ago I worked for a small photography company. It was based out of the owners garage and employed maybe 30 high school students and 10 photographers part time on the weekends. Every single bit of cash that company earned went straight into increasing the wealth of the owner, while everyone else got minimum wage. If I ran the numbers right (we all knew what each other made, and we knew how much cash we took in during a weekend job), the profit margins were obscene. Yet we still were using broken equipment repaired with duct tape and beating up our own vehicles to transport equipment to/from the jobsites. The owner wouldn't even drop the ~5k it would have cost to switch everyone over to using digital cameras. Hardly the utopian ideal of a great small business working hard for the economy

And one parting thought: From what I remember from macroeconomics, investing in infrastructure is a good way to increase wealth. So on paper, if we tax everyone who makes more than 150k/year at 90% and implement a 100% death tax for the next 20 years in order to invest it all in making a world class road system, 100mbps fiber to everyone's porch, and a powergrid so smart that it becomes self aware, it should do wonders for the economy right?

In reality, I suspect that it would create a new class of superrich, all of whom are nephews of politicians and/or working as power/phone/road company management.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[khallow]

Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it.

So you're claiming that velocity of money is pretty much the same for HFT traders and people who stick money in mattresses? It's not. Such things can differ by many orders of magnitude.

Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses?

It's worth noting here that nobody aside from the US government actually is building a billion dollar space ship. But plenty of people, even in today's poor lending environment, are loaning money to small businesses.

If I had a billion dollars, what small businesses am I to invest in that aren't already covered by hundreds of banks, similar numbers of VC firms, and at least tens of thousands of angel investors?

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[asylumx]

I wholeheartedly agree with you. The gov't is likely to spend it in a more responsible manner. Well, I take that back. We sure have wasted a lot of cash outside our borders on wars and rebuilding the places we've destroyed, so I guess that money doesn't help our economy at all.

Nevertheless, I do think if the rich guy is going to sit on his money, the gov't taking some of it and putting it back into the economy is a good thing for all of us besides that rich guy. Fair? No, but useful anyway.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[khallow]

While I like to think that everyone has in it to become engineers or scientists, I don't think everyone believes me in this.

The problem comes even when you're right. What are those engineers or scientists going to do? We don't need that many engineers or scientists.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[khallow]

if we have increasing concentration and a decreasing growth rate, it would mean we are paying the wealthy more and getting less growth

There are other reasons to have decreasing growth. Such as increasing regulation or a decline in the competitiveness of the US economy, both which have happened and can explain the problems, even including wealth concentration.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[Bob9113]

>> Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it.

> So you're claiming that velocity of money is pretty much the same for HFT traders and people who stick money in mattresses? It's not. Such things can differ by many orders of magnitude.

Yes, you are right, I was being shortsighted. I was only considering the comparison between buying a spaceship and operating a thousand small businesses. In that context, I'm guessing the velocity of money after the transaction is probably in the same rough range, but certainly any evidence that points strongly to a greater velocity on one side or the other should be considered in the whole transaction calculus. My broad generalization is not correct in all contexts.

It's worth noting here that nobody aside from the US government actually is building a billion dollar space ship. But plenty of people, even in today's poor lending environment, are loaning money to small businesses.

If I had a billion dollars, what small businesses am I to invest in that aren't already covered by hundreds of banks, similar numbers of VC firms, and at least tens of thousands of angel investors?

Another way to say this is, "Of the hundreds of banks, VC firms, and tens of thousands of angel investors, none of them think funding an asteroid harvesting spaceship is a better bet than funding small businesses." There may be very good reasons for them to feel that way, and it's not because big bets don't get made; Tesco just dropped two billion on Fresh & Easy. It went down, but it was still a more rational way to allocate resources than these.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[khallow]

Another way to say this is, "Of the hundreds of banks, VC firms, and tens of thousands of angel investors, none of them think funding an asteroid harvesting spaceship is a better bet than funding small businesses."

