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Congress Can't Make Asteroid Mining Legal (But It's Trying, Anyway)
Jason Koebler writes: Earlier this week, the House Science Committee examined the American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space (ASTEROIDS) Act, a bill that would ensure that "any resources obtained in outer space from an asteroid are the property of the entity that obtained such resources."
The problem is, that idea doesn't really mesh at all with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, a document that suggests space is a shared resource: "Unlike some other global commons, no agreement has been reached at to whether title to extracted space resources passes to the extracting entity," Joanne Gabrynowicz, a space law expert at the University of Mississippi said (PDF). "There is no legal clarity regarding the ownership status of the extracted resources. It is foreseeable that the entity's actions will be challenged at law and in politics."
The problem is, that idea doesn't really mesh at all with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, a document that suggests space is a shared resource: "Unlike some other global commons, no agreement has been reached at to whether title to extracted space resources passes to the extracting entity," Joanne Gabrynowicz, a space law expert at the University of Mississippi said (PDF). "There is no legal clarity regarding the ownership status of the extracted resources. It is foreseeable that the entity's actions will be challenged at law and in politics."
Is it just me, or does the phrase "a space law expert at the University of Mississippi" cause you to giggle just a little bit?
Making Up Names Of Bills With Cleverly Crafted Backronyms Is So Fucking Annoying.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I am not bound by treaty. I am bound only by the laws of my country.
If Congress says I can keep the gold I just mined off Ceres, it's mine. Would the Russian government come after me for their share? Good luck to them.
I would say that an entity that managed to get there and posess some mined material up the Earth gravity well can probably deal with attempts to de-legalize it rather efficiently. ;-)
Paul B.
that seems fair
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
i've worked for the government and seen some doozy acronyms, but ASTEROID has got to be the best I've ever seen. it even stands for something that makes sense. bravo to to coiner.
Yeah, no kidding. They are worried the Chinese are gonna colonize space, and we will be left behind, so they come up with this property bullshit. Dude, property is about respecting others rights. If you go to outer space, and you take a piece of rock from an asteroid, and build a space station from it. people down here in the USA are gonna cry foul, it's common property, you can't take it, it's ours too, but the fact is unless they can send the police over to claim it was theft, or the military, it's all just bullshit. That's where the rubber meets the road. Space war. Over a piece of rock. Who owns is. History of human civilization, who gets what, who owns what, who controls what, west side, west side, nigga die over a block you don't even own, you paying rent, mofo. Maybe we should convince the Chinese to pay us rent for using the asteroid or Moon materials for their space stations, in case they succeed making it there before us.
Without these hippies, the solar systems ressources would already belong to whoever claim property first and futur entrepreneurs would have to pay a share of their earnbings to absentee landlords.
Barringer Crater mineral rights were granted to Daniel Barringer in 1903 thus granting him owner ship of the iron from that meteor. So if minerals are brought back to earth, they belong to who ever brought them back. In space however its up to them to keep them. Note: the outer Space treaty only applies to governments, not individuals or corporations.
I don't want to do a sig now
That's like saying you can take a car so long as you own the slim jim you use to get in it. You didn't make the asteroid, or oil deposit, or whatever it is. You have no inherent right to it.
My problem isn't the resources, it's how they will cut corners to be first and somehow kill us all in the processes.
They just planned to kill their local fishery and destroy a whole ecosystem just so they can build an artificial island in contested waters for an airport.
They are idiots IMO they will probably find the biggest asteroid and somehow change it's direction towards earth while trying to grab the resources.
And there's gotta be a ton of gold at the center of the earth, and platinum, same at the center of the Moon. The Big Dig. How low can you go. Inside the Moon, it does not get very hot, no molten lava to contend with. Who can get there first, and start the digging for them heavy noble elements of platinum, iridium, osmium, gold, all mixed in with nickel and iron. If the theory that the Moon was ejected from the Earth from a massive asteroid impact is correct. Inner planets don't have much moons, for whatever reason, our Moon is special. If the Moon was ejected in a molten lava state, then the heavy, non-oxygen-bound stuff (such as noble metals) had a chance to stratify and collect at the core (It's kind of interesting that there'd be any gold and platinum in the lithosphere of Earth, but volcanoes spit stuff up from real deep, moreover a lot of our nickel-platinum mines are actually asteroid-meteorite crash sites embedded into the lithosphere, that did not have a chance to sink deep.) All they gotta do is some seismic listening experiments to see if the Moon has a dense core, unless you can see through it with ultrahigh energy xrays or even neutrino observations, something that goes through it, and then you don't need seismic experiments. But otherwise it's time to blow some nukes up on the Moon, and place seismic sensors throughout its surface, to listen and probe its internal structure. If it has a core, and it's not molten, it's time for that gold rush, or more like platinum-nickel rush.
