Out of curiosity, does anyone out there know of any international treaty (that would be binding against an individual or company, not a nation) that would prevent someone with the money (Bill Gates or Coca Cola, for example) from turning the surface of the Moon into a billboard we couldn’t ignore?
A text of the treaty is here Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. The treaty was written with nuke-happy governments in mind, but it can be stretched to forbid a lunar billboard. For example:
I would say that making the sunside of the moon a billboard would be disruptive, wouldn’t you?
And (this is the killer):
I like where it says “or of any natural person.” It means that Bill Gates XIV can’t buy up the moon. So the 1979 treaty, unless it was revised in 1989 (Article 18 provides for revision ten years after the treaty becomes law), would prevent such a nefarious scheme.
I’m digging into obscure contract law at 0100 on a Saturday morning. And I’m enjoying it. No, I don’t have a life. 
Before you jump on me, treaties are contracts among nations.
If Galactus comes along and wants to write his name on the moon, I don’t plan on stopping him. I could only hope that the Silver Surfer might be loitering nearby so he could fly up there and talk some sense into the big guy.
OK, but did every nation on Earth agree to that treaty?
I think the bigger question is economic and technological. Why would anyone spend billions of bucks putting up an advertisement that is about the size of a dime held at arm’s length?
I vaguely recall reading some SF story where they worked out the details of writing on the moon. They proposed spraying powdered carbon-black on the surface. But there’s not enough room to write “Coke” on the moon at a size everyone can see, so they just write “C” and tell everyone it stands for Coca-Cola.
But my favorite story was a 2000AD comic called “The Loonies.” An ad agency uses lasers to project ads on the moon. A cult of Luna takes offense and storms the projection building and starts killing the advertising people. Then Judge Dredd comes in and kills everyone. At the end, he is the only one left alive, so he puts a final message up on the moon, “out of service.” Ah, well, it’s just a comic.
A few years ago Pizza Hut had the idea of projecting their image as an advertisement on the moon. They abandoned it once they discovered it would have to be the size of Texas, and put their logo on a rocket instead.
I believe the story you are thinking of is: “The Man Who Sold the Moon” by Robert A. Heinlein.
In the story, he proposes two possibilities: A company would help finance a trip to the moon and would get the advertising rights to the surface. It’s not really so farfetched. Expensive, true, but think of the exposure!
The other idea is that a government would use it for propaganda purposes. The story was written in the 50’s, and a hammer + sickle (spelling?) fit on there quite nicely.
Yeah, Heinlein sounds right. I must’ve misremembered the sickle as a C. I probably read that story when I was about 7 years old.
I think that’s as opposed to a “fictitious person”, i.e., a corporation. But maybe you knew that.
I think any company considering it would also have to consider the backlash. A lot of people would be extremely pissed if the Moon was emblazoned for all time with a corporate logo. The promotion would probably backfire.
It was both a “C” graphic (as proposed to the cola outfit) and a hammer-and-sickle (as used to alarm possible military sponsors). In both cases, the main character (why the ^%#^ can’t I remember his name?) demonstrated his proposal with a button on his lapel that was the exact size of the moon in the night sky, to make a point about how legible simple graphics would be.
[Movie Announcer Voice]D. D. Harriman is The Man Who Sold the Moon.[/MAV]
(Can I invoke Fernis’ Law? It’s not a sci fi . . . crap, I mean SF thread, but it involves an SF idea. . .)
Okay, Apollos 11, 14 and 15 (and the Soviet Union’s Lunakhod 2) put retroreflectors on the moon ment to be illuminated by laser from earth.
Experiments performed at McDonald Obsevatory (near Fort Davis, TX) helped establish moon orbit and recession from the earth.
If I remember, a pinpoint laser from earth ended up illuminating something like seven (7) kilometers of moon and reflected back around twenty (20) kilometers to earth.
To light up the whole moon into a Coca-Cola bottlecap sounds prohibitively expensive.
Derleth, I’m not sure that that treaty is actually relevant here. It would prohibit a governmental agency from billboarding the Moon, and it prohibits anyone, government or no, from claiming the Moon, but it makes it pretty clear that a private company could, for instance, establish a colony on the Moon without claiming ownership of the real estate. Perhaps a private company could similarly decorate the surface without claiming it?
As for the SF angle, the corporate logo on Harriman’s button was “6+”, not a C, which I always interpreted as a names-changed-to-protect-against-lawsuits rendition of 7Up. And what’s Fenris’ Law?
Speaking of which, is it just coincidence that the three letters in HAL (of 2001 fame) become IBM when you decrement them by one letter?
What is Fenris’ Law? I ran a couple of web searches but could only find some pages about towns named Fenris, Fenris Caves, castles named Fenris, etc.
I wasn’t suggesting we should worry about the possibility, I only wondered if there was a tool in place to prevent it. I’m not aware of any treaty or pact that every nation on Earth agreed to. As I interpret contract law (simplified), anything not prohibited is permitted.
According to Kubrick and Clarke it was coincidence; in fact, they said that if they had realized that connection before hand, they would have changed the name.
Crap.
This is what I get for not having read the thing since, like, 1982 or thereabouts.
Oh, and WTF is Fenris’ Law, anyway?