A point that would be valid, if any of these parties had experience with both launching space ships and starting small businesses and hence, an avenue for making such a comparison. But alas, these are all entities that tend to have a lot of experience in funding small businesses and not very much experience in spacecraft.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[khallow]

You're putting the cart before the horse. There are regulations BECAUSE special interest groups want to pay certain wealthy people (i.e their friends, each other) more

Then how come the economy started to slow when we tried to fix these problems?

When the wealthy manipulate the economy like that, of course your economy would decline in competitiveness. If you believe in capitalism, this manipulation is deplorable because it's not free market. Even if you're a full blown communist believer in central planning, this manipulation is still bad, because the wealthy are not supposed to be the central planners (it's supposed to be Big Brother who plans eveything)

As I see it, this is classic unintended consequences of historical attempts to fix the very problems you're complaining about now. The rich are simply better at the game that was created than you are.

For example, with the increasing globalization of trade, what has the US done to make US labor more employable? It's made it harder and more costly to employ people. I think that's accelerated the trend of moving jobs out of the country and in turn increased the gap between the workers who get their wealth from work, which has a depressed value right now (due to all that competition), and the rich who get their income ultimately from capital (which hasn't experienced a similar decline).

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[khallow]

I agree. Which is why I don't buy "unintended consequences". They (the rich, the special interest groups) know exactly what the consequences are, and they figured out what's the best way to profit from those consequences, which keeps them rich.

The thing is that the rich weren't the driving force behind the biggest regulations of the past forty years. Instead it was large voting populations who wanted certain things fixed, such as pollution or today's income inequity.

For example, the recent Obamacare didn't start as a giveaway to insurance companies and others. It started as an urge to get a common level of health care insurance and care beyond that of emergency rooms.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[Bob9113]

A point that would be valid, if any of these parties had experience with both launching space ships and starting small businesses and hence, an avenue for making such a comparison.

The expertise in these people is not investing in small businesses, it is risk management. That's what they study, their passion, the value they add. Their specialty is looking at potential investments of capital and making the best possible calculation of whether it will produce a return that justifies the risk. Their kind has a long and storied history of investing in highly unknown fields, including sending ships into the unkown to seek riches. Here is a good book on the topic.

But alas, these are all entities that tend to have a lot of experience in funding small businesses and not very much experience in spacecraft.

The people who are providing the funding in the case under consideration also have zero experience in spacecraft. Additionally, they are not specialists in risk management.

Re:Trickle Down Theory?

[khallow]

The expertise in these people is not investing in small businesses, it is risk management.

No, risk management is too broad a term for what they do. If you put a VC or banker in insurance or a casino, they aren't automatically going to do well because of their past risk management experience. They'll have some advantage due to their past experiences, but they'll still need to learn the ropes to avoid major risks. Same goes with space projects. There's a lot to learn.

And angel investors generally aren't specialists in any sort of risk management.

The people who are providing the funding in the case under consideration also have zero experience in spacecraft. Additionally, they are not specialists in risk management.

And who would those people be? A big group is NASA which has the experience. On the private side we have a number of founders who might not have started with all that much experience (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and John Carmack), but they definitely have it now.

Come to think of it, nobody is born with that experience. So you can point to any investor and claim that at some point they didn't have the experience.

So once again, why should bankers, VCs, etc who already operate in successful areas gamble on a sector that they know nothing about? Why should that be a big deal? Wouldn't you say that a key goal of risk management is to understand your risks as best you can?

We'd see what we do see whether or not space activities have near future profit potential. Investors who have considerable knowledge of a risky field are the ones who end up investing in that risky field.

Here is a good book on the topic.

Sounds interesting, but irrelevant to our discussion. One doesn't need a history lesson to see that risk management is not a broadly interchangeable field that operates independent of a considerable specialized body of knowledge.

Awesome ...

[gstoddart]

Bring on the space pirates.

But, more seriously, I think the problem was when that treaty was signed, it took the resources of a nation-state to get someone into space. And now increasingly, it's private corporations doing this.

At some point, someone will actually land something on an asteroid or something and say "we own this now", so at some point, this really is going to be needed.

This life-ending Asteroid has been brought to you by Coca Cola.

Re:Awesome ...

[Westwood0720]

And the name of the asteroid is Dottie.