To anyone who sues over this chuck of space rock I claim, fine, I'll send it right to you...
Problem solved...
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Money and power are 10/10ths of the law.
Congress can modify or repeal treaties by subsequent legislative action, even if this amounts to a violation of the treaty under international law.
The treaty was stupid and anyone who signed it should be shot for gross incompetence. Simple fact is their are resources and unless we are one world communist country every damn thing in space will have a price tag attached.
I full expect China to mine for shit as well. So we might as well get this space race on the way now.
What happens in low Earth Orbit and above is none of their business
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sounds like what needs to happen is a recognition that when an entity mines in space, it can claim that its value-add in extracting those resources gives a claim to those extracted resources and only those extracted resources, with the possible exception of an active, ongoing extraction operation having the right to exclusive use of the mine and only the mine while the operation is active. Once the operation is inactive then it's fair-game for others to start using it too.
I don't see a lot of threat in the Chinese or any other power colonizing space and managing to keep hold of their colonies. Space exploration is in the same place as "New World" exploration was at the first voyage of Columbus, in the sense that as as species we don't really have the developed means to take territory and hold it, and I expect that it'll go through a revolutionary-era as well, when those that have actually done the colonizing or the progeny thereof decides that they don't really need the mother-country anymore. That period might be harder if the colonies don't find ways to be self-sufficient, but given the sheer cost in sending supplies, any colony would have to be self-sufficient to be financially practical. Like the United States was in the 1770s, space colonies will be too far away from the motherland to be easily held if those colonies want to break away, as it'll be too expensive garrison them and simply won't be worth the effort.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
What if you just charged what it cost to get the material, shipping, and such? Who cares who it belongs to as long as you are the one mining and transporting it (for an exorbitant fee...)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I really don't want to see the moon explode from overmining and inadequate safety precautions though.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
As soon as space mining becomes practical on the near horizon Congress will take the necessary action to legalize it. Otherwise they risk losing all of the money and jobs (not to mention the brib... er campaign contributions) from the support services that would go to non-US companies in countries who aren't signatories to the treaty.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Article VIII of the treaty states:
"Ownership of objects launched into outer space, including objects landed or constructed on a celestial body, and of their component parts, is not affected by their presence in outer space or on a celestial body or by their return to the Earth."
So if someone attached rocket engines to a small asteroid and moved it, for example, that could be considered "constructing an object" and they would own the whole thing, including the asteroid which is one of its "component parts".
This is what the idiots on the House science committee think is their most useful work to do at this time? Making space "safe" for mineral interests? Fuck, I can't believe that this is the most immediate concern in science (or even space, for that matter).
I can hear it now in Chair Lamar Smith's office: So what do we do today to look busy? I know, we'll have hearings on a symbolic bill that is unenforceable and will never get to the floor, let alone pass, but, since most people don't know that, it should be easy to spin it as about good American capitalists (yay!) getting that awful world government (boo!) and pesky things like the treaties we don't like (boo!) out of the way, so our good American capitalists (yay!) can make money (yay!) and create jobs (yay!). I'm pretty sure that's about how deep the analysis goes on the political side. Then there's just the money side with the Democratic congressman from the great state of Boeing providing bi-partisan cover.
Those idiots need to be voted out.
That is all.
move the corporate headquarters off world.
They already move their headquarters out of the country to avoid paying taxes.
What's to stop them from moving corporate headquarters off world to avoid treaties?
I don't believe anybody has any treaties or laws against trading with entities that don't live on earth, and if a company has the ability to conduct large scale mining in space then they probably have the ability to make a reasonable claim that their corporation is based on that astroid.
That was my first thought. Who's going to argue with someone who maintains navigational control over very large rocks in orbit? Drop the investigation/case or I vaporize your city with a 50m rock.
...or happiness.
Everything else you have to be able to TRADE or it is worthless or illegal to trade or posses.
