Slashdot Mirror
Making Mining the Asteroids and the Moon Legal
MarkWhittington writes: Popular Science reported on a bill called the Space Act of 2015 that has passed the House and may soon pass the Senate that will allow private companies to own the natural resources that they mine in space. The idea would seem to be a no-brainer. However, the bill is causing some heartburn among some space law experts, especially in other countries. Fabio Tronchetti, a lawyer at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, argues that the law would violate the Outer Space Treaty.
Really, claiming territory that you cannot even get to? Any treaties or laws regarding anything beyond geosynchronous orbit are laughable, because they are unenforceable.
Heck, even here on earth, I wish people would follow a simple principle: deliberately flout stupid laws and regulations. It's the only way to get them off the books. Of course, you have to be willing to fight an enforcement attempt, and most of us would rather not. However, the alternative is for regulations to accumulate. Every time a bureaucrat has a brain fart, they add another one, and the damned things never go away.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I kinda want to write some amateur sci-fi on this topic... if I actually had any modicum of talent for writing.
If a corporation / country starts mining an asteroid for materials to use in space, what is anyone going to do about it? Tax them? Declare war on them?
There isn't THAT much unobtanium in space that's usable here on Earth which would make it worth deorbiting. The value of mining stuff in space is so you can build things in space. It's pretty expensive to boost water into orbit. So it seems like it could be pretty lucrative to hijack a few tons of ice comet, wrap it in insulation, and gently tow it into a usable orbit somewhere on the lagrangian transport network over the course of a few years or even decades. From there it could become a nice resource of raw materials to have to help supply a good-sized space station, available to the highest bidder.
Once something like that is set in motion, who's going to stop it? Only another corp with the ability to launch another robotic probe to hijack that hijacked comet. If one probe disturbs another probe, is that an act of war? Probably not, even if they're both pretty expensive. Should it be legal for one probe to "steal" another probe's towed cargo? What if they were just two separate microfactories that landed on the same asteroid and were mining it for minerals? Seems like they should be able to "share", and shall the fastest probe harvest most of the asteroid. But at one point does one probe manage to "stake a claim" on an asteroid, and is programmed to take defensive measures against anything else that approaches to interfere? Knowing that if there were a bunch of territorial probes roaming the solar system, they could all trivially wipe each other out with relatively small lasers or projectiles or explosives if they were at all aggressive. So they would likely be programmed to cooperate as much as they possible, since their missions were so expensive. But they'd have a self-destruct that would take out whatever it is they were carrying and any enemy probes in the area, to discourage probes from trying to "steal". At some point, our fleet of mining probes may have spread out far enough to encounter alien probes, which may as well have been programmed with similar rules of engagement, and it will be interesting to see how they manage to autonomously interact and communicate their intentions to each other.
Back to the subject of actually staking claims, it would be interesting if corps / countries would be required to have a human present to actually plant a flag on asteroids they wished to mine. The logic being if a probe attacked a competing probe in space, it's just business. But if a probe attacks a human in space, that's an act of war, and the companies can go to court down here on Earth or the countries can go to arms or whatever it is they'd do back in the days of imperialism. So it will be neat if that manages to be the impetus to put long-term human colonies in space, if just to be homesteaders. Wonder if they even have to be awake for the trip... or even fully alive for that matter. It would likely be pretty depressing, to have countries scrambling to put just one or two people per asteroid to stake claims and squat in space and try to hang on to survival and maybe sanity for decades at a time. Space cowboys.
Then I give you an other example (happened in RL):
a US school class of kids between 16 and 18 visit Paris, France. The teacher allows them to share a bottle of wine (means, less than an ounce per student).
That is completely legal.
However US courts claim that US law is to held up "in Europe!" which makes the teacher lose his job.
We europeans lough our asses off about such stupidity.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.