Space WI: Nations Lay Claim to Celestial Bodies

Yuelang

Banned
Why didn't Columbus just claim the whole new world and all of the Americas? why didn't anyone? Why just a small land?

And like Spain's competitors, USSR should land there first before making a counterclaim to split the moon. And the international community could only watch in envy even if US-Soviet end up split the moon in two...

Heck, maybe get some treaty about let's vent some steam off by periodically agreed for space wars. Just no war on Earth....
 
I've argued this one a LOT on the internet, (I have no life, really :) ) as the idea of "claiming" land here on Earth "works" because it's enforceable. When it can't be or isn't its ignored.

Hence the Nazi "claiming" a majority of Antarctica was never taken seriously by anyone else. (Or certain claims of "colonization" by some South American countries today for example)

However the entire "basis" of the argument is the "fact" here on Earth that land has an inherent "value" over and above any possible resources that it has. On Earth you have pretty much "free" basic life support even if you do not have any "resource" rights so therefore "land" has value and can be used as a commodity. (And as a "basis" of that process a "government/nation-state" has to OWN the land before it can be "granted" to someone else hence the need for governments to "claim" territory which is the basis of all "property' on Earth)

This is NOT true in space. Owning several acres of the Moon "land" wouldn't be the same as owning the RESOURCES of those acres. Once you've harvested the resources the "land" is useless to you. You can't "live" on it without a lot of intensive resources and infrastructure IN-PLACE already so the American "frontier" mindset of "ownership" is pretty useless. It's just not the same as on Earth.

Randy
 
If you want a potential future conflict, there is a little controversy to this day as to whether Neptune was discovered by the British or French. (It was the bloody French, and the British astronomer who the British claim is based on admitted the French got there first.)

That's the problem, claiming an entire planet as a part of your territory would be unenforceable. If the U.S. Claimed the moon during the Apollo era, what action would it take if the soviets landed a probe on its surface or sent a mission in orbit or something. The best one could do as far as claiming a planet is dropping probes and saying that everything within 200km of the probe is legally yours.

And yet...human history is full of unenforceable claims. Sometimes, they stuck for a while because no one had the ability to do anything about them. Again: Spanish domination of the New World, which no other European power could really do anything about (save for the rare raid) until the early 17th century. Sometimes they eventually become enforceable (British claims over Australia).

No great power has ever developed the ability to enforce such a planetary claim...but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. I can imagine...a more intense Cold War where the U.S. deploys missile defenses in lunar orbit to shoot down any Soviet probes that violate lunar space, or even vice versa. Extraordinarily expensive, but not impossible.

In our timeline, we've opted by international agreement to forego such claims because no one is willing or able to bear the (massive) expense involved in enforcing them. That might not always be the case.
 
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