Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
Gregory W. Nemitz
registered some land containing 492
quintillion dollars worth of platinum.
The land was right here... well,
over here - an asteroid
named 433 Eros.
Not a single sovereign nation on earth
recognizes human claims to
extraterrestrial real estate,
but he did it anyway.
And then, less than a year later,
NASA landed a probe on the asteroid.
They called it the first asteroid
we had ever landed a probe on.
Nemitz called it "parking space number 29"
and promptly sent
NASA a 20 dollar parking ticket.
But so far,
NASA and the US Attorney General 
have dismissed the fine, saying that
his claim to own the asteroid is without legal merit.
But why?
Plenty of organizations exists that will
gladly take your money in return for
land on the Moon, Venus, Mars.
And if you had enough money to go to the Moon,
nothing is legally stopping you from moving there,
building a house with a significant
other, having some kids and turning
your Moon house
into a Moon home.
It wouldn't be trespassing
or squatting or stealing.
The 1979 Moon Treaty
says that no one can own any part of outer space
ever, but only 11 states have signed it.
However,
129 nations have signed and/or ratified the 1967
Outer Space Treaty, which says that outer
space is not subject to national
appropriation.
It says nothing about a private individual
or a company owning part of outer space.
But without the recognition and support
of at least one sovereign nation,
what does ownership really mean?
I mean, I can claim anything I want.
I can claim to own Prospect Park
in Brooklyn, but just saying that I do or
even moving there
and living in Prospect Park wouldn't
entitle me to the rights that usually go
along with ownership,
unless someone with a bunch of power
agreed that I owned it and could enforce
that ownership and keep others
from claiming to also own it.
In the past,
explorers had few qualms about claiming to
own land,
even if other humans were already there,
because they had
power on their side - mainly plenty of guns,
Germs and Steel.
To paraphrase con artist
Canada Bill Jones, "you know what beats four aces?
A gun."
Or as @lawblob pointed out,
McDonald's actually does serve
breakfast after 10:30,
if you have a gun. If you claimed some
land on the Moon as your own and moved in,
would you also have to hire your own lunar police
and Cislunar military to defend it and
to keep others from
challenging your claim?
Pretty much.
That's kind of the problem.
Currently it is
risky for individuals or corporations to claim
and use extraterrestrial territory
because the Outer Space Treaty
says that outer space is the common
heritage of mankind.
It belongs
to all of us
and only to all of us.
Many interpretations of the Outer Space
Treaty predict that powerful things like
nations
would be reluctant to come to your
defense should someone else want to move in
or cause trouble
or dispute your extraterrestrial claim.
Maybe you could get the sovereign nation
to weigh in on your behalf by declaring
universal jurisdiction
but that would need to be for an
incredibly terrible heinous crime, a
crime against all of humanity, not just
a dispute over a few space rocks.
Catherine Doldirina from the
Institute of Air & Space Law at
McGill University suggests
that considering outer space, the common heritage of
mankind, has slowed space exploration.
You see, the Outer Space Treaty was based
on the Antarctic Treaty, which says that
the entire continent
shall never become the scene or object
of international discord.
Discord is not a good thing, but
without an incentive to profit from it,
not much has happened there,
as opposed to the
Arctic, where a resource boom is
currently underway.
If people felt safer appropriating and
taking advantage of space, of celestial
bodies,
if technological development was more incentivized,
would we already have orbiting tourist attractions
and lunar hotels?
Maybe.
But here is what you can currently own
in outer space: stuff you put there
and, to a certain extent, orbits.
The Outer Space Treaty says that the
stuff we left on the move,
anything put into space, remains property
of the original owner forever.
Orbits around
earth are temporarily granted by the
International Telecommunication Union,
a UN agency;
but they don't work like typical real estate
on Earth.
When a group of Equatorial nations
attempted to claim orbits above their
land boundaries, without planning on
putting satellites there,
their claim was largely ignored.
