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Who Will Own Mars?

posted by CoolHand on Friday March 31 2017, @05:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the martian-gold-rush-of-2029 dept.

Anonymous writes:

http://www.autodidacts.io/who-will-own-mars/

Everyone's excited about rockets to Mars, and each SpaceX launch brings that dream closer to reality. Musk and others are putting a lot of money and brainpower on the technical problem of getting people to Mars. Less sensational topics, such as surviving on Mars, receive less attention — but plenty of money and serious thought, because there's no way to get around them.

But there's another important question which isn't getting much attention:

Who will own Mars, and how will it be governed?

Does Mars belong to the people who get there first? To the highest bidder? To all the people of Earth?

Does Mars belong to Earth, or does Mars belong to Mars? Does it belong to the Sun? To the Martian microbiome, if there is one? (What are the indigenous rights of microbes, I wonder?)

Who will be in charge of Mars once the colonists arrive? If Mars turns out to have valuable resources, who gets them? And if a Mars colony is to govern itself, what kind of government would it have?

The Mars colonization project is driven by the ultra rich. And those who want to stake their claim on Mars may rather the rest of us didn't think too much about the little problem of who owns the planet next door, and why.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31 2017, @06:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31 2017, @06:21PM (#487216)

    Good lord!
    This must be the stupid question of THE year.
    Like everything, it belongs to the person or brainwashed group of people who do the
    leaders bidding, who have THE BIGGEST GUNS!
    sheesh.

    Of course once in a while the leadership inbreeds and the offspring is just a cripple and thus unfit to do the required brain gymnastics to keep the enslaved populace docile. This is when thd ownership of the guns chance hands but not before denanding its fair share in bloid as payment.

    The unique thing about mars is that it ia a virgin to the MAD doctrine thus the smart owner of mars will see to it that he or she is and stays the only owner of atomic weapons, thus needing the capability to nuke any ... or further nukes trying to "land" on mars intact or otherwise ...