yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Will Mars Be a World Without Laws? | MARS


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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.

More Articles

View All
Interval of convergence for derivative and integral | Series | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy
Times in our dealings with power series, we might want to take the derivative or we might want to integrate them. In general, we can do this term by term. What do I mean by that? Well, that means that the derivative of f prime of x is just going to be the…
Ancient Egypt's Celebration of the Dead | Lost Treasures of Egypt
[cow mooing] NARRATOR: Each year after the harvest, the people of Thebes held a celebration of the dead called the “Beautiful Festival of the Valley.” They carried statues of Thebes’ three main gods in a grand procession out of Karnak temple east of the …
Fundraising Panel at Female Founders Conference 2014
Okay everyone, we’re going to now have a slightly different format for the next, uh, 30 minutes. We’re going to have a discussion amongst these four YC female founders about their fundraising experiences. Um, so hopefully there will be lots of interesting…
Cooking up a Kitchen | Live Free or Die
Oh my god, well that’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Let’s cover that thing; like, for real, this is a cow’s head that is decomposing. About six or so weeks ago, a neighbor of ours had a cow suffocate. It got so cold out that its nose froz…
Kevin O'Leary | THE BEST INVESTMENT WATCHES YOU CAN BUY!!
[Music] Hi everybody, Mr. Wonderful here, and welcome to another episode of Wonderful on Watches, one of my favorite topics. In the background are gorgeous aquariums. I love the peace and the harmony of fish swimming while we talk about beautiful pieces o…
1999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting (Full Version)
[Applause] Good morning! Really delighted we can have this many people come out for a meeting. It says something, I think, about the way you regard yourself as owners. We’re going to hustle through the business meeting and then Charlie and I will be here …