Thursday, July 16, 2009

Apollo - Space Property

One of the things we will have to do in order for space development to take place is to establish some system for the ownership of property in space.

One of the things I am referring to is the private ownership of land on the moon, Mars, Mercury, asteroids, and the moons of other planets. If I wanted to do so, I should be able to go somewhere where I could buy a couple of hectares of land on the moon, or buy myself a small asteroid. Once I own this piece of real-estate, I should be free to do what I want with it subject to the free enjoyment of others of thir own piece of the solar system.

t should be possible, if I wanted to do so, for m to purchase an acre of surface area or a several square meters by volume of material in space.

Ownership provides a degree of permanence that makes it possible to plan what it is that on owns.

There is little incentive to make any type of long-term plans involving some material in space if one does not own it, and others may take it away at will.

Let us take 100 square kilometers of surface area, divide it into one million plots of land, each 100 meters long by 100 meters wide, and put them up for auction on e-bay. The moon has enough surface area for 3,000 such auctions.

The money can be used to do good here on Earth. The option that I like best is that of an ultimate land-grant college run by the United Nations. Simply give this university the title to all of the moons, planets and asteroids in this solar system, including the Kupyer Belt and th Oort Cloud, and gift it to this university – ot to a set of universities.

The charter for this university then would be to us the revenue it acquires from this property to provide educational services to the people of Earth – focusing primarily on the children from violent and war-torn countries.

Iraq is going to be a continuing problem in part because Iraq is now full of 20 year old men who spent the last 6 years (since they were 14) learning nothing but violence from the society in which they have been raised. Their schools have been closed. In the name of future peace, it should have been possible to have removed some of the best and the brightest children to a university where they have a brighter future waiting for them.

This is just a suggestion. For the purposes of this posting it does not matter how the property gets into private hands. It is morally relevant to focus on those solutions that would fulfill the desires of a good person. I hold that the desires of a good person would embrace the education of the poor children in violent and strife-ridden parts of the planet. Though it is not the only option that a person with good desires would favor.

There is a legitimate discussion to be held elsewhere about who to benefit with the money that is to be raised by selling space property. For the purpose of this discussion, what is important is giving people title to chunks of property in spac. Once they own it, they are going to start asking themselves the question, "What can I do with it?" And they will begin to think of a number of ideas, and investing in ways to turn those ideas into reality.

1 comment:

  1. Would this property agent be a department of the UN, in that case, or would a given area be in control of the nation that first landed upon it? That might stir up some competition, re igniting a global space industry, but there might also be additional competition from various companies the likes of Microsoft etc.

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