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Comment by LyndsySimon | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

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.

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...

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