Possession

[Lanforod]

How about just using the good ol' 'Possession is 9/10ths of the law'?
Whats wrong with that? Not like we need to worry about space pirates just yet, and there are always legal avenues on Earth for pursuing criminals.

Re:Possession

[jythie]

If private entities get out there then that is probably what will determine who owns what. However, if they still have terrestrial assets like bank accounts or buy supplies then they will still be subject to what the nations they get those from say.

Shouldn't the Moon be off limits?

[Formorian]

Just curious. Why mess with a body the so affects our world?

Also, if you mine an asteroid are you then changing it's trajectory and potentially putting it into earth's path?

I'm more apt to be OK to mining other bodies in space, but the Moon, I'd want to see some serious studies done on the affect of mining on the moon effects on the earth.

Re:Shouldn't the Moon be off limits?

[marco.antonio.costa]

You overestimate what we humans can achieve in comparison of the sheer scale of cosmic objects.

If an asteroid is big enough to be a threat to Earth, it's too massive to move. And the moon is 400000km from the Earth. Taking dirt from the inside and throwing it on the surface will not change its gravitational pull one iota.

Re:Shouldn't the Moon be off limits?

[Tomster]

...why mess with a body that so affects our world? Umm, look around -- we've been messing with our own planet pretty seriously for a century or so now. Anything we do to the Moon will have minor-to-none effects on the Earth for long enough that by the time there is any noticeable impact to the Earth it won't be a problem for us.

As for accidentally putting an asteroid into the Earth, we understand calculation of trajectories well enough to prevent that sort of thing.

Re:Shouldn't the Moon be off limits?

[thomasw_lrd]

Are you sure about that trajectory thing?

http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/Americas/NASA-satellite-to-crash-into-Earth-on-Friday/Article1-749351.aspx

I agree that we need to study how mining the moon, might affect the Earth in both the short term and long term.

Whether you believe in the global warming or the causes thereof, I wish they would have had the technology to study it 100 years ago. It's time to stop being stupid before we do things. And I don't want asteroids put in Earth orbit. If one company fucks up, it could wipe out life on this planet. Mine them where they orbit now, and send the materials back to Earth.

Who will enforce it?

[davidwr]

A property right without a sovereign to back it up with arms if necessary leaves me at the mercy of anyone bigger than me who wants to take my claim away.

A property right with a sovereign to enforce it with arms if necessary may put that sovereign in violation of treaties it has already agreed to.

Even if it doesn't, such a sovereign would have to be willing to stand up against the combined military might countries who are willing to go to war to defend the "right of all mankind" to "own" the asteroid or whatever piece of property is at issue.

In other words, any country which says it will back a claim to "space real estate" is betting that the rest of the world won't care or at worst, will just whine about it but take no real action. Any person or company making such a claim is betting the same AND betting no other person or company will attempt to fight the claim by force.

Re:Who will enforce it?

[coldsalmon]

Nobody CAN enforce it, which makes the whole discussion academic at best. Until we have technology sufficient to create a property conflict in space, it's all just talk. The ultimate issue will be decided the same way colonial boundaries were decided in centuries past: you get as much land as you can win a war on.

Re:Who will enforce it?

[joh]

Isn't this just like saying "Shooting someone in the face is the best way to win an argument"? Or like saying "People can be violent assholes, so being the most violent asshole is the pinnacle of civilisation"?

The point is that space is hard. Really hard. And destroying is much cheaper than building. So to even to begin going there and spending money you have to agree to agree and to stick to regulations and contracts even if nobody can enforce them (or only in a way that is very final and destroys everything you went there to begin with). I know that this is really hard to do, very much like not just hitting or killing someone who doesn't stop to have his own interests. But this is the only way to get things done without spending ourselves into the stone age and in real life we do it this way most of the time anyway.

For a really long time now in human civilization violence has been the exception, not the rule. And a great lot of things that are happening every day is NOT backed by the threat of violence but by mutual agreement that coming to terms is a really cheap, easy and enjoyable way to get enough of what you want that you can be happy with it even if you're not getting everything. It's just a habit, very much like violence or threatening with violence can become a habit. An expensive habit, usually.

