Comment by ampdepolymerase | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ampdepolymerase | Hacker News Reader

ampdepolymerase

Everything will go out of the window the moment the new space race truly begins. Whoever colonises Mars first at a large enough scale (that is self sustaining) has a tremendous first mover advantage. Anything earth can send will not be able to arrive in a timely manner such that it would not be detected. Short of faster than light travel, it is close to impossible to take down a planetary adversary with current technologies (one possibility would be a gravity tractor and slamming a massive asteroid into Mars, but the second and third order effects of doing so is very very dangerous).

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.

There will be decades, if not centuries, between the establishment of a Mars colony and the point at which it is capable of surviving indefinitely with no supplies from Earth whatsoever. In the interim it will be simple for any global-scale military power--the same ones writing the laws--to threaten a Mars colony by blockading its shipments. Launch sites are relatively few and can be easily monitored, launch windows are extremely predictable, and spacecraft are extremely vulnerable to space-based weaponry. There would be no need to spend time attacking Mars when you can just cut them off and let them starve.

This is true. However, the blockading global-scale military power would probably be committing an act of war against the country launching the supply mission. I have difficulty imagining a scenario where Mars would matter enough for any power to take that risk against any but the weakest supplier.

Sanctions. The US is doing it illegally today and no one does anything about it. Against a space supplier it would be easy.

Exactly, the existing outer space treaties will have about as much effect on Martian exploration as the Treaty of Tordesillas[0] had on the colonization of the Americas. Perhaps even less - at least Spain and Portugal mostly abided by the treaty, even if the rest of Europe didn't, mostly because Spain wasn't too interested in Brazil and Portugal had Eastern Hemisphere colonies to exploit, whereas if Elon Musk has the only economically practical spaceship to go to Mars, he can pretty much dictate the rules.

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

Elon will be long dead by the time Mars is a polity in its own right. Even if he isn’t he will not have a monopoly on violence over Mars as many nations will join up to smack him down. Sorry he doesn’t get to be king of Mars.

But Mars will be independent the moment they are self sufficient. That will take a long time, but that will be their tea party moment.

Posession and ability to defend territory are what ultimately determines who owns what.

Not quite, as even when they are independent - a self sustaining colony - they would still not be in the possession of military technologies to fend off Earth actors.

They don't need to. They just need rockets, lots and lots of them. All colonists need is to deny the incoming party the ability to make a successful landing or orbit.. Unless you want to nuke or slam an asteroid into Mars, conventional warfare simply do not work well on the timescales of space travel. Another alternative for the red team is stealth, but our current understanding of metamaterials is nowhere advanced enough for an invisibility coating in the optical spectrum that can hide a spacecraft capable of interplanetary travel. Perhaps they are sufficient for a missile that only needs to make a minimal adjustments to direction.

Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment a.k.a. Rods from Gods?

Same for the Moon.

The US should jump the gun and claim it. We're in the lead now, but that won't always be the case.

Seriously the moon is large are sharing it will promote peace and innovation.

And this is what will happen, even if the first to start will get the better spots. You can't claim the Moon is yours unless you control all its territory.

Under that logic, the Russians could claim outer space altogether.

>" Under that logic, the Russians could claim outer space altogether."

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

But like the US were first on the moon, the Russians were first to send a satellite/someone in space.

No one that's willing dismiss international treaties will care how many things anyone sent up - they'll only care who was the first.

Okay, now I understand, but grandparent was talking about who was in the lead, not who was first. You generally can’t stake claims retroactively, so USSR could have made a claim, but failed to. On the other hand, it’s tough to distinguish regions of space, so I’m not sure it could stick.

Noted; basically I'm just saying that Musk won't care about treaties, and given the US' silence so far on his 'terms and conditions', I'm willing to bet they'd go along with it; in fact, wouldn't be surprised if the US 'suddenly' took things over and started staking claims.

They will care about who can make a defensible claim and defend it, on whatever real or made-up grounds. That will be 99% earthly politics and power projection and 1% space-to-space lasers for a long time to come.

And as far as (total) successful/operational missions go, I wouldn't call the USA as being ahead by that much anyways:

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

This will happen the second governments think that the moon is actually worth "owning" (at least enough to justify the costs involved)

No offense, considering some politicians here, I wouldn't want the US in control necessarily.

Can't wait until multiple planets are in a race to build the first Death Star.

If a planet is advanced enough to build a moon-sized Death Star, I think they'd have a better life going nomad and using it as a mobile home. Its habitable volume might be greater than all the planet's surface.

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