Mars, colonialism, and property ownership

Great Debates
1

SpaceX is working on the early stages of developing their Mars-capable BFR and Blue Origin is starting work on the building blocks necessary for a similarly-sized rocket. There’s also NASA’s SLS. It looks like we’re facing a very real possibility of human colonization of Mars, perhaps in the next couple of decades. Tangentially-related to this, President Trump has announced plans to create another service branch, a “Space Force”.
How has / will property ownership be settled in places like Mars / the Moon? Do colonial-era rules (get there first, plant the flag, and it’s yours) apply? If so, does the USA already own the Moon (Apollo program)? Does a person need to be present to make such a claim, or is a robot sufficient? If SpaceX gets their first, will Mars be privately-owned? Or will Martians set up some future government of their own choosing?

I understand this is mostly wild speculation, but let’s hear your thoughts. Who owns / will own Mars?

2

It will only matter when it matters, and then all the blathering people did when it didn’t matter won’t matter.

No, we’re not going to give Elon Musk ownership of Mars just because he lands a probe on Mars. We’re also not going to give Elon Musk ownership of Mars even if he lands there in person.

Setting foot on a place doesn’t mean you own that place. And neither did that rule apply in the Colonial Era. What mattered was whether you had an army and navy ready to enforce your land claim. Lots of explorers landed in lots of places and claimed those places for lots of places. Didn’t mean a thing until guys with guns showed up.

Ownership isn’t a metaphysical property. It’s a question of whether you can effectively control a thing yourself or with the help of your friends. If you can, then you own it, because nobody else can do anything about it. If you can’t, then you can complain about it, but if you can’t convince the rest of us to help you then your ownership claims don’t mean a thing.

So I can declare I own Mars tomorrow, and even type up a nice certificate. And that means what? It means nothing. It means nothing today because there’s no dispute over Mars or parts of Mars that can be resolved. If I could call the cops and they’d go over to NASA and arrest the engineers putting together Mars missions, then my claim would mean something. But since I can’t, it doesn’t.

And if Elon Musk lands on Mars the day after tomorrow, the cops aren’t going to march over to NASA to arrest anyone either. He can claim Mars, but unless there’s a dispute between people that other people care about, his claims mean nothing.

It’s when you have two Mars bases and they argue over who gets to mine in which canyon that property rights on Mars matter. And what really matters is what the guys on Mars actually do. If a court on Earth rules that Mars Base Alpha owns a particular crater, but the guys at Utopia Planitia Commons don’t listen to that court, then the rulings of that court are irrelevant. The court has to have some way of enforcing their ruling that the guys at Utopia Planitia will listen to.

And so the current state of property rights in outer space are that most countries have agreed for the time being that they will not recognize any such rights. So if you want to set up a mining operation on the Moon, you’re going to have to enforce your claim yourself, because no government on Earth will do it for you. The good news is that if you set up a mining colony on Mare Crisium, there isn’t anybody who can stop you either.

3

The current sort-of-agreement is that nobody owns other celestial bodies. Whether that will stand up when it becomes possible to use other celestial bodies for anything other than temporary research projects or as a challenge and demonstration of ability is a different question. I think it will first go to the UN, where nothing will be decided, and then result in political conflict, backroom deals and possibly actual war.

I strongly disagree with human colonisation of Mars being a very real possibility any time soon. A manned mission to Mars within 20 years? I think that’s a very real possibility. A colony? I don’t think so. A martian colony in that timeframe is very close to impossible and it’s a very silly idea to try it. It might happen, but I doubt it.

4

Probably war. The UN has a Moon Treaty which very few countries have signed. In the end it’ll mostly go to whoever grabs the most land in space first.

5

This sounds exciting, in a might-makes-right, we-might-bomb-your-Mars-cave-and-leave-you-choking-and-frozen sort of way. I’d kind of hoped we’d moved past this sort of thing as a species, but given that we can’t even agree how to handle disputes over our oceans and artificial islands here on Earth, I guess it wouldn’t be surprising to see the guys at Utopia Planitia Commons up-armoring their excavators and beating their (figurative) plowshares into (figurative) swords.