I think that us becoming a space-fairing civilisation will be just a phantasy as long as we don't kick that habit. Call me a pacifist freak if you want (I surely am). Come to terms and STICK TO THEM even if your opponent is a weakling who can't do shit to you.

Re:Who will enforce it?

[khallow]

Even if it doesn't, such a sovereign would have to be willing to stand up against the combined military might countries who are willing to go to war to defend the "right of all mankind" to "own" the asteroid or whatever piece of property is at issue.

And who in the world is willing to go to war for the "right of all mankind"? I doubt there is even one country willing to do that.

Re:Or every private endevor in space can lease fro

[TheCarp]

What id you and a number of people wish to mine an asteroid, use the materials to create a new space station, and live independantly and separately from the nations of earth?

You do realize that this, assuming we are not wiped out before it happens, is the natural progression. Those of us who are unhappy with existing arrangements and affairs are going to want to leave. In fact, this may be the first time in history where such migrations have been nearly entirely infeasible. That will not last forever....and once it begins anew, it will take a LONG TIME to fill up just the locally earth bound space

Eventually exiting empires will simply be in the situation of King George when the colonies declared independance.

In a real way the Golden Path is the future, though, i doubt it really will require a sand worm god emporer to bring about, its natural human instinct to become disgruntled with the current order and want to leave and form new colonies.

Re:Or every private endevor in space can lease fro

[kasperd]

That is you enslaving men even as they venture out into the stars. "Dont go too far bold adventurer, you owe us and we shall be paid, no matter how far afield you wander."

I think there need to be a distinction between going there yourself and sending a robot to do it. Any person who is prepared to leave Earth and settle on an uninhabited celestial body can reasonably claim ownership of the area in which he settles. But if you build a robot to go and mine resources, and perhaps use some of those resources to build more robots, which can harvest even more resources, while you are staying back on Earth simply reaping the profits, then you shouldn't be able to claim ownership in the same way.

You don't need porperty rights to mine

[Hentes]

I don't think ownership of celestial bodies is necessary to conduct business on them. We shouldn't write laws concerning the future, because we simply have no idea what space enterpreneurship will be like. Once we have reached a level where getting profit from outer space becomes possible, we can create our laws while having much more information available. TFA's claims that private space projects are limited by legal problems is bullshit, ambitious space activities are limited by financial and technological problems, not legal ones.

Re:The 51st State?

[Motard]

We planted a flag. That's how these things are done.

Later on, the shooting starts.

Occupation or location control

[RichMan]

You can own an non-terrrestial property if
a) you occupy it for a significant length of time
or
b) you control its location

Failure of a) or b) for beyond a determined length of time shall result in loss of title.

how-to-buy-land-on-the-moon

[Rick Richardson]

http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-buy-land-on-the-moon/

Re:The 51st State?

[Jeng]

I am there right now, so there.

Don't think so? Then you come up to the moon and prove me wrong.

no problem

[frovingslosh]

existing treaties, like the Outer Space Treaty, seem to prohibit private ownership of space resources

No problem. When you get to your asteroid or whatever, you just declare yourself an independent space faring nation. You certainly have far more claim to that title than those who didn't get there. And you'll want to do that anyway, otherwise all of your profits will be taxed by the earthworms who think they are entitled to most of your profits and to tell you how to do things, even though they took mo risk and provided no service to you.

Re:no problem

[thomasw_lrd]

That's why Page wants to mine asteroids. So Google no longer has to pay earth taxes. Well played, sir, well played.

You got it.

[marcus]

No different from the way it is here.

A few Questions:

[3seas]

If property rights are granted, does this mean we have no space left for .... whatever?
Or is this a property rights troll on everything?
Or maybe ... Oh, its a god thing....

At any rate can someone enforce their property right to the space between the ears of some politicians and who ever else....

No property without jurisdiction

[loufoque]

Property is something that can only exist within a given jurisdiction.
Until a government claims jurisdiction over space, any one can go to space, establish a settlement and claim sovereignty and ownership.

Any attempt by a government to claim you're on their land would then be an act of war.