And while there is a long and fruitful career to be had in trading illegal shit, they tend to end abruptly and violently.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Space is a resource that will belong to whomever has the capacity to claim it first
I was thinking some private group or company snags an asteroid says, "alright if you want me, come and get me. In the meantime, neeeyaa, neeeyaa, neeeyaa!"
mfwright@batnet.com
No but I paid to go get it, so I get to decide what happens, or have you not noticed the way things work?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Read your own sig.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Congress can very much make asteroid mining legal for Americans; for an American to break a treaty entered into by the US government isn't, by itself, illegal. Calling it "a violation of international law" is really a misnomer, since "international law" isn't "law" in the usual sense of the word. There is no judicial branch of government enforcing international law, no constitutional principles governing it, no consent of the governed.
If Congress decides to make asteroid mining legal, it may or may not be a treaty violation on the part of the US, but so what? Treaties aren't binding law, nor are they immutable, they are merely agreements between states and are renegotiable.
Try not stealing one since the US government doesn't own them and I think you'll find yourself in jail. Any takers who'd like to bet otherwise? I think in practice this is resolved already, what you bring back to Earth is yours. The fun parts would be that nobody has mining rights, if you find a big gold vein there's nothing stopping another country/company dropping a mining rig right next to yours.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
While the outer space treaty prohibits countries from claiming celestial bodies as their own, Article VIII states that a country "shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body. Ownership of objects launched into outer space, including objects landed or CONSTRUCTED on a celestial body, and of their component parts, is not affected by their presence in outer space or on a celestial body or by their return to the Earth."
Which means that if one might be able to claim an asteroid by by bolting a spacecraft to an the asteroid and stating that the asteroid is now a spacecraft part that was constructed when holes were drilled into the asteroid.
Sounds to me like it says that whoever gets the iron, gold, iridium, space fairy dust, whatever from an asteroid owns it. I don't see how that is different from what happens on earth (aside from the space fairy dust). Whoever digs the hole generally owns the minerals extracted. What I didn't see is how they determine who owns the mine or has rights to mine a particular rock. Being a pretty extreme environment, at first it may just boil down to possession is nine tenths of the law. But I personally don't see any issues with this. Whoever gets the stuff out should own it. Just as long as they don't fuck up returning material to earth and accidentally drop a football field size chunk of iron or nickel (or whatever) on a city at orbital velocities. Maybe better to make the finished goods on the moon if they need gravity, or in lunar orbit first. Keep the big dangerous shit away from the planet.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Why would space colonies want to break away?
Presumably any earth-entity capable of colonizing the far reaches of the Solar system would have to be a fairly important country. It would also offer any thriving colony the local equivalent of a path to statehood. Why secede when you can get two Senate seats?
A lot of SciFi is based on the assumption that future leaders have not learned the lesson of the past. Even the Brits have learned that at some point you off the colony a choice: go independent without a war, or get a vote in Parliament.
And treaties are written in stone? History is repeat with treaties that are no longer enforced or even acknowledged by any current country. The day someone starts shipping down millions of dollars in precious metals from an asteroid is the day that either countries simply start ignoring the Outer Space Treaty en mass or the day it is "reinterpreted" to allow such pursuits.
I don't see how that is different from what happens on earth (aside from the space fairy dust). Whoever digs the hole generally owns the minerals extracted.
Where are you from? Because I have lived in a dozen countries, on three continents, and the minerals have either belonged to the one being able to use violence to overwhelm anyone else who wants them, or to the one holding a contract an the entity able to use violence to overwhelm anyone else. (Also know as the State. The contract often has a name like deed, title, etc...)
There is no property, and I doubt there has ever been property, without the means to protect it. In the past, and in some shitty places in the present, that means the owner being able to protect it himself. But we, as a society, have decided that it is more efficient (for those who matter) to actually have a mechanism that allows property to be protected by a larger group than the owner.
I doubt space will be any different. When it is in the interest of those who matter, they will get together and come up with a mechanism that will allow people who matter to exploit space resources. By definition, if a group can keep other groups out, that's the only group that matters.
Now, everyone has his own opinion on who matters... I will not bother arguing about that.
No good deed goes unpunished...
If you are from a nation bound by the treaty, reflag your vessel (nuwclear wessell) to a non-treaty country.
So, the earth is divided into many countries. Why not just go ahead and assume that all rocks in space (the Earth is a rock in space too) are to be split up as they are on Earth? The whole idea of ownership in this way is to silly to come up with a plan in one day, given our current laws, as those laws weren't gotten in one day either. It'll take many years before anything will become of this. We haven't even gotten to the part where some religious stance claims that God sent the rock here for some Heaven's Gate shit - making it holy ground.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
The Moon has more surface area that North America. Even if all of the nations of the Earth conspired and made a deliberate effort to explode the Moon, it can't be done. Mining operations that would produce minerals in quantities equal to the entire mining production of humanity from before the Sumerian empires until now and doing that on an annual basis would take billions of years to mine out enough of the Moon for you to even notice something was happening.