So you not only need to ask the UN for an orbit
and get permission,
you also need to use it and fill it.
It's a little disappointing that we
don't know how
lunar real estate works or if it will,
but it's exciting to know that we,
within our lifetimes,
might have a chance to be part of the solution.
A unique generation not visiting space
for the first time,
but homesteading it for the first time.
Here's another unresolved space law quandary.
If an alien landed in your backyard,
intelligent life from beyond Earth, and you shot it
with a gun, dressed it and then cooked up,
you and your family, some alien meat
fajitas, would that be
hunting or murder?
We literally don't know.
On earth, we have human rights,
but there are no alien rights.
Maybe it would fall under the category of
cultural vandalism, an act that's not necessarily
a legal, but is a giant bummer
to the rest of humanity.
This has happened before -
not with aliens - but with paintings.
In 2003, the Chapman brothers purchased
one of the few remaining sets of
Goya's Fantastic Disasters of War.
Instead of displaying the works for the
public, they defaced them
by drawing clown and puppy heads on the people.
They called the work "insult to injury."
In protest, a man threw red paint on
Jake Chapman when he appeared at Modern Art
Oxford,
but at the end of the day,
what the Chapman brothers did
wasn't illegal.
They owned the paintings.
Vandalizing the Moon or
killing a peaceful alien aren't illegal
acts, but just like defacing historical
paintings, they seem wrong on some
deeper level, especially since because in
most museums
you usually can't even touch the paintings.
But who was the first person
to touch the Moon with their bare hands?
I mean, the guys who walked around on the
Moon wore space suits, they had material
in between their skin
and the Moon.
Well, to be sure,
you already have the Moon in your hands.
Well, little Moons.
Lunula.
The crescent-shaped area at the base of
your fingernail,
where tissue is thicker and the red
vascular structures underneath are more
hidden,
making it white.
And to be even more sure,
at the quantum level touch is
problematic. As I've covered before,
atomically speaking, matter never really contacts
other matter in the conventional sense.
You can't
truly touch anything.
MinutePhysics called it
interaction over a short distance.
With that in mind, NASA says the
Terry Slezak was the first person to
touch the Moon
with his bare hands. He was a technician
in quarantine, who accidentally got lunar
soil smeared
all over his hand while removing film magazines
from the astronauts' cameras.
But when Armstrong and Aldrin returned to the
lunar module
after their moonwalk and removed their
helmets, they came into contact with
lunar dust
they tracked in on their suits.
They even reported its
odor, saying it smelled of spent gunpowder
or ashes, possibly because it oxidized
on contact with the air in the cabin.
Point is,
the first few breaths of Moon dusty
air that Armstrong and Aldrin took in were our first
fleshly contact with the Moon.
Or were they?
Walking around on earth
every day I am surrounded by material that recently
was in outer space. Hundreds of metric
tons of extraterrestrial rock falls to
Earth every year.
Some from the Moon, but most from asteroids,
ejected by a high-speed impact and
eventually caught by
Earth's gravity.
Some pieces are big enough to see,
but most are pulverized by our atmosphere
during entry into tiny particles that
disperse
in the air, becoming a tiny fraction of the very
dust and dirt we clean up and breathe in every day.
There's microscopic space dust,
pieces of asteroids and even the Moon all around us.
In fact, there might be microscopic
pieces of the Moon
under your bed right now or even
under your fingernails. Which means the
first human to have fleshly contact
with lunar material
was the first Homo Sapien hundreds of
thousands of years ago
to walk on dirt. We are still studying
exactly how much cosmic dust is in the
air that we breathe every day,
but it's safe to say that every once in
a while you inhale some
material that was recently in
outer space, some of which thousands of
years ago was on the Moon.
Was the Moon. And just like other
particulates in our atmosphere,
large enough pieces get trapped in the
mucus that protects
our lungs, meaning that picking your nose is gross,
but every once in a while,
a booger could literally
be out of this world.
And as always,
thanks for watching.
