Right, ownership of wild unclaimed territory must be based on
staking a physical claim -- actually going there and setting
up fences so to speak. Other than that it's just people talking. You've got to have some physical boundaries and preferably a
way to enforce those boundaries.
These are good ideas. Certainly, anyone wanting to claim territory on another planet or asteroid should expect to face challenges from those who actually go there.
There are actually a large number of land cases in which absentee landlords were challenged by what amounted to squatters. Very often, the squatters would win on the basis that they were occupying the land, improving it, making something of value of it.
Isn't that the way it's supposed to work, Jim?
It is entirely without precedent in written human history. The nearest thing we can look at which may have been similar was the expeditions by Asiatic tribal peoples across the land bridge where the Bering Sea is now located, into what was then unoccupied North and South America some 16,000 years ago. Apparently, there were no humans whatever on those two continents at the time.
All the other "way it's supposed to work" stuff we have at hand is about governments sending out various expeditionary forces to "plant flags and footprints" in new territories. These explorers would stake a claim, then the sovereign back in the mother country would press the claim, charter colonies, etc.
Believe it or not, the Johnson administration in the USA worked very hard to *abandon* territorial sovereignty over "celestial bodies" in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The negotiating team LBJ sent was working as hard as they could to get everyone to agree that no nation would have territorial claims in space. Why? They wanted to end the "Moon Race" and reduce their obligations from (a) fighting the Vietnam war, (b) fighting the war on poverty, and (c) winning the Moon Race to just (a) and (b) above.
So, on the downside, there is no national sovereignty over any of these outer space territories. Some amazing number of countries have signed up to the Outer Space Treaty. It isn't practical to find a space-faring nation which isn't party to it. It would be easier to create such a country from whole cloth.
On the upside, there is no national sovereignty over any of these outer space territories. No nation may claim them as their own. Which means that Dennis Hope's claim for the Lunar Republic is as good as any other claim. Seriously. It is as worthless as any other claim, too, by the exact same token.
Unoccupied land is not really something you could find anywhere on Earth from about 9,000 years ago, until the discovery of Antarctica. And that entire continent was divided up amongst the first eight nations to send expeditions there, in very short order. Those territorial claims were put into a sort of suspended animation, or we might say, "frozen" to make the obvious pun, in 1957 with the Antarctic Treaty. Various things like the discovery of coal and natural gas in Antarctica have been proposed as reasons for undoing the treaty, or not renewing it, or renewing it with very different terms.
That's the other interesting thing about the Outer Space Treaty. It comes up for renewal every thirty years or so. So the absence of territorial claims in space may be a temporary thing.
With nation states claiming territory, they could in theory provide legitimacy to land claims by individuals and companies. However, this idea pre-supposes a nonesuch - a nation state that is interested in private property ownership. That whole concept is very much out of fashion among the nationalists and statists, as you know.
Free Luna!
The motto of the revolution in Heinlein's classic _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_. One of my favorites. For no particular reason, I chose it for my Dream Builder site: http://freeluna.dreambuildersystems.com/
(These guys take e-gold!)
Regards,
Jim http://www.houstonspacesociety.org/icon/ ^^^^^URL has some essays on property, frontiers, etc.
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