Re:No property without jurisdiction

[Hentes]

But that's very unlikely in the foreseeable future. What will happen is that private entities will make visits or send machinery to the spot. So if somebody else has rights to that place, they can prosecute on Earth.

Re:No property without jurisdiction

[loufoque]

What's Earth? The global government?

Sorry. You are missing an important point.

[bdwoolman]

You wrote

and the value of the rocks won't matter.

If you need it, and the material is very scarce. Its value will matter a great deal. Its value will become very high. This in relation to both its utility and scarcity.

Re:Sorry. You are missing an important point.

[X0563511]

You seem to be missing a point yourself: the value doesn't matter here. If it's needed, it will be obtained. Sure, it might cost you a lot, but that is not my point.

Re:Sorry. You are missing an important point.

[JesseMcDonald]

The value of something is exactly what you're willing to pay for it. Saying that something is needed is just another way of saying that its value is greater than any potential cost. The idea that "the value doesn't matter" is nonsense. This entire thread is about nothing but value; whether you realize it or not, you're saying that the value of these materials is greater than the cost of going to space to mine them.

idiots would try it too

[frovingslosh]

That would certainly be fun: " We down here in this deep gravity well declare war on you people up there among all of those rocks! "

The U.S. owns Earth's moon

[xkrebstarx]

We've owned it since we stuck our flag in it. If you don't think that's legally binding, talk to Christopher Columbus about it. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Columbus_Taking_Possession.jpg

Columbus?

[murder_face]

Didn't Columbus claim the Americas in the name of Spain when he planted a flag? Did we not do the same when we planted a flag on the moon?

Re:Columbus?

[Carnildo]

Didn't Columbus claim the Americas in the name of Spain when he planted a flag?

Yes. From his letter describing his voyage, "...where I found very many islands peopled with inhabitants beyond number. And of them all I have taken possession for their Highnesses with proclamation and the royal standard displayed and I was not gainsaid..."

Did we not do the same when we planted a flag on the moon?

Armstrong didn't make any such proclamation when he planted the US flag on the Moon, and I don't believe any of the later mission commanders did, either.

Re:Columbus?

[murder_face]

I never said that Columbus was saint. Similarly didn't that same situation take place in during the Gold Rush where people would stake their claims? Or should the UN control the moon? IMU maybe?

A voyage of discovery

[Crypto Gnome]

Y'all seem to have forgotten your history.

A long time ago people ventured out to discover new land with the intention of CLAIMING said land.

Once claimed (for the country, usually) the land could be developed under the laws of said country.

While I understand and agree with the proposition that it'd be unfair (or at least, unreasonable) for any country to claim an entire planet (at least, any planet in this system) but Asteroids and Various Other Miscellaneous Bodies should quite literally be UP FOR GRABS.

Of course you'd have to land on it, stake your claim, and maintain a permanent facility there. This can all be done with robots/remote-landers but it IS entirely achievable.

Just read a history book

[scamper_22]

Our history of full of empires, merchants, new lands...

It basically boils down to what nation/institution is powerful enough to control the space property and whatever rules they impose on it.

It could be one powerful country that takes space exploration on its own. We could a bit more cordial and share the costs of exploration via some kind of international agency and then auction of any property rights.

We could even parallel something like the Antarctic Treaty which basically ban military activity on the continent.

No one can tell for sure how property rights will be handled in space, but our own history has ample examples from bureaucracy to genocide.

property rights in general...

[alienzed]

how about we solve the lunacy of the concept here first...

Re:property rights in general...

[RivenAleem]

how about we solve the lunacy of the concept here first...

A truly stellar pun there!

Um

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

I think this is pretty much going to be a first come first serve kind of thing. I don't think anybody on earth should have the ability to declare property rights on something in space, unless they can walk right up to it and stick a flag in it (and, of course, the means to protect the flag). You can sit on earth and pay to have a bunch of lawyers claim rights on some space rock, but if someone else lands their spaceship on it you just look like a moron.

Re:Um

[PPH]

So then its a lot like the RIAA.

Re:The 51st State?

[Anonymous Coward]

F**ing Vikings.

Wait, so I don't own a piece of the moon?

