Wait a minute. The US didn’t ratify any of the UN treaties on the moon. We got there first, spent our money to get there, we planted our flag on it, so it is ours unless someone else takes it by force.
Don’t forget about the moon weasels. Screw with their environment, and they will take us all out.
Moon weasels are Nixon crazy.
Stellar reasoning, pun intended but probably not received. Would you like to claim a star for yourself, while you’re at it? Someone will claim the rights and sell them to you cheap. You think a flag on a hemisphere constitutes ownership? Not to denigrate your knowledge of history, but you should know, it’s been tried before. It’s irrelevant, but I have to ask for the sake of the entertainment value, what force, jtgain, do you think, is required to take unoccupied territory? Remember, the force of law is out, according to you, because – well, because of sheer chauvinism, but we’ll pretend it’s a good reason for the sake of argument. So?
As is all of classic liberalism; made up, the whole lot of it, by imperfect men. So in that regard, your philosophy is no more valid than anyone else’s.
Since there is no atmosphere, any changes to the landscape on the Moon are pretty much permanent until enough meteorite strikes to erase it. Personally, I want the early lunar landing sites to be preserved as they are. I’d also hate to see so much mining that the view of the Moon from the earth is affected. At the very least, mining should be restricted to the far side.
Despite that you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re right about that second part — and it’s what I’ve always asserted: no worldview is any more valid than another. A law, however, is not a worldview, though it may (or may not) reflect one.
“What do you mean I can’t keep mining here in the forest preserve? I already bought this sweet pickaxe and everything.”
Oh, sure. Trample all over Roger Waters’ property rights.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. Sure, all laws (about private property as well as public property, and everything else) are human constructs, and to some extent arbitrary. No news there.
Why remarkable? It’s all made up shit, remember? We made up some shit called “sovereign territory” and “obligations of citizenship”, from which concepts the orbiting rock called “the moon” is currently excluded, for historically contingent reasons.
The goal at this point (as I see it) is to make up some additional shit about the moon that will be reasonably satisfactory to at least most of us shit-maker-uppers (aka human beings) while avoiding the expense and destructiveness of a war.
Thanks, but it doesn’t really answer my question. What I was wondering was not whether some way of determining who gets to mine the moon could be found, but rather how.
Exactly. As I noted above, though, the traditional approach tends to be rather inefficient and wasteful, which is one reason that the alternative approach of international laws and treaties was developed. (Not that this approach can’t be inefficient and wasteful too, but at least it has the potential not to get so much stuff blown up.)
“Taking charge”? Sure it is, but that isn’t what you said before: you said that the UN would be the owner of international waters. The Treaty definitely puts the UN’s International Seabed Authority Secretariat in charge of decisions about international waters, but does not literally confer ownership upon it.
“In a bad way”? Meh. There’s not really any totally good way to have an international body control global resources. Then again, there’s no totally good way (in fact, not even a mostly good way) to have nation-states fighting wars to control global resources, either.
The US has apparently not found it an undue hardship to comply with the Law of the Sea Treaty since it came into effect back in 1994. What the government now seems to be realizing is that we might as well cash in on our compliance and get official standing for our claims to a cut of the ocean.
Untrue. Some worldviews are far more based on facts than others. Some are more logically consistant than others.
Just because some parts of a worldview, or anything else, are completely arbitrary doesn’t mean that others aren’t simply factually wrong, or right for that matter. Nor does it mean that some sets of arbitrary assumptions are internally logically consistant with each other, and some aren’t.
Not to mention Gary Larson’s!
Enlighten me; which part of the classic liberal worldview is not made up by men?
The law of the jungle.
Here are the texts of the two relevent documents: the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, and the Moon Treaty of 1979. The Outer Space Treaty, which has been ratified by the US and most of the rest of the world, had as it’s main points that nuclear weapons wouldn’t be based in space, and that celestial bodies wouldn’t be nationalized. In other words, it was agreed that there would not be a neo-colonial “plant the flag” territorial race. So far, so good. However, since sovereign national governments are what traditionally have recognized and upheld property rights, it then becomes unclear how or whether private property could be established in space. All the 1967 treaty has to say on the subject is that “the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty”. So private parties can’t be unregulated free agents in space; like ships at sea, they are to under someone’s laws and government.
The 1979 treaty, which was intended as a followup to the 1967 treaty, is much more controversial. On the surface it appears to merely reiterate much of the intent of the 1967 treaty. But the provisions of Article 11 made many people fear that if ratified it would ban private enterprise from space: (underlining mine)
Indeed, some critics called it the “Socialism in Space” treaty, and the L5 space colony people lobbied heavily against it. However it’s currently moot since only a handful of nations have signed it.
Y’know… I think it would be sort of cool to look up and the moon, just coming off (or just about to enter) a New phase, and seeing city lights illuminating one of the limbs. A reminder that humanity is destined to branch out; skies the limit. It would take an AWFUL lot of development to deface the moon enough so you could see it when illuminated. But maybe someday, hopefully within my lifetime, I can look up and see the mar of humanity there.
But I agree. The Apollo sites need to be preserved and untampered with. It’d be cool to have a pressurized tube-museum of sorts, that snaked around various points of interest, so people could see the first footprint for themselves. It’d be a nice break for the lunar miners before they had to get back to their hard and dirty work of raping the moon of it’s natural resources.
Agreed. Unless we yield to the temptation to use the Moon as a nuclear waste dumping-ground. Then we might lose it, and fuck up the tides.
I’m flabbergasted that I need to explain this to you. The reason it is remarkable is that the shit Smith makes up decides the fate of Jones. It’s the same ethic that underlies slavery and conscription. The assumption is made that Smith has some magical quality that entitles him to make up shit that Jones must obey, and usually it is nothing more than the fact that enough idiots voted for Smith — like bystanders cheering while the guy on the pool table ramrods the bitch who just wasn’t popular enough.
So it is not so much that the law is made up, as it is that it entails coercion.
So what if there *were * a magical man who created the universe, who sent his representative to inform all of mankind that unless they fed the poor, cared for the sick, and visited those in prison, they would be denied eternal life? Would you reject that as coercion as well?
The Bingham County Mine is 4 km across.
It doesn’t count when God does it. He has immunity.
Anyhoo, mine the moon for all its worth. Mine the heck outta it. Hollow it out and build condos.