Relax, the Moon is going to be just fine even with extensive strip mining, and arguably it is better to have it happen up there than down here on the Earth while killing habitat for many animals and destroying whole ecosystems.
Only the smallest of asteroids will ever be completely mined out before mankind will have settled and occupied the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Wherever you are, it belongs to you, and nobody else has any right to tell you to be elsewhere. You are at liberty to sell, rent, or share it with others as long as you remain there. Your ownership ceases as soon as you leave.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If you have the technology to go mine an asteroid, i dont think any country on this planet will be able to take it from you. And if they try, just "accidentally" drop some of what you mined on them.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I wonder what the lobbying budget of Planetary Resources is at the moment? There are other space mining enterprises, but they are the ones that are furthest along with actual hardware capable of doing something with the idea. Their short-term goal is to simply map the Solar System, and not even trying to pretend that it is for purely scientific purposes.
Oh look! A radionuclide! Run Away! Run Away!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I was there at the hearing, and I think the summary is pretty far from the true situation.
First, Prof. Gabrynowicz is in the minority in the legal community on this (her response is also to work for international consensus on these issues, which is not going to happen.
Second, the Asteroid Act has been vetted by the State Department (and by a whole bunch of interested parties) and it certainly is in agreement with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 (even Prof. Gabrynowicz didn't claim otherwise).
Third, all of the space powers appear to be in agreement with the basic principle expressed by the Asteroid Act - that space mining is a lot like deep sea fishing - you can't claim your fishing hole, but you get to keep what you take.
For a more balanced explanation as to why the Act is needed as a US instantiation of the '67 Outer Space Treaty to clarify the rules for US Corporations, see Dean Larson's WSJ Op Ed (or my own take on it).
> when those that have actually done the colonizing or the progeny thereof decides that they don't really need the mother-country anymore.
I'd be alright with that, but the problem is that space isn't like the surface of the Earth where you have neatly demarcated areas that you can lay claim to and you have to actually travel to in order to use. You could have companies pushing around asteroids and bumping them into Earth orbit, extracting resources, without sending even a single person over to the actual asteroid (all done with a bunch of robotic probes). You will inevitably get two companies (or countries) fighting over who gets the right to push which asteroid around. Neither of them are even near the asteroid, and no colony will be set up on the asteroid since it's probably far too small to support an independent human population by itself.
I guess a good analogy would be the Pacific islands and not the 13 colonies. The pacific islands changed hands so many times and many still have debatable levels of 'belonging' to another country. Now imagine if the pacific islands were free to roam around...
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Yeah, space is a limited commodity. Like Leprechaun Gold @ a Colorado dispensary.
Who in their right mind was part of this Treaty to begin with? No one in their right mind.
If they weren't in their right mind, their contract is as good as toilet paper.
We need more employment, resources and fewer people on the planet.
If you tie up the mining companies resources in space, it means they're not as active here.
I'm not even a lawyer, closer to a super-villain, and even I can see the right thing to do here is quit damn worrying about what the neighbors think and go fuckin' stake a claim.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
It's true that mining asteroids is of little use for us here on Earth. But when you consider raw materials for space industry, then it suddenly becomes an extremely attractive idea. But the problem is that without cheap materials and a cheap way of accessing space, no space industry is ever likely to develop. So it's kind of a chicken-egg problem.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Personally I would avoid robbing people who have kinetic weapons of mass destruction hanging in orbit. That's just me though.
Let's crowd-source shooting the Chinese into space! Let's put them there first! Show a little brotherhood.
There's enough space to go around. I can see quibbling about the moon on the light side, but REALLY!
Go forth and mine. Set up diverse industrial asteroids. Be neighborly. Get along with each other or you don't get to come back to Earth.
Let's send the most quarrelsome of everyone into space. Give 'em a job and something to bitch about. Keep them busy and out of our hair.
Set up an asteroid for the U.N. and all the world leaders, call it Botany Bay and accidentally, well, you know...
Now quit thinking so selfishly about the vastness of everything being property, let alone shared. Just share it, it's an endless resource.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Sounds like your space rock "chuck" should be consulted before any lawsuit.
