Will Mars Be a World Without Laws? | MARS

Law works because it's effectively backed up by a state, and that kind of breaks down in space a little bit. The whole legality of who owns what is going to fill volumes. There are international treaties that relate to space. The UN Outer Space Treaty 1967 says space is the common heritage of man and that there can be no claims of national sovereignty or appropriation.

But we also have a bill that we put through Congress to the President signed recently that says open if you go to bars and you establish a camp, you can own them or you mine metals there, you can own those metals. Well, there's no international agreement on that at all, so who owns those resources? Those are kind of gray areas that will need to be developed.

These are very, very old rules. The idea of who owns what out in space, you just apply the same rules as we have now. If I go out into international waters, no country owns that, no territory owns that, there's no authority over it. But if I pull a fish out of the ocean, it's my fish. But you can come up in your boat and pull a fish out of the same spot of the ocean, that's your fish.

If you're a commercial venture and you go out and light an asteroid, that's yours because you went and got it. But the people who ultimately end up owning the territory on Mars will not be countries on Earth, it'll be the people who live there. And they're like, we didn't sign that treaty. Mars is likely to be a lot like the Wild West.

Who is going to stop somebody if there's a private company that wants to go on the opposite side of Mars and they want to just drill into the side of Mars and see what they can find? Who's gonna stop them? No, there's not gonna be anybody to stop them. You're a homesteader on Mars, and someone comes and starts homesteading in your backyard. No state is going to be able to support your claim.

So it might have a very, you know, kind of an old-school way of dealing with that. It was the same way in the American West; law enforcement was the last thing to arrive, rules were the last thing to arrive, justice was the last thing to arrive. Mars is likely to become very much an unruly place.