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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

The interesting question to me personally is the political one. The 'Moon Treaty' [0] apparently is a failure.

Is Musk on record anywhere about 'ownership', 'rights', 'obligations' of those exploring, colonizing and profiting from Mars?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Treaty

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Treaties are great fun for the specific brand of nerd that loves treaties.

In the real world, the only thing that matters is who has the bigger stick to backup whatever terms they dictate.

No NATO treaties or US treaties would have any weight without the backing of the largest military force on the planet. So in regard to space, it's all meaningless, because there's nothing of value on Mars or the Moon that is economically worth sending a military to enforce a treaty over.

Common sense isn't so common sometimes...

Well, there's the rub. While I imagine there's a school of thought that says "fuck you, we're on Mars, we're declaring independence, whaddya gonna do about it?", there's also a school of thought that says "we have nuclear weapons, interplanetary missiles, media control, and the political will to do the obvious".

Economic worth is not what wars are fought over. They are fought over the prospect of losing face. It all boils down to dick-waving, even over the vast expanses of space.

I mean, who would object to a limited tactical strike with no boots on the ground on a radical (possibly insane) terrorist controlled (I hear they abuse children) space-pirate-fortress?

Don't underestimate the power of a large boulder dropped into the earth's gravity well.

The moon is a harsh mistress, indeed.

If you feasibly want to move it, it would have to be a very large boulder. You would have to plan your redirect years in advance.

For anything a martian colony could realistically move in a shorter timescale, even if it hit Manhattan, it might kill a few thousand people.

A much smaller boulder dropped into the Martian gravity well would kill the entire colony.

Yeah, but also don't underestimate the power needed to get it there in the first place. Earth would have a fully fledged industrial complex, the ability to lob nukes across space. A burgeoning Mars colony would still be worrying about producing enough water to survive - launching boulders, or even carving chunks off phobos to fling back at earth - neither are easy prospects, and given that a nuke could make the journey in weeks (big rockets, don't care about slowing down), you wouldn't have much time to do anything other than hunker down and wait for fire.

I thought it was a bit unfair that your comment above was downvoted, so I upvoted it. Anyway, the canonical "reference" is Kim Stanley-Robinson's "Red Mars" :-) In that book independence happens after the Mars colony has reached a sufficient level of development.

As a prospective space pirate, I believe that would be a good time to shelf the question of raw military might, and bring up the prospect of Kessler Syndrome and Earthbound dissenters/sympathizers.

The Martian independence play is to just put a bunch of fragmentation grenades into LEO, rather than mess around with nukes. Nobody who expects to keep living on Earth would ever do something so foolish, but if you wanted to cut ties with your homeworld in a hurry, without killing anyone directly, that would certainly do it.

When akk they have to do is fire a few rocks or boulders back at earth it doesn't seem like a good idea. Of course earth could do the same but hitting a smallish base on mars would be problematic, for Mars they could just redirect a few decent sized rocks toward earth and because it is so densely populated wherever they struck would cause global pandemonium at best.

Largest Military Force - so China?

At the moment, a 4 year old with a stick in his hand would be the largest military force on Mars...

Exactly. And there is basically no way Earth will be able to maintain military hegemony over Mars in the long term. It would be easy for Mars to obtain MAD capabilities.

Redirecting a rock in space or even firing some metal rods from space toward your target would be sufficient to fuck things up for the recipient of said projectile. No need to mess around developing a nuke when an asteroid will do a more complete job. Now that would be MAD.

You'll not that India is the only space faring nation that's actually signed the Moon Treaty. The relevant one is the Outer Space Treaty[1] which does prohibit owning celestial bodies but allows groups to establish installations and prohibits interfering with other nations operations so you can de-facto own what you build on. That's a lot better than allowing the USA to claim the whole moon because we got there first with a flag, though.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

Perhaps space technology would be invested in more heavily if there was a finders-keepers policy in effect.

"finding" will need to be precisely defined: do you need a actual human to set foot on a celestial body before you can claim it, or is crashing a 'micro-probe' or even a ball-bearing be sufficient?

Recent relevant HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11525788

Anyhow, it's premature to even be worrying about ownership rights until some person actually lands there, and even then, there's ample historical precedent to guide us. If you're seriously interested in this topic, spend some time with exploration-age history, because space is likely to look a lot like that, only without the ethical issues associated with ignoring the natives, which at least our local space doesn't seem to have.

(And even if it does turn out Mars has some bacteria, well... Earth-bound conservationists are unlikely to hold back the progress for very long once it becomes a real possibility. It's really easy right now to posture about how we can't afford to colonize Mars if we would so much as tousle even one microorganism's precious little cilia, because the choice isn't real yet. When it is, someone's going to go.)