The reason you can make a claim in North America and have it stick is due to the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army. They are the guys that make it possible to make a mining claim and not have to worry about having some 2-bit thug come along and take your mine from you. That is what makes civilization possible. As much as Canada wants to assert their independence, they are dependent upon the U.S. military to make sure Russia doesn't go and sack the northern part of their country (or the whole country for that matter). Ditto for Mexico (in spite of the gangs in northern Mexico.... proving my point and the GP poster above).
The problem with the assumptions about those hoping for peace and tranquility in space is that you don't have sovereignty claims, thus no military of any kind except for pirates and thugs who don't give a damn about treaties or the United Nations. This also includes opportunistic nations that may want to take any space-based assets. That is not an environment you want to be investing billions or perhaps even trillions of dollars worth of money to develop space-based mineral assets.
Yes, space is big, far bigger than you can imagine. None the less, once you start sinking resources into developing a location in space, it becomes a target for aggression. That becomes a fixed point that can be occupied and stolen. Thugs will beat you up simply to steal ten bucks out of your wallet.... what will they do for assets worth billions? That is why you need to have available some friends who are far bigger and badder than any potential thug to allow civilized behavior to flourish.
You are bound by the treaties your country signed.
Yes: You, and the states, and their courts, are bound by them (to the extent they are clear or were implemented by federal enabling legislation).
In fact, they have more legal weight in the US than laws passed by your own Congress.
NO! They have EXACTLY the same weight as federal law. Both treaties and federal law are trumped by the Constitution, and both are also creatures of Congress, They can be modulated, and destroyed (at least in how they are effective within the country) by congressional action.
The idea that they're any stronger or more permanent than federal legislation comes from a (very common) misreading of the Supremacy Clause:
This says that the Constitution, Federal Law, and Treaties trump state law in state and federal courts. It says nothing about the relative power among the three.
The misreading is to interpret "all treaties made ... shall be the supreme law of the land ..." to mean that treaties effectively amend the constitution. This is wrong. You can see it by noticing the same kind of misreading also makes federal law equivalent to a constitutional amendment - which it clearly is not.
In fact the Supreme Court has spoken on the relation between the Constitution and treaties: In Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957), the Supreme Court held stated that the U.S. Constitution supersedes international treaties ratified by the U.S. Senate.
Treaties are abrogated, at the federal level, all the time, and there are a number of mechanisms for doing so.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, if it's not specifically "illegal"...I say whomever can make it up there should go for it. As long as the companies / countries aren't putting anyone (besides their own astronauts) in danger and aren't "militarizing space" then who cares?
> If the theory that the Moon was ejected from the Earth from a massive asteroid impact is correct.
It is not. The moon is a billion years older then the earth.
An article. Wow.
Try reading up on the parent bodies of meteorites -- we know of quite a few -- then look at the composition, particularly of e.g. siderites. (Sure, plenty of stony meteorites too, still typically ~20% iron/nickel.)
Not that much carbon, actually. Lots of iron and nickel, and significant amounts of e.g. platinum group metals (same columns in the periodic table as iron and nickel). Fortunately there is some carbon, because it turns out that one of the easiest ways to separate out the different metallic elements is through selective fractional carbonyl precipitation. (React the metal mass with carbon monoxide, heat the resulting gas to the specific temperature at which the specific metal carbonyl breaks down, then collect the pure precipitated metal and recycle the CO.) You definitely want to do this in space, metal carbonyls are pretty toxic.
-- Alastair
Who in their right mind was part of this Treaty to begin with? No one in their right mind.
Bear in mind that if the treaty dates to 1967, it was being worked on in 1966, possibly earlier. At that time, the US was seriously worried that it might lose the space race to the Soviet Union (who were still racking up "firsts" faster than the US), so there was probably an aspect of bet-hedging to it. (1967 was also the "summer of love", so, hippies, and height of the Viet Nam war, so, distraction. So yeah, not in their right minds.)
When the Moon Treaty (also known as the treaty on the useful pieces of outer space) reared its ugly head some years later, plenty of people loudly and vigilantly campaigned to avoid it being ratified. (The successful effort was largely led by the L5 Society -- which was quietly thanked some years after that by several foreign (*cough USSR cough*) nationals because they didn't want it either.)
-- Alastair
Hmmmm?
Take a good look at it. The Moon may not be there in a couple generations anymore, but all turned into space stations. I give it about 500 years before it's gone.
