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We think space settlement is possible, but the discourse needs more realism—not in order to ruin everyone’s fun, but to provide guardrails against genuinely dangerous directions for planet Earth.
The book is divided into six chunks. The first is about what space does to human bodies and minds. The second is about where we might place those bodies and minds in space. The third is about how to have them not all die. The fourth section is about whether any of this is or ought to be legal.
Carrington Event, after British astronomer Richard Carrington. Records from August 28, 1859, all over America document the effects. In one Boston office at about 6:30 p.m., all the outgoing telegraph lines simply stopped working. In Pittsburgh, sudden currents in their electrical system compelled telegraph operators to disconnect the batteries; when they did, “streams of fire” and sparks jumped out. That night, from California to Britain to Greece to Australia, something like the Northern Lights was observed,
the Martian surface is poisonous. Perchlorates, a class of chemicals found in trace levels on Earth, make up 0.5 to 1.0 percent of Martian surface soil.
perchlorates are a pretty nasty chemical. At high doses, they cause thyroid problems by competing with the iodine ions your body needs to produce certain hormones. This is probably not good, especially for developing fetuses and children.
At two rotations per minute, you need a diameter of 450 meters to hit one Earth gravity. If you up the rotation to four per minute, you can pull it off with about 112 meters in diameter.[*]
saying no to nuclear power is basically closing the door on space settlement until some exotic future power sources are available.
Our goal for this section is to explain to you how we got the space law we have, what the space law says, why it’s dangerous in its current form, and how we might hope to change it.
Seabed law was initially intended to work this way, and a statement by Moragodage Christopher Walter Pinto, a Sri Lankan delegate, gives a good sense of what it means: “If you touch the nodules[*] at the bottom of the sea, you touch my property. If you take them away, you take away my property.” This is far more restrictive than just saying anyone can go do stuff on the bottom of the sea.
There have been two other times since World War II when a massive piece of territory got regulated: Antarctica and the deep seabed. Neither place experienced a major conflict or scramble for territory because both were regulated as commons. Today, both have much clearer, much more restrictive property rules than the Moon under the Artemis Accords.
Since 1994, the bottom of the sea has been governed under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, or just UNCLOS.
you can actually try to exploit minerals in the deep seabed. Similar to what the Moon Agreement would have done, UNCLOS created an international regime to manage resource exploitation.
The US has signed but not yet ratified UNCLOS, despite occasional internal efforts to try to get us to do so. Why? Well, for one thing, as Donald Rumsfeld said of UNCLOS at a 2012 meeting in the US Senate, it was “conceivable that it could become a precedent for the resources of outer space.”
Territorial integrity is one of the main norms of international law,
During the twentieth century there were three major state-creation periods. First, the collapse of the “Central Empires” in the wake of World War I. Second, the rapid decolonization of empires that mostly took place between 1945 and 1975. Third, there was the liberation of states controlled by the Soviet Union,
In 2008, Kosovo declared its independence and was immediately recognized by the United States and a number of European countries. But it has never received a UN seat because many major international players refuse to recognize it.
We have come to believe that unless major legal reforms are undertaken, expansion followed by crisis is a likely path.
Space settlement will be much harder than it is usually portrayed, without obvious economic benefits.