6

We might implement something similar to the Antarctic treaty. Of course, Antarctica doesn’t have enough natural resources to make it economically worthwhile to exploit, and anything worth having on Mars is going to be even less worthwhile, due to the difficulties of getting it back to Earth.

I don’t think it would work legally for the US to land on Mars, stick a flag in the soil, and then say “OK now we own the whole planet” but if we did, it wouldn’t matter much until we find something somebody else wants. And they have to want it enough to mount a mission to Mars and try to get it.

Suppose we land on Mars, and find a large deposit of unobtainium, that can be used to turn sea water into energy. I can see a claim being upheld that we own that deposit, and probably any other deposits we find. The whole planet? Probably not.

Regards,
Shodan

7

Trying to remember Locke’s proposals from my college days–I think he suggested you owned previously-unowned land if you improved it.

While I’m hopeful our ideas about property ownership will have changed by the time we settle new planets, if they haven’t, some principle along these lines might be helpful.

We’d need something like this:
-An interplanetary organization that can process land grant applications.
-Standards that determine what comprises “improvement” of land (so no, you can’t just dust a planet with trace amounts of oxygen-producing algae and claim you own the entire planetary surface).
-An enforcement and dispute-settlement mechanism.

We may also want to establish rules preventing monopolies on land. And we’ll also need to establish rules for setting up new governmental entities: once there are more than a half-dozen families living in an area, you know there are gonna be disputes that require resolution among the folks living there, and it’d be nice to avoid getting all Hatfield and McCoy about it.

8

I don’t see anyone getting to Mars and back in the next couple of decades. We were able to get to the moon with 1960s technology, nobody’s been back since 1972, and a Mars mission is orders of magnitude more challenging.

If anyone gets to Mars in the next 20 years, it’ll be some very old multibillionaire who can finance a one-way trip because he’s willing to die there, just to say he was the first man on Mars. And I’d put a low likelihood even on that.

And colonies? Not happening this side of mid-century. We’ve got some time before any of this even approaches being an issue. I won’t be around when that happens, and I’m planning to live for another few decades.

9

I suppose it would be like Antarctica, with loose territorial boundaries where scientific exploration happens. At least until someone discovers something valuable. After that, who knows?

There are a number of scenarios. Each nation could plant their flag. If such ventures require a significant amount on international cooperation, maybe jurisdiction might fall under some multinational NGO or corporate entity or some mix of both (think the East India Company in space, Wayland-Yutani from the Alien films or CHOAM corporation from Dune…probably SpaceX).

For the foreseeable future, any space colony would have a strong dependence on Earth for supplies and other technical support. Making political independence impractical.

And now you have dropships full of space marines landing in your back yard.

They can so long as you still need to resupply that colony from Earth.

10

I mean, Russia just decided to annex Crimea and parts of Georgia in a might-makes-right sort of way, so we haven’t really moved past conventional land disputes here on Earth.

11

It’s a moot point. Mars isn’t farmable, there are no people to enslave, there are no fossil fuels to exploit and the only interesting mineral that we’ve found at all is titanium which isn’t worth the cost to extract. Bottom line is that Mars is Antarctica. One country might set up a base somewhere, another country will set up another somewhere else. Mars has the same amount of surface area as all of the land on Earth, there are plenty of places for any type of settlements that we can conceive of for the next multiple, multiple centuries.

12

Yeah. Anything we put on the Moon or Mars is going to be scientific outposts for the foreseeable future. And if or when that stops being true, the discussions of ownership are going to depend on the form of the surprising new technologies that are allowing us to run long-term self-sustainable operations in places with no (or inhospitable) natural atmosphere and water cycle.

13

Well said and spot on. That’s why Trump has decided to militarize outer space and has ordered the Pentagon to create a sixth military branch that will include “preparing for war in space”.

Note: This post is best read when accompanied by the theme song of the James Bond film, “The World is not Enough”.