It may take millions of year for a limited number of humans. You forget about the near infinite ability to breed and multiply.
How do you know? Also, if that's true, was it ever molten, does it have a high density metal core?
Surely if a corporation wants to mine (and profit from) resources in outer space, which are owned by every one, they simply need to apply for a licence from a central body.
It should be fairly straightforward to negotiate a licence that makes it worthwhile for the mining corporation that also reflects ownership. So either a proportion of the resources or profits derived from those resources (via a tax) would be distributed to the treaty signers.
This signature intentionally left blank
"Yes, space is big, far bigger than you can imagine. "
You might even say "vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big."
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
But I personally don't see any issues with this. Whoever gets the stuff out should own it.
As long as that stuff doesn't come from my tracts of land on the Moon, Mars, etc, claimed through the Lunar embassy.
And if they do extract resource from unauthorized mines on my land, then I would be entitled to the value of 100% of the raw resources extracted.
No one has to worry about China claiming asteroids.
It really is about being there...it's so ridiculously expansive in all senses of the word...space I mean...
as far as asteroids go, a more likely yet still far flung scenario is China partners with some ridiculous Brittish 'tech innovator' guy (who is backed by oligarch money) to mine an asteroid
they bring an asteroid to earth, screw up and it hits us and destroys civilization
that's more likely than anything China related threatening the US
Thank you Dave Raggett
I cannot decide whether you lack comprehension of your own native language, or whether you are deliberately obtuse. Or maybe you believe that North America's civilization, which I do not dispute, means that your property is magically safe because the people around you are a different breed from the ones populating the rest of the world.
Let me recap.
You said: I don't see how that is different from what happens on earth (aside from the space fairy dust). Whoever digs the hole generally owns the minerals extracted.
This is completely incorrect everywhere I have been, and that certainly includes the United States, where I currently work. (BTW, the countries you call 'tiny' include six of the eight largest economies in the world)
In general, oil, gas and minerals in the US belong not to whoever digs the hole, but to whoever owns the land directly above them. That is different from most other countries in the world, where they belong to the State, period. Even in the US, the resource rights can be separated from surface ownership by an explicit deed, and there are provisions according to which land owners can be forced to sell their rights, even if they are already exploiting the resources, or even if the extraction of the resources will detrimentally affect their use of their property.
Familiarize yourself with the laws of your own country! They vary from state to state, but they have a few things in common. The most important thing, of which you are clearly unaware, is that you own fuck all. The deeds, titles, etc. which allow you to use land or resources are granted by the State, and the State can unilaterally break the contract if it deems it necessary. People living on lands needed for malls, people farming above oil deposits, people raising livestock on 'frackable' terrain... those have all learned exactly how much their deeds and titles are worth. Because the US is civilized, they will be reimbursed by their losses... exactly as much as those who matter think that they should be paid.
I explicitly said: the one holding a contract with the entity able to use violence to overwhelm anyone else. Who the hell do you think I was referring to? Who do you think has its monopoly on using violence enshrined in law?
Space will be no different. Resources will belong to whoever has come to an agreement with the entity that can enforce its will (project force, has monopoly on violence, blah blah blah) Right now, there is no entity that can do this in space, which means that if you could extract the resources, you could pretend you own them as long as you stay away from Earth. Once you enter the sphere of influence of various States, things will be different.
No good deed goes unpunished...
No one has to pay any attention to US law in space because the US is on earth and not space. The US should focus on things it knows like killing brown people and torture.
Everybody thought the era of pirates was over.... until they started to show up again in the 21st Century here on the Earth. If the opportunity presents itself, there will always be people who will take advantage of a power vacuum and try to take that which is undefended.
No, it won't be like Star Trek or Firefly..... those are too slick and clean cut. It will be far more ugly and different still. This isn't chest thumping, it is facing reality instead of burying your head in the sand and thinking none of this is going to happen. I'll also say that a couple hundred years is nothing in terms of human history too. If you don't make longer-term plans, your civilization is simply doomed to extinction.
I haven't forgotten the multiplicitive nature of human reproduction or how life will spread. Millions of years from now mankind is likely going to be spreading to other Galaxies and doing things you would not even comprehend at the moment. Human populations also seem to somehow stabilize when constrained with resources (sometimes in ugly ways, but it does happen). Space is huge and there will be many other places to worry about than a mined out Moon.
Who knows, there may even be a lunar restoration group wanting to make it look as pristine as when Neil Armstrong first walked on it.
