Mars is not a legal vacuum
voelkerrechtsblog.org
voelkerrechtsblog.org
Agreements like the Outer Space Treaty primarily bind weak nations. If US, China, (and eventually, India) truly believe that space dominance is critical to national security, then the treaty will become similar to the nuclear weapons agreements, an exclusive club for those who has the power to do so and everybody else will be kept out under threat of war and sanctions.
Lawyers too sleep well at night because of rough men willing to do violence on their behalf, it is just sometimes they forget that the armed enforcers of international law are sovereign powers who can rewrite the very laws should they win.
The US should jump the gun and claim it. We're in the lead now, but that won't always be the case.
How so? The USA has had the most orbital launches so far in 2020, with China in second, and Russia in a very distant third.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_spaceflight#By_country
No one that's willing dismiss international treaties will care how many things anyone sent up - they'll only care who was the first.
Posession and ability to defend territory are what ultimately determines who owns what.
Some Island on earth thought that too.
Also, sending a nuke could be done much faster than an asteroid intercept mission. It could get there in as little as a week.
Just getting the ships in position to shift their orbits will take weeks to months. Meanwhile, nukes already hit. You'd only need 100km/s of delta-v, which is very doable at those timescales with a sub-ton payload.
TLDR: Short of planet killing levels of power, you are unlikely to dislodge dug-in ground forces. Rock is really really good at absorbing impacts.
As of June 2020, 110 countries are parties to the treaty, while another 23 have signed the treaty but have not completed ratification. In addition, Taiwan, which is currently recognized by 14 UN member states, ratified the treaty prior to the United Nations General Assembly's vote to transfer China's seat to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1971.
The latest example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_...
Meanwhile our space lawyers would be like "I didn't really expect that to work".
We see how that held up.
Or for another example look at the colonization of the USA. There were overlapping legal claims to most land, with the same plot having been given in a grant by the King before the revolution, by the state, by Congress, and some innocent pioneer actually went and lived there knowing none of that. The way we resolved this was consistently in favor of the squatters who lived there. On the same principle, conflicting legal claims to Mars should be resolved in favor of people who actually go to live there.
And guess what? We're looking a likely future where in a few years SpaceX is able to get there in volume while nobody else can do better than occasionally land small robotic vehicles at great expense. Who will be establishing the facts on the ground?
Doubly so if Elon winds up financing a lot of it by replacing long distance airplanes with reusable suborbital rockets. Despite SpaceX not being a sovereign government, the implied military capabilities here on Earth are quite significant...
Colonial law on Mars is something our great great great great grandkids may need to worry about, if even that.
But as https://www.foxnews.com/science/musk-4-year-timeline-mars-mi... reports, in mid-October Elon Musk was claiming a fighting chance of launching a rocket there by 2024. With that being a type of rocket that he intends to be making in volume for uses near Earth.
Given his past over-optimism, I'd take good odds against him in 2024, but would take an even money bet that he makes it for the 2026 window. And given that he's already gearing up for mass production, he'll be able to send a bunch at the following 2029 window. If he misses 2026, shift those dates to 2029 and 2031 instead. (The windows come every 26 months, see http://clowder.net/hop/railroad/EMa.htm for a list of dates.)
Either way, SpaceX is apparently on track to launch a fleet of ships to Mars in a decade or so. With plans that the first launch will get there and explore, the second will be a bunch of ships that land and set up a base, and the third will hopefully be able to make a return trip using fuel produced on Mars. From there, he's aiming for serious colonization.
You may call him delusional. I certainly did in 2008 when he was trying to get a rocket program off the ground using his private fortune. But I would suggest not underestimating his ability to achieve on his vision (if not on the timeline that he pushes for).
We are accountable to those we need stuff from.
Every human needs Earth right now.
Anyone wanting to establish fresh needs to not need earth, period.
They can then approach the earth as a sovereign trading peer.
Seems to me no more complex than that.
I harbour no doubt.
I think this will be the case for an incredibly long time, if not forever.
In the face of climate change or an extinction-level event like the one at the end of the Cretaceous period, even the bottom of the ocean would be a more habitable environment than Mars would.
Fun (and mostly unrelated) fact I learned on a Joe Rogan podcast: If you are at the bottom of the ocean, it actually takes 7 times longer to get to the hospital than if you are on the international space station.
If you are aboard the ISP, you can get to a hospital within about 24 hours if needed. But if you're at the bottom of the ocean, it takes about a week to surface because you have to give your body time to adjust. I think those are the correct numbers at least. It's been a while.
From a super interesting episode with Garrett Reisman, who lived on the bottom of the ocean:
Also, Mars' soil has toxic amounts of perchlorates[2]. You wouldn't want to breathe them in or have them touch your skin.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-breathe-and-survive-...
[2] https://www.space.com/21554-mars-toxic-perchlorate-chemicals...
[1] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/16741/what-is-th...