Conservationists (or anyone else who objects) will have it easy. Interplanetary missions are sensitive to timing. All you have to do is disrupt the launch schedule for a few weeks, then boom, it's another few years before they can even try again.

The United States and the West is not the world. Maybe you can file a couple of lawsuits and get an injunction against a US launch, but try that in China and the best case scenario for you is that nothing happens to you, and the scenarios get progressively more, ah, "interesting" for you from there.

Anybody who knows anything about human behaviour will know that it was a failure from the beginning. If there is strong demand for the resources in the moon, powerful people will move in and take them. Watch what will happen with the Arctic as its oil becomes more accessible.

A law or treaty is only as good as its enforcement mechanism.

If there is only one entity capable of reaching the place, I'm not sure pre-existing treaties and such have any relevance.

Being able to bomb a place is much easier than being able to land a human crew safely and establishing a colony or mining operation.

They still have relevance. Lets take the Antartica treaty for example. Lets, for the sake of argument, say only one entity has the knowledge, resources, etc to reach Antartica and this entity is a subsidiary of BP. BP-Antartica lets say. BP-Antartica wants to drill for oil. This would still be a violation of international law under the treaty that governs Antartica. Same thing applies, or should apply to SpaceX or any other entity (public or private) with regard to any existing and future space treaties.

"International law identifies Antarctica and outer space as two of four global commons (the others being the high seas and the atmosphere). Both have been defined within international regimes as spaces outside the territory of nation states and beyond the normative inhabitable zones of the human species. In both instances the current governance regime were outcomes of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) (1957-1958)."

http://phys.org/news/2015-08-antarctica-key-space.html

Specifically in the Antartica treaty:

"No acts or activities taking place while the present Treaty is in force shall constitute a basis for asserting, supporting or denying a claim to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica or create any rights of sovereignty in Antarctica. No new claim, or enlargement of an existing claim to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica shall be asserted while the present Treaty is in force."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System

Does territorial sovereignty mean anything to an international corporation that just wants resources and can hire private security?

Yes! Or it should as humanity has identified Antartica as a Common. Just because you are an international corporation doesn't mean you get to violate international law.

Unfortunately, the environmental protection protocol is open for review in 2048. This will probably roll back the protections in place for the environment of Antartica :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Environmental_Prot...

If tomorrow the 5 permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, Russia, UK, USA) and their atomic weapons decide to cancel the Antarctica treaty, then the treaty is void. They can invite to the ceremony the other members of the UNSC, but I guess it's better to invite the other countries with atomic weapons.

They didn't cancel it yet because for now there is currently no activity there with a profit, and they are not sure how to divide it. But once there is a way to gain money, don't expect that the treaty will last too much.

I know, and then humanity will have destroyed the last remaining wilderness on Earth and the ecosystem that goes along with it. Looking at our collective history we should know better. How tragic.

Realistically any 1 or 2 of those members could unilaterally 'cancel' the treaty. Treaties are only useful until someone violates them, then you have to figure out what comes next...

The UN isn't s game of Risk. Nobody's going to start nuking countries over the Antarctic Treaty. Trade sanctions, embargoes, blocking IMF funding, etc are the actual way things are done.

How do Antartica treaties affect entities based in countries that aren't party to the treaty? Say a Nigerian company set up a base there and started mining. What would happen?

It depends more than a little bit on how independent from Earth you are. If you are dependent on Earth, you are pretty meaningfully subject to the governments where you are operating.

"If you sanction us or cut access to our launch site in Nevada, we will redirect a 50m asteroid to impact Washington, DC."

It would be a classic Mexican standoff, but the group with access to orbital and inter-planetary platforms would win. You could try to starve them out, but you couldn't keep them from obliterating you while it was happening.

> "If you sanction us or cut access to our launch site in Nevada, we will redirect a 50m asteroid to impact Washington, DC."

At which point you have become the worlds most wanted terrorist, and will have to watch your back for the rest of your life while large portions of the worlds security apparatus tries to find ways of taking you out (not just the US - everyone else will worry they are next).

> At which point you have become the worlds most wanted terrorist

Only you're not on this world... Interplanetary games of brinkmanship have new rules.

But most of your resources likely still are, or the threat would be pointless.

The purpose of the threat is to prevent the grounders from denying you access to your resources planetside.

Seems to me that the first entity to get a real foothold in space will be the de facto ruler of Earth.