Yes, Douglas Adams had a really good way to describe such things. I miss the guy.
I think you're off by at least one order of magnitude (if the way you go about it is smart), maybe two.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Spaceships are boats, and mined resources are therefore maritime salvage. Problem solved.
The Outer Space Treaty refers to STATE PARTIES, it does NOT refer to private entities nor to commercial exploitation of resources found and extracted in outer space by commercial entities.
This entire article is a waste of time except to invalidate itself by the simple act of linking to the treaty it's bemoaning.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
> If the theory that the Moon was ejected from the Earth from a massive asteroid impact is correct.
It is not. The moon is a billion years older then the earth.
uh, other way. The Moon, according to the latest theory, formed when a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth, the two iron cores merged and the Moon formed from mainly quartz and SiO2 ejecta - which is the reason why the Moon has no appreciable magnetic field and Earth has a much larger nickel-iron core than it should have.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
5 billion, more like. It's receding at an inch or two a year.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
And since nothing bad happened, what exactly is your point?
I think that was exactly the point.
It's sort of like how, when North Korea attempted a satellite launch not too long ago, the news was full of stories about how incredibly irresponsible it was since a satellite breaking up in orbit could turn into a chain reaction that would scour all orbits of all satellites. These stories were coming, of course, from the propaganda machines of countries which have, on more than one occasion, intentionally blown up satellites in orbit to demonstrate military power.
bingo. This is what the Outer Space Treaty is intended to prevent, there is no legtimacy in staking claims in space (that bit of the Moon you think you "own"? Well, you simply don't). There is, however, NOTHING in it preventing private entities or even State parties from exploiting resources from space, with the caveat in the case of State parties that anything they extract is for the good of ALL. It makes NO provision or restriction on private exploitation of space. If you mine it, it's yours, however you CANNOT prevent someone else from mining in the same place for the same thing, until it comes out of the regolith it's anybody's. The maxim holds here: if it is not specifically illegal then it is fundamentally legal. Claim staking: illegal. Exploitation: legal.
*Let me try and clarify: I can plant a quartz mine on the Moon, but I can't stick a forty foot perimeter fence around it and I can't prevent my competitor building a quartz mine five feet away.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Because you never know what endangered life form you might find.
*Let me try and clarify: I can plant a quartz mine on the Moon, but I can't stick a forty foot perimeter fence around it and I can't prevent my competitor building a quartz mine five feet away.
Actually, spacefaring nations have already laid out operational safety rules. For example, the ISS has a 1 km "keep out zone" around it. For the Moon, you can't place your landing pad so close to my mine that it kicks up rocks and damages my equipment, and conversely outgassing from my mine processing can't contaminate your solar arrays. Once people actually set up operations on the Moon or some asteroid, there will be reasonable *and agreed to* safety boundaries and access roads, which will, over time, become property lines and public roads. For the latter to happen, you will need to reach a point where people are buying, selling, and subdividing land, and sharing costs for transport improvements.
Assuming the 1 km keep-out zone is adopted for asteroid mining, then any asteroid smaller than 1 km will be the province of one mining operation, unless they set up as a multinational or joint corporate project (which is actually pretty likely).
Elon Musk is working on the cheap access to space part of the problem, and I'm working on the other part.
That other part is a "Seed Factory", an industrial starter kit that makes parts for more machines in an expanding collection, using local raw materials and energy. So instead of having to send a whole asteroid processing plant, which would be pretty massive, you send a much smaller starter kit. We're about to buy a property near Atlanta to build and test prototypes for this concept. The first generation factories will be for Earth use, by the 3rd or 4th generation we should be ready for space use. In between we plan to do difficult and remote locations on Earth, like the oceans, deserts, and ice caps. That should give us experience in remote control.
I don't think that's true in the slightest. Poor, resource-starved populations have the most children. Populations with opportunity and means have the fewest children.