This seems unlikely to remain true if Martian settlement becomes a real thing. The shipping cost of <anything> from Earth to Mars is so preposterously expensive that a high priority of any settlement would be to make everything self-sufficient as quickly as possible in order to avoid it.
Mars can have 100% self sufficiency but will only have freedom if it can defend it.
The bare minimum to even have the discussion is sufficiency. Having something to defend.
I agree with you otherwise.
And the example of sovereign trading peer holds too. Being able to assert sovereignty in a way that matters to would be oppressors speaks to how wise it is to declare said sovereignty, does it not?
In any case Musk is cart well before horse here. Humorously so.
>"SpaceX purports not to create law horizontally via contract, but to establish the only law on Mars – a vertical structure endemic to sovereign legal orders."
Which doesn't seem supported by SpaceX's ToS:
>"For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement."
SpaceX is trying to establish an agreement between itself and all its users, not enforce that agreement against third parties (as far as I can see). There may be a conflict if/when a second provider establishes a colony on Mars, but nobody else seems to be working towards that goal, so it's even more speculative than SpaceX's ambitions.
Besides the nice theoretical debate this is of course all nonsense, there is no way that a viable Mars colony will be set up within the next century or so, and quite probably much longer than that.
Every potential adversary is approaching from the same direction and you have weeks / months of warning before they arrive. If you have the resources to establish a colony on another planet then defending your stake is relatively trivial in comparison. Also your team are already experts at the rocketry required to implement such a defence.
Your only hope would be that Earth wanted to take over your settlement. The military would need to land, and at least you could die mounting some kind of pathetic resistance... or blow it all.
The idea that an independent Martian colony is just around the corner seems to have an incredible following here in hn.
That's radically over-optimistic in a wide variety of ways. Exactly which resources are would scarce for such a colony is challenging to predict but guess humans - living indefinitely in 38% of earth gravity probably isn't possible and even reproduction would likely be harder still. A colonized Martian environment is going to be one big room/box for a long time. Also, it's not just raw materials that are going to be scarce. Microprocessors, chips, as an example, require continent-scale support/supply-chains on earth, where most things are easy. Vacuum is cheaper on Mars but not free like in space and all sort of other things are harder.
Of course a world is governed by the people on that world. Not some billion-mile remote authority. I.e. an Earth government can say anything it wants, while the folks on Mars go on doing whatever they decide.
I see very little chance that Earth can maintain a military influence over Mars, especially when the cost/time to travel is magnitudes higher. It's likely that Mars will have its own form of government from the people over there.
I've probably read too much sci fi.
Jokes aside, this is one thing I don't understand about Elon's viewpoints. He's afraid Earth's insanity will destroy itself, which is why we must spread to other planets. He forgets that as soon as he relocates people to Mars, that same insanity will be relocated with them.
Take for example the current elections in USA. Elections in Mars could be a two-round blockchained poll transmitted in real time. It would be over in minutes instead of weeks.
How far does that reach exactly?
This topic reminds me The Moon is A Harsh Mistress and A Ticket To Tranai.
Edit: I'm not saying how things should be... I'm just pointing out the obvious
This is quite the post, where space lawyers think the law isn't possession and force projection. Without force behind a law, they are just words. Mars will be independent the moment they no longer need Earth for resources, decided by whomever governs Mars.
It will just be called the Compromise of 2057 and all legal claims and military presence will be dropped and recalled.
Worse has happened before.
Either you can enforce your space law, or you're irrelevant. (But they may in fact be able to enforce it in Earth court. We'll see.)
A colony on Mars would have to adapt fast to the challenges of that environment, they can't be expected to wait for Earth bureaucracy to decide if they are allowed to act. In fact, the colonization of Mars should be modeled after the colonization of the American Continent; everything that was done then will be repeated on Mars, with the exception of genocide.
But earth has the bigger fleet, not as advanced as mars but still, and the belters have something to say too.
Good luck with that in your fragile vacuum vessels.
Or even sooner, when the Martians are backed by some earthly sovereignty that gains enough from the cooperation to really don't give a damn about who is in charge over there.
Yeah, and that will happen... if and when a series of extremely challenging technological and social hurdles are crossed. Especially, the ability of humans to live on Mars for any extended period of time is doubtful given the limited gravity[1]. Mars is going to need influx of humans for a long time, hopefully with them also leaving well compensate. "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise a kid"[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars
[2] William Shatner
They also talked about "De Jure"(In theory) and "De facto"(in practice). You could subvert the law if you do not apply it or apply it selectively.
Communist are experts on that. For example, Lenin called elections. When he lost them, he just made a coup d'etat and took power(De facto), then he will name everything as "democratic"(De jure), the government of the people and so on. A similar strategy as Napoleon, that declared himself against monarchy and declared himself Emperor (De facto) later(while being republican in theory).
Another example is Venezuela. It is a democracy "De jure", but a dictatorship "de facto".
The entities that occupy Mars (or Venus) and take possession of it will own it de facto. Who cares about what lawyers say in another planet?