Welcome to the land that no country wants: Bir Tawil (2016)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Not for the purpose of trying to claim it as a sovereign state (silly idea), but as a proof of concept on the volume of material/logistics involved and to stress-test the technology for self sustaining colony infrastructure.
Note that I am not saying we shouldn't also attempt a mars colony, but rather that running a pilot project/proof of concept at Bir Tawil or some similarly harsh environment would be a minuscule cost compared to the actual thing, and may prove very instructive.
It has the advantage of:
standard earth atmospheric pressure and air you can breathe
can go outside without a spacesuit
magnetosphere for radiation protection
ability to extract some drinkable water from the air, even if very arid, if you have sufficient amounts of electricity
relatively easy to transport dozens of tons of cargo to, likely using something like military-type 6x6 5 ton trucks
access to earth based telecommunications systems (geostationary satellites, iridium, inmarsat, etc)
photovoltaic systems can be installed that don't need to be hardened for vacuum
But it does have water, lots of water, which could be useful in all sorts of ways.
Ultimately conditions are different enough to Mars to make knowledge gleaned from one to be useless in the other.
Fry: How many atmospheres of pressure can the ship take?
Professor: Well it's a spaceship, so anywhere between 0 and 1.
Not a single billionaire alive today can be trusted to safeguard the delicate ecosystem there.
But doing anything like resource extraction or permanent settlement is simply not allowed by the antarctic treaty system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System, and would be heavily fought by all the signatories of that system.
Whether somebody would have the early stages of their construction project shut down by a flown-in team of military forces from some major nation states (US, Russia, UK) is another question. Or simply blockaded and shut down at places like the ports in Chile, Argentina, Tasmania, mainland Austrlia, New Zealand, South Africa.
You've actually got the same exact problem with the Outer Space Treaty. It only prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty over outer space or any celestial body.
There are 2 non-signatories of the Vienna Convention in Diplomatic Relations.
How would you define a country?
There’s also plenty of “global” treaties that United States is not a party of. Does this make the US a “irrelevant country”?
The US doesn't accede to these treaties because it has a huge economy and military.
There have been many attempts at self-sustaining/closed ecosystems over the years, with a distinctly mixed track record.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/mars-sim...
Technically, this is more than possible with current tech at less cost than sending a rover to Mars (probably), but no one wants to do it because it's not land you can plant a flag into and "claim" as yours.
In other words, from cost, to sustainability, to environment, to trade, to defence, to literally whatever criterion you want, living on land is better than living under the sea.
And alas it would not really increase survivability of ELEs. (inside mountains is likely better for that.)
The only reason to colonise Mars is to mitigate an ELE, and its a pretty poor mitigation at that - Mars is more likely to experience an ELE than we are, all it takes is a bit of machinery to fail.
Which begs the question of course, why do we care? If an ELE happens, then it happens. Bummer.
You might want to start with just building a very large east/west solar installation to create a large shaded area, then some water extraction systems and high intensity greenhouses. And obviously give the whole place very good internet connection.
It would not have to be fully closed, like biosphere 2. Many things you don't have to worry about, like CO2 from concrete accumulating. You can even have a bit of water loss.
But the problem is this: if you are successful and create some thriving city there, one of the neighbouring countries will suddenly discover some long lost claim to the land and annex it.
Then take a few square kilometers of desert in the vicinity and try to build a self sustaining city there for the EELT employees. Maybe it can grow into a tourist attraction. You would have to be extremely careful not to create light pollution though.
This is fairly impossible with two nations currently in a border dispute. Antarctica is a better place for that because there are no nations at war, no bandits, no geostationary satellites. It's quite a bit like Mars only with more water and an atmosphere.
It has the same advantages as Bir Tawil, and it's still much warmer than Mars. If you can't succeed at Bir Tawil, you can't expect to succeed at Antarctica, and if you can't succeed in Antarctica, you can't expect to last on Mars.
This is different from stuff that legitimately has no owner, like a flower in a forest. Unless the forest is private property, the flower has no owner until it is picked. As can be imagined, very few things actually has no owner.
They got a standard city template, changed the title... and that's it. They didn't even replace the lorem ipsum.
1/5 stars, would not recommend.
Who then has the motivation to stop the ostensible theft: you or the seller? The seller doesn't care, but you do. Without possession of the bike you cannot hope to return it in exchange for the money.
By contrast, say that a third party somehow manages to make use of Bir Tawil, without having any effect on the surrounding land, without posing as a security threat, and without making any actual claim. Which country is most motivated to intervene in principle: Sudan or Egypt?
And Bir Tawil is just a worthless desert, but Hala'ib Triangle is mostly fertile land with a sizeable shoreline, so why would anyone pick the worthless desert over it instead?
- good military outpost - possible mineral rights?
To you perhaps, but outside of your imagination?
“members of the Ababda and Bisharin tribe … carry goods, graze crops and make camp within the sands.”
Well, strictly speaking, either country could decide to claim both areas, it's just they believe that by doing so they would be lessening their chances of their claim over the preferred area succeeding. So it might be more accurate to say "without weakening their claim" instead.
> The senior officer concluded, perceptively, that, whatever we were attempting to do, we were far too incompetent to do it properly, or to cause too much trouble along the way.
Ah, so that explains it.
But hey, if I were Heaton's daughter I turn my princess status into a college admissions essay,
You're right, though, that in normal circumstances when we talk about things being "legal" we mean "with respect to a specific (non-null) jurisdiction". I think that's because places without jurisdictions are so rare that we don't usually think of this degenerate case. Perhaps there needs to be some special term like "vacuously legal", or "anarchically legal", to distinguish it from the more common type of legality.
which itself is a constitutional provision
The group was shipwrecked, surviving on a turtle and drinking their own urine. The victim, Richard Parker, was apparently in a coma. Despite these mitigating circumstances, the two defendants, Dudley and Stephens, were sentenced to six months each in prison.
My assumption is that even if the victim and defendants weren't British citizens (or subjects) the case would still have fallen under British jurisdiction, whereas if the same incident had occurred on a boat registered to a different nation, Britain would have to rely on the courts of that country to interpret their own laws on the matter.
I suppose it's possible that another country could have in its laws a defence of necessity that was applicable to that precise situation, and I don't know how double-jeopardy rules and extradition treaties interact with the nationality or passive personality principles of personal jurisdiction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction#Internat...