If you want a specific case that can be looked at, look at the population of Gaza from the formal founding of Israel through today. The population absolutely exploded in number between then and now, and that's arguably one of the hardest places to live in the world.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It's not Planetary Resources itself that has the influence, it is their list of advisers and investors. They include:
James Cameron (movie maker), Eric Schmidt & Larry Page (Google), Charles Simonyi (Microsoft Office, billionaire), Ross Perot Jr. (billionaire), and Richard Branson (Virgin Group).
well, yeah, there's the obvious safety factors, but the thing is you can't use that as a band-aid for claiming mineral rights - the only minerals you can claim in space are the ones you dig up yourself and put in your cargo hold. Once you take off (and I would assume there'd be some rule for not leaving anything behind, like broken equipment or bags of shit or anything else to mark or otherwise prevent landing by anyone else), that patch is anybody's.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
by "starter kit", are we to read "factory factory"? As in, a relatively small robotic facility designed and programmed to locate, mine, refine and form mineral resources into larger parts and structures, mechanics and consumables such as larger cutting heads, eventually to clone itself writ large, ready to receive instructions for new and varied structures such as habitation, airponics modules, etc? Because that would be fucking cool.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
uh, no it's not. Taking someone else's property isn't the same as extracting something that was in the ground possibly inaccessible through economic or technical limitations to anybody else.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I think once they have found minerals, they will set up a permanent operation there. When they take off; it will be to bring one shipment back to where they could market it, however: people and assets would remain in the area, and it would be controlled, and it would likely be continuing to mine until the next wave of freight carriers come by to pick up the next shipment.
And very empty, to where any piece of rock in a low gravity environment, such as the Moon or and asterorid (not so much Jupiter or even Earth that are too deep a gravity wells) is worth blood.
I signed a land purchase contract that explicitly transferred mineral rights, and I did not really care, I mean I do, but what I really needed was a tranquil living space. At the county they hold the documents they don't make public the records, and you have to walk into their office, through a metal detector, and any hard copy or printed proof you want to take away they make you pay for it. It's not possible to research the history of a piece of land without going bankrupt over the fees if the history is littered through and through with documents, going back all the way to the Native Americans. In a lot of countries whoever owns title owns the land, and if they own it by mistake, and someone else should have it, that someone else can get monetary compensation from the government, but they do not reverse title. In the US you buy what's called "Title Insurance" which is a major ripoff, but at least it's a one time fee only for a one time service, that is, someone at the private title insurance agency digs through the land records, and if they don't luck out in finding anything nasty, they will insure the title, as a gamble, on your named amount. There is always a chance that a record was missed, especially when they play hide and seek with you on the computers, so even if you sit at the county office, and thoroughly examine all the records, and even pay the staff there to do the search for you, with consideration, there is a way to submarine a fake, ancient document, from say 1834, that voids the validity of all the rest of the title transfer deeds ever since then, and under this system of land purchases with hide and seek, nonpublic county land records, all you're purchasing is pretty much air. And if you purchase title insurance in a given amount from an insurance corporation, nothing guarantees that that corporation won't take your money, pocket it, then simply go out of business and restart as a new one. Kinda like lifetime dialup ISP's in the 90's were. For $99 one time fee, we give you a lifetime dialup internet acccess. You know how that pyramid scheme works? They take your 99 dollars, give you internet for a couple months, pay the CEO millions in salaries, take up all kinds of business loans from banks, then simply go bankrupt, out of business, and restart a new business. Wash, rinse, repeat, take your money and run with it, is what land title insurance companies are too. So all you're buying when you buy a title to a land is air, hocus pocus. What else can you do though? How can you find yourself a place to live in peace, as the nearest communist public lands, that are nobody's private property, called state parks or natural reservations, maybe half a state across from you, where you can go and just be with any right, other than that everything else is private property, and you don't have the right to be present there, including you don't have the right to sleep in your car at a 24x7 Walmart parking lot, if Walmart says so on a displayed banner right under the parking lot cameras.
I hold NASA to the same standards and am mad already at them for somehow over complicating simple projects recently. They really need to restructure NASA right now as times have changed.
Not so much the rock itself, there's many similar rocks with similar minerals. It's all about the mining infrastructure you build there. Or about portable infrastructure that does the mining, for convenience lets call it a spaceship. Now if I was building such an object, it'd have a lot in the way of defence systems on it, to ensure that the blood shed would be someone else's...
How do you know? Also, if that's true, was it ever molten, does it have a high density metal core?
Not sure how UnknownSoldier knows that. It certainly doesn't jive with what I've been hearing for the last 20 years since I was in school for physics. Current theory is that the proto Earth was hit by a proto Moon about the size of Mars. Part of the proto-Moon ejected from the collision, unfortunately, the heavy metal cores of both the proto-Earth and proto-Moon stayed with the Earth so the moon does not have a similar metal core and is mostly mantel material. Also, the proto-Moon ejection formed two bodies which re-collided fairly non-violently as things go with the other bit now smooshed onto the back side of the moon.