This is essentially the plot of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"

To the extent that the US government believes something like that will happen, I expect it will develop sufficient capability to eradicate the thruster (and the people controlling it). If it has to have a militarized orbital platform, it will. I guess in some ways that super-capable ballistic missiles would be more politically palatable than a militarized platform. Such a thing could just be launched at any object that showed a suspicious early trajectory.

Anyway, I meant economic dependence; if you have investors that are on Earth, they will expect you to do what it takes to get them their returns. That means complying with governments. So in that scenario, dependence is simply needing that investment.

Shoot out the trusters? there is no friction to stop the kinetic momentum in space.

Anyway you can rig the asteroid with explosives in the center of it, and just blow it to make a still dangerous giant meteor rain.

The rather hard sci-fi book series by Jack Campbell/(non alias name is: John G. Hemry) by the name lost fleet is full of scenarious where planet dwellers are rather fucked against space forces.

Spoiler: Giant block of metal is all you need to do planetary bombardments from space, just send it off and Newton will do the rest. Good luck stopping the many many tons of a single metal object "dropped" from space.

I'm assuming that the first notice of the asteroid changing trajectory will be well before the trajectory is Washington DC. So presumably there is something changing the trajectory. Vaporize that thing. Now the trajectory is not Washington DC and the threat is empty.

How about this scenario? There is an asteroid in the solar system we've already directed on such a trajectory. Using the thrust capability that we installed to accomplish that, we're happy to redirect the asteroid, if our demands are met.

Holy crap, that's an astronomer's wet dream--not the missiles, but the suspicious early trajectory detector!

Automatically track every object in the solar system large enough to make a boom-boom on Earth? Yes, please! I'll take 3.

Granted, but if there are sufficiently capable entities up there, I'm pretty sure we should expect to pay for them.

I'd say it also heavily depends on whether anything of monetary value can be extracted from Mars...

Agree, I'm interested in the political aspect of this as well. For most of modern history (past WWII lets say) exploration of unknown frontiers (Antartica, space, the moon etc) has been done under nation states with various levels of funding from governments either at 100% public or a public/private mix. This exploration is done usually with the end goal of expanding human knowledge or sometimes for national defense as in the space race and the moon.

What makes me SUPER uneasy about what SpaceX is trying to do with Mars is the 100% private nature of this, at least from an ownership perspective. Is SpaceX trying to claim ownership to Mars, or a least a part of it? Who or what gives them the right to make this claim? Wouldn't humanity as a whole be better served to see Mars the same way we see Antartica?

Additionally, why does SpaceX get to say who goes to Mars and who doesn't? Shouldn't we choose who gets to go on missions to Mars based on expertise in technical and scientific fields vs how much one can pay for a ticket? Why should the ability to go to Mars be based capital? Does a little child who wants to be an astronaut also need to be a billionaire? Ultimately, what gives the super rich the right to leave this planet for a colony on Mars while the rest of us try to figure out how to survive on the planet that they had a large hand in destroying in the first place. Why should we, as a society, even support a colony on Mars that will take many years to be self sustaining in the above configuration.

Hopefully our international bodies wake up and start taking the privatization of space seriously and at least start enacting and enforcing some guidelines, regulations, and treaties around space and bodies in our solar system.

SpaceX isn't standing in anybody else's way. Any and all other interested parties are free to pursue their own plans. Adding guidelines and regulations won't suddenly make it so that other people go, all it'll do is make it harder for SpaceX to do so.

This post sounds to me like sour grapes. "I can't go, so I don't want anybody to go unless we all can." I hope I'm wrong, because that idea terrifies me a bit.

Good, it should be harder for SpaceX and other completely private entities to go since space is identified as a public Common (see my comment above).

Its not sour grapes. When Neil Armstrong went to the moon it was for all Americans and all of Humanity. During the space shuttle missions there was a public effort to try to select a broad representation of cultures, backgrounds, educations, nationalities etc to be astronauts.

However, if the only ultra rich get to go, which it sounds like the case since that would be the only way to fund a private mission, why should everyone left be ok with it? Why should the richest people in the world, most who have had a incredibly large role in environmentally destroying the ONLY planet all of humanity can live on, just leave everyone else to clean up the mess? It would be the ultimate FU to the rest of the 99.9% of humanity.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/24/9792854/neil-degrasse-tys...

I really don't see many multi millionaires sitting on Mars trying to do subsistence agriculture honestly and if some want to, they are welcome...

You are missing the point. Capital funded the moon missions as well - just in that case it was the capital of the community you belong to, let's say your nation, so you feel involved. Nowadays NASA can't even put a human being into orbit any more - and that's not the fault of SpaceX.

