In article ,
Stephen Souter wrote:

Your mention of "investors" suggests you're contemplating absentee
landlords (who need to be encouraged to "improve" their investments) as
the major beneficiary of the system--as opposed to resident homesteaders
who have a built-in incentive to make improvements.

Correct. We're not going to have people actually living on other bodies
for a long time. The trick is to get from where we are now, to that
point in the future where actual squatters are an issue.

In between now and then, we are faced with the problem of kick-starting
an offworld economy. One of the main problems holding back the creation
of such an economy is the nebulous (and in some countries, outright
denied) state of property rights.

It's not about settlement; it's about use of resources. If I want to
land a probe on an asteroid, claim it as my own, and start mining and
selling the resources therein, I currently can't do it. The nebulous
state of property law will prevent me from getting the necessary
investment. With even a reasonably clear stab at property law, I might
well get the backing I need to do the project, and the economic ball
starts rolling.

It's also about real estate futures. Futures markets are a way for
investment risk to be spread out over time, making possible projects
that would be far too risky to fund all at once. They pour money into
the early stages of an industry or market to help it get rolling, in
anticipation of a payoff when the industry/market is mature. In this
case, if a reasonable (note: *reasonable*) system of property ownership
were established, then for a relatively small investment (a few hundred
million US$), a company could claim (say) some lunar land, and sell this
in order to fund more ambitious projects. Again, this helps get the
offworld economy going.

You're *still* assuming the wrong-doer is on Earth, and therefore within
reach of a terrestrial justice system.

Correct. You appear to be dreaming about a future in which people are
setting up cabins on the Moon. That's great, I hope to see such a
future someday, but it doesn't tell us anything about what we must do
*today*, when no one (and only a couple of robotic craft) have even
touched the moon in the last three decades.

So you would not give "two hoots" if you and some Russian (for example)
both claimed ownership of the same prime patch of Martian real estate,
each of you with a registered land deed from your governments to prove
it?

Russia is among the relevant nations. But no, I wouldn't give two hoots
if, say, someone in Argentina claimed the same land on the bases of some
Argentinian law in conflict with the laws of Russia, the U.S., Japan,
and China.

In any case, what would you sue him for?

I wouldn't; in this case I would just ignore him. Like that guy
currently selling lunar plots of land ("for entertainment purposes
only"), his claim is not recognized by anyone that matters and so is not
relevant. (Again meaning no disrespect to Argentina in particular; I
mean any country with no space capability and only a small amount of
economic clout.)

And you keep picturing a system where all the would-be offworld
landowners are residing on Earth, and therefore within reach of a law
suit.

Right. You might notice that my picture matches the real world, and
will most likely continue to match the real world for several decades at
the very least. (And even after we do have people living permanently
off Earth, it will be a very long time before those offworld colonies
are politically independent of their mother countries.)

My point is that it's way too early to be designing land tenure systems
for places nobody yet lives in. Such an exercise would be about a useful
as drawing up a constitution for a putative United States of Mars: an
interesting intellectual enterprise, but surely impractical in reality.

A more appropriate time will be when people actually start to colonise
such places. They can then either draw up their own systems or (more
probably) draw upon the system used by the colonising power.

No, that doesn't work. Nobody is going to develop space (or at least,
it will take very much longer) as long as the property law is unclear.
The lack of clear property rights is one of the key factors preventing
us from reaching that time you imagine.

For all practical purposes, the US is the only spacepower at the moment.

That said, however, to rely on the US's space power status as the
foundation of an extraterrestrial land tenure system is to build such a
thing on quicksand. Such a system will only survive as long as the US
superiority in space lasts.

Agreed. That's why I'd much rather see a system of property rights
endorsed by at least the U.S., Russia, China, and perhaps Japan. Better
yet would be something from the U.N.

Best,
- Joe

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