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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Law doesn't come from (or shouldn't come from) unqualified legislators guessing about what the future will be like and what problems will be there. Law comes from when somebody has a grievance against somebody else, and society steps in to resolve it.

Could you imagine how bad it would be if Congress got excited about the potential for internet crime in 1985, tried to guess the form of the problems that would arise, and then wrote laws banning and permitting things that they thought would lead to trouble? There is no way somebody back then could predict which situations would lead to trouble decades later.

The best way to deal with space would probably be to let judges stretch earth law (property rights, whatever) to produce as much justice as possible, and then modifying the laws once the lessons had been borne out.

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> Could you imagine how bad it would be if Congress got excited about the potential for internet crime in 1985, tried to guess the form of the problems that would arise, and then wrote laws banning and permitting things that they thought would lead to trouble?

Didn't they try to do that with 1984's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

Breaking into computer systems was already something that was happening then. Maybe they went a little overboard with the wording but it's not like Congress invented hacking.

Instead, they outlawed visiting google.com (by a strict reading of "unauthorized access")

A little overbroad is somewhat of an understatement..

> Maybe they went a little overboard with the wording but it's not like Congress invented hacking.

Believe it or not but CFAA would likely have not come about if not for the classic film "WarGames" [1].

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=7rBLCZuEOswC&pg=PA38&lpg=P...

About as well as Korea's government picking the crypto businesses should use in 1996:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-...

You mean like everyone who's talking about AI policy right now?

It's just as ridiculous to do so in AI.

There have been people who have predicted exactly the direction we are headed like Richard Stallman.

I think though that the number of people with that kind of vision and foresight are few.

> I think though that the number of people with that kind of vision and foresight are few.

It also often comes from domain experts, and almost never from politicians.

It might be interesting to see what RMS is predicting right now.

I have a friend who participates in superforecasting. I should pay more attention.

So this sounds great in theory, but there are a number of ways that I can think of where it falls short.

Tragedy of the commons issues are ones that often largely too late to easily solve by the time enough public pressure has built up to force legislative oversight. Social injustice issues are the same.

That being said, I agree that overzealous legislators making pot shots at potential issues is not a good solution either. My thought would be meet halfway with predictive laws with sunset clauses? That way, if a mistake is made, it will be undone in a predictable timescale without the need to get an oft deadlocked congress to take action.

Laws aren't so easy to sunset even if they have sunset clauses. Whoever benefits from the legislative mistakes will grow to be more powerful than whoever is being pinched by them, and then they'll lobby like nothing else to keep the laws the same. One example would be H&R block, which was created by a complex tax code and works very hard to keep it that way.

As for the tragedy of the commons, if your mining operation negatively impacts mine by messing up a shared resource, I can sue you right away. The lack of a legal framework doesn't mean that everything is legal, at least under US tradition; it means that the civil courts decide.

> As for the tragedy of the commons, if your mining operation negatively impacts mine by messing up a shared resource, I can sue you right away. The lack of a legal framework doesn't mean that everything is legal, at least under US tradition; it means that the civil courts decide.

This is only true though for direct damages that ideally are measurable in a monetary value. Are there cases where it helped keeping goods in the commons. I for one would love to sue everyone who fishes in the ocean because I'd rather watch the fish and sleep well at night knowing the ocean isn't being ruined. Simpler and less controversial example would be pollution of the air we are all breathing.

The good news is that most of these commons issues are related to ecosystems on earth, which are blissfully absent in space.

I'm curious to see if or how long that will hold true. We already have been seeing outcry over light pollution caused by SpaceX massive satellite formation.

I'd say low earth orbit is qualitatively different from, say, an asteroid somewhere.

Who do i sue over global warming?

That’s one legal concept, and one that’s consistent with common law: law is made through court rulings and decisions.

But it’s not the only legal concept, nor the most dominant or best, and in civil law systems, it’s required that all law be available and readable for free for the public, which means law has to be written into laws, and can’t be defined through court rulings.

The U.S. has both statutory and common law. They're not mutually exclusive.

True, but in civil law systems, with minor exceptions, only statutory law counts. Why should the US system dominate in space?

Another question is: why should the US decide what happens in space? That’s quite an imperialistic view on the world.

staticautomatic isn't saying the US system should necessarily be dominant, they're just pointing out that the two systems aren't mutually exclusive.

I’m not saying they are, but it is a question that presents itself given the context.

I'm not saying it should. I'm just saying that we don't face a choice between one or the other.

From a practical point of view, it's likely that much space law will be decided by the countries that send stuff into space. That seems reasonable since they have a clear vested interest in protecting their citizens, the possessions of their citizens and regulating the activities of their citizens.

That's not really imperialism, just a matter of responsibility. Clearly the US and any other space going nation should be held responsible for the activities of it's citizens and enterprises in space as elsewhere, and has responsibilities towards them as well.

Where that line of reasoning reaches the end of it's tether is when we come to consider property rights over pre-existing assets and territory in space.

Is it much different than the laws of the sea? Sometimes laws spur innovation. If the law is: first one to establish a base owns it then there will be a lot of effort put into establishing a base.

Then the question becomes: what counts as a "base" and how much of the surrounding land or other relevant resources are deemed to belong to the base?

Personally, I think land ownership claims around unmanned probes, rovers, and stationary facilities should be kept small, and claims around manned homesteads should not be more than about a mile radius or so, probably less. In the beginning, I think it's good to have policies that encourage settlements with different owners to be located close together, without anyone becoming a real-estate baron. The best land should go to those who have the ability to actually use it, not real-estate speculators.

See also: https://xkcd.com/2125/ as an example of how land claims shouldn't work.

Yea, I would say continuous occupation by natural persons for a certain amount of time.

According to one of the earliest space lawyers in the '80's, maritime law is largely the foundation.

Jurisdiction might prove a challenge here (state/federal courts?) but we already deal with this kind of things on oceans so I'm sure we'll muddle through like we usually do.

> The best way to deal with space would probably be to let judges stretch earth law

Step 0: Which ones? US judges? Chinese judges? Maybe Saudi ones?

> let judges stretch earth law (property rights, whatever)

Time to churn out those cornucopia machines.

This seems like the classic case of common law against civil law.

Isn't that pretty much what the US Constitution was?

It would have been if the US was the first country.

The United States Constitution wasn't even the first constitutive document of the United States! It was very much informed by the experiences, not only of other countries, but also very much of the Articles of Confederation.

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