SpaceX Starlink TOS: the parties recognize Mars as a free planet | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX Starlink TOS: the parties recognize Mars as a free planet

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62 pointstosh15 comments

You know you’re good at marketing when your terms of service go viral.

That should apply in orbit and on the Moon as well. I want Earth governments and their laws to have as little influence in space as possible. There is at least a chance that we can escape statism and live with less coercion and more voluntary cooperation in space.

> less coercion and more voluntary cooperation in space

The state isn't the only form or coercion. Given the high cost of accessing space and the extreme resource constraints, space is likely to be dominated by multinationals and billionaires.

Some forms of feudalism where serfs must pay rent for their land or otherwise starve are technically still a free market, just one where the market power is extremely asymmetric.

"Voluntary cooperation" implies options and a liquid competitive market. If your Mars colony is going to die and you ask mine for resources to bail you out, and I condition that on being the supreme emperor of your colony, that rapidly degrades.

Further, there is no reason to believe firms won't engage in straight up theft and warfare. If you just captured an asteroid that has enough rare earth metals to collapse the prices on Earth and space isn't governed by our laws, then many companies would be funding a mercenary army to take that asteroid from you.

I wonder what the legal precedent here is from an international law perspective. Are courts likely to agree with that? (Not that they can do much about it if they don't)

The Outer Space Treaty bans nations from claiming a celestial body or stationing weapons of mass destruction on them.

Nations yes, what does it say about corporations making claims?

I wonder if we will see corporations evolve into nations at some point

Private property requires a state.

If you were to make it so that no nation can lay claim to space, rhen it wouldn't be possible to enforce a standard of property and thus corporate claims would be empty.

Private property requires that a private individual stake a claim to it. Private property is mutually exclusive of a state. The state [typically] is the primary violator of private property by enforcement of some shared mode.

This is not actually how it works in the real world. Private property cannot be upheld by individuals alone because of unsolvable issues in legitimizing any property claim, and therefore it is absolutely impossible to practically have any private property at all without having a state.

Indeed, looking back at history, the State was created essentially the same time that private property was created. This is not a coincidence.

Odd. I would only assume people kept possessions they made (tools, weapons, trinkets, etc.) prior to any formal states existing (or pooled them voluntarily). But, then, you get into _de facto_ states and what that potentially means.

Here it is useful to make a distinction between personal property and private property. The idea of having ownership over your direct fabrications is of course natural, but even then was fluid and affected by community need strongly.

Private property on the other hand, for example the ownership of land or resources, did not exist until the creation of the state, because private property in this sense was not possible without it.

In actuality, even some agricultural civilizations didn't develop private property, and it turns out that those that didn't are also the ones that didn't develop the state.

Can you give me a better definition of "personal" vs "private", because I'm seeing all sorts of problems there.

It's all fun and games until we laugh our way into something from The Outer Worlds.

Mars is a Harsh Mistress.

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