As a "public Common", everybody should be allowed to go there. That's not the same as to claim ownership, which indeed should be publicly and very well regulated.

What purpose will that serve? You make things harder for SpaceX, so... what? Everybody just stays home? Does that make you happier, because we're all equally stuck?

It's the Harrison Bergeron approach to space exploration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

'''there was a public effort to try to select a broad representation of cultures, backgrounds, educations, nationalities etc to be astronauts.'''

Oy vey... that might be a sentiment which befits an established enterprise, but it is no way to reach for the stars.

Do you think Magellan or Columbus tried to be inclusive when they were looking to crew their expeditions? Of course not, they selected on whatever capabilities or vices they deemed necessary for their purpose. Did the Vikings go for a multicultural crew when they tried to reach Vinland? Nope. What about Genghis Khan, did he choose his troops by looking at the colour of their skin or their cultural heritage? He probably did, the criteria being 'just as long as they look and talk like me'.

Trying to be culturally sensitive and inclusive might work when trips to Mars are organised by the UN, based on technology and experience from pioneers like the current crop of 'commercial space access providers'. This is not where we are just now, however. Right now the selection criteria are altogether more practical: can you afford it, cope with the stress, have the right capabilities, can you function as a crew in a cramped environment for an extended period, can you handle the possibility of being left 'stranded' on a planet hostile to (our) life?

It's not being culturally sensitive for sensitivities sake. It's about an equal chance of survival. Most fairly intelligent people acknowledge having one planet for the human species is risky right? What if an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth? We better spread out to hedge our bets. Which leads me to...

> can you afford it

Now, if all was fine and dandy on Earth and some rich people want to take the risk of starting a Mars colony with the idea that most of us will be able to travel back and forth in a hundred years go for it.

The problem is, there is an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Oh, and the asteroid was created with help from some of the people trying to now escape. The asteroid is global warming. I can go into great detail on how global warming is going to make things incredibly challenging for the 9+ billion of us around on Earth in 2050. At least to Elon's credit he's doing some things that might make living in a warmer world a little more sustainable before he jets off to Mars. Most people that will be able to pay the price won't be doing so.

Wouldn't be more ethical to focus on saving the one planet most of us and our kids will live on? Lets say the Mars colony is successful. So successful that you and your families chances of surviving are actually better on Mars vs Earth. What gives you and your offspring the right for that greater chance of survival? Because you are rich? What about executive XYZ who lead company ABC for 20 years and used our air and water as a dumping ground for pollution. What gives them the right to leave? What gives them and their offspring the right to survive and thrive on another planet while us on earth deal with the cost of that pollution. As I said, it would be the ultimate FU to 99.9% of us.

What is that fallacy where you draw a dichotomy where none exists? Of course we can do both.

'''It's about an equal chance of survival.'''

I think a spaceship designed for and by those who have the means and will to design such will work just as well for those who lack either, or both [1].

[1] After all, the Golgafringians managed to put their entire middle-management layer, not to mention their telephone cleaners and hairdressers, on one...

Did you miss the part where they are doing this for NASA? There's already a legal framework in place, in fact, legislation has to be passed just to enable private space flight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_spaceflight#American_d...

Ah! There is a big difference, I believe between subcontracting LEO for NASA and a frikin Mars mission.

Since so far everything is done for NASA I don't have a problem with it. NASA, like any giant government agency subcontracts out a lot of work to various parties. The whole "Military-industrial complex" thing. In the case of LEO where it's NASA controlled but privately contracted SpaceX is awesome because they are bringing down the cost of launches to LEO. This saves us, the US taxpayer $$$.

The frikin Mars mission is different because from what I understand SpaceX is going with or without NASA. That's the difference between an Apollo mission, where the Saturn V was developed by Boeing and others, and Boeing just going alone.

Personally, I think this legislation is a bad idea and is a direct attack on a global common. It will be interesting to see how this holds up internationally. Its almost like the US saying to the world we open up waters in the middle of the Atlantic (international waters) for resource extraction by any of our corporations. Try and stop us.

>Its almost like the US saying to the world we open up waters in the middle of the Atlantic (international waters) for resource extraction by any of our corporations.

The US doesn't have to do anything for that to happen, since that's the current status quo. Fisheries in international waters are in crisis due to overfishing in part because they are global commons and access cannot be restricted.

Eh from what I am seeing access is fairly regulated.

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/ia/permits/highseas.html

http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-2/fisheries/deep-sea-fish...

Status quo seems to be not good enough on the enforcement end, which leads to illegal overfishing.

Well how about that. I guess my cursory Google search was too cursory.

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