"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
> Spike Jones wrote:
> > Curious wrote:
> > > > ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA...
> > > > ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE - IT IS MY PRIVATE RESORT
> > >
> > > who owns mars and moon?
> >
> > The first one to get there with sufficient guns to make it so. spike
>
> Bleah! Bleah! Bleah!
>
> For me, part of the whole point of ditching Earth is the chance to live on
> some piece of territory that is NOT soaked with fifty thousand years worth
> of blood from the people who killed the people who killed the people who
> killed the... you get the idea.
Sure. And, fifty thousand years from now, you can get fed up and go
somewhere *else* that's not soaked with fifty thousand years of blood...
The neat thing is, that's really an option if we can continually expand,
no?
> Assuming we don't just divvy up the mass of the Solar System to begin
> with, then I'd expect that any piece of territory in space belongs to
> someone who uses it for something useful - the homesteading principle.
Define "belongs" and "useful". If you mean you can kick out anyone else
who tries to take your land, I'm afraid Spike is right, at least for the
extremely short term. If, on the other hand, you mean that you're the
only one who can actually use that land, then you are right, again at
least for the extremely short term: until there are a bunch of people
making use of stuff in space, sheer logistics and physics will most
likely isolate you from your nearest neighbor by a large enough distance
to render questions of ownership academic, guns or no guns. Unless, of
course, someone tries to take your developments - and legal ownership
of spacecraft, bases, and other manufactured equipment is *far* more
legally clear.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:24 MDT