[BitwiseX]

But I bought an a few acres in the Sea of Tranquility.. SON OF A...

http://www.lunarregistry.com/land/index.shtml

Re:The 51st State?

[biodata]

You clearly haven't seen the new documentary about the early moon landings Iron Sky.

Space Navy

[biodata]

Everyone is gonna want one, but someone will have the biggest and will own space.

small problem

[slew]

Small problem. When the US planted the flag, it was to memorialize the event, not to claim the moon for anyone. The plaque with the flag says "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Likely part of the reason that the Nixon ordered the US flag (vs the UN flag or both) planted was that he caved to congressional pressure. At the time, a rider attached to the house appropriations bill for space funding would have required the US flag be planted (under the justification that the US taxpayers funded it). Even though that rider did not survive to the senate, its mere existance was probably part of decision process.

Another problem is that although the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter pictures show that the flags appear to still be there, they are likely to be bleached out white (the surrender color).

Thanks Jesse I could not have said it better.

[bdwoolman]

However, give X0563511 some credit. He (she) has probably found himself or herself in the intellectual weeds of price elasticity and demand. It was expressed clumsily, but X0563511 has essentially forwarded the idea of an infinitely inelastic commodity (something so desirable that the demand pressure would not change no matter how high the price ascended.) Of course nothing is theoretically infinitely inelastic. Which is why price always matters. However, there are some things for which it matters far more than it does for others. And that (I think) is what X0563511 had in mind.

Nasty Twist

[Roger W Moore]

In other words, the same rules as we have on Earth. A government claims a land because they want it and they have the means to defend it...

Sort of...but with a nasty twist. Whoever has control of large amounts of material in space and the ability to transport it back to earth will actually have the biggest guns. So if we let corporations loose in space without some viable means to prevent large chunks of rock hitting the Earth they will end up not just with more spending power than governments but with more military might than them too. I'm not sure this is a good environment for democracy to flourish.

The SU owns Earth's moon

[joh]

We've owned it since we stuck our flag in it. If you don't think that's legally binding, talk to Christopher Columbus about it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Columbus_Taking_Possession.jpg

Hmm, I think the Soviet Union first got their insignia on the moon with Luna 2 in 1959.

What now?

speaking of history, if only...

[slew]

We could even parallel something like the Antarctic Treaty which basically ban military activity on the continent.

The Antarctic Treaty Article I

1. Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only. There shall be prohibited, inter alia, any measures of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military maneuvers, as well as the testing of any type of weapons.
2. The present Treaty shall not prevent the use of military personnel or equipment for scientific research or for any other peaceful purpose.

Article IV of the apparently "less well known" OuterSpace treaty...

States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.

The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.

Strangely similar wouldn't you say? A quick read of a history book published after 1970 would probably indicate that the 1967 Outerspace Treaty was based on the 1959 Anarctic Treaty. http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/ha/tos/tos.html

I'd guess salvage operations followed by asteroids

[girlinatrainingbra]

I'd guess near-earth orbit salvage operations will occur privately first before asteroid exploration and exploitation crews fly out and figure out how to mine and build out there or mine out there and ship it back to earth.
.
Yeah, it'll probably be something like a junkyard ship created by a small rag-tag team that gets up there privately and starts salvage operations on things like that left-over North Korean satellite that doesn't work anymore (supposedly) and all of our USA-ian interesting nonoperative satellites:
Salvage 1 has a ship made out of of a Texaco gasoline Semi-trailer with cement mixer as the capsule.

Where's Andy Griffith and Isaac Asimov when you need them? ;>)

Re:The 51st State?

[shutdown -p now]

I don't think one flag is sufficient to claim the whole moon, to be honest. A reasonably sized region around where it's at, probably.

Moon Treaty

[Keith Henson]

Around 1980 the L5 Society defeated the Moon Treaty. Personal experience, got to testify before Congress.

Re:Which is a recipe for disaster on epic scale.

[khallow]

Are you really telling us to use the law of gun and force rather than diplomacy ? With MAD still in effect ? Are you insane ?

It's something of a cliche to turn the tables. But perhaps you should have looked at that second question first. Last I checked, MAD is enforced only by the biggest guns around, nuclear bombs.