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Elon Musk will run into trouble setting up a Martian government, lawyers say:
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is steadfast in realizing his dreams of establishing a permanent colony on Mars, but any new government there will face immense legal challenges.
We got an early glimpse of what such a future society could look like, buried deep inside the user agreement for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service.
“For services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities,” the terms of service read. “Accordingly, disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”
[...] Lawyers, however, have their doubts about SpaceX’s abilities to set up a Martian state. In fact, several told The Independent in a new story, what SpaceX has laid out in its Starlink user agreement isn’t radically different from space treaties that have been signed over the years.
[...] For instance, the 2020 Artemis accords stipulate that “outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”
[...] “[Musk] could be trying to lay some groundwork for offering up an independent constitution… just like he did for electric cars and reusable launch vehicles,” [Randy Segal, of the law firm Hogan Lovells] told The Independent. “Does it have any precedent or enforceability? The answer I’d say is clearly no; but if you say something enough, people might come around.”
(Score: 3, Touché) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @07:14PM (14 children)
Do you really think a government set up by a corporation on Mars is going to be so much better than what we ended up with here? Now I miss that Canadian wonder Continuum.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday December 30 2020, @08:44PM (10 children)
Agreed, it would have to be very strict and authoritarian, in order to maximize the chances of survival. Thinking otherwise is a flight of fancy.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Troll) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @09:35PM (9 children)
can you imagine a mars dome with a bunch of trumdumb antimaskers screaming about their rights when a dome-demic of killer airborne herpes breaks out? and they find out the virus species jumped from the cow in the dome-farm.
I do think mask laws, like not being naked in public laws, are a goverment overstepping authority, but I wear an n95 because of my freedom of choice. I do not however support fucking a cow, as it can only give consent by walking and sliding off the redneck dick, at which point penetration has already occurred and it's too late go give consent. Now if this was a smart monkey.. He knows what's going on before it happens. But smart monkeys on mars lolwut? What is this, Congo III (Congo in space).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @10:27PM (8 children)
Can you picture whining feminists and self-appointed minority spokespeople living under a Martian dome expecting a work-free sinecure publishing occasional screeds in the Martian government online newspaper? It will take a crew willing to do hard physical work without complaint to live on Mars. I picture conservatives as more fit for that environment.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @11:14PM (7 children)
Your picture of an astronaut is a fat hairy redneck with a GED? NASA uses cement bricks to weight test rockets.
As far as work-free... Strange how the red states always receive financial aid from the blue states. Strange how even within the red states, all their money comes from the blue areas of the state. Who's working here again?
From 1945 to 2020, GDP grep 4.1% under democrats, and 2.5% under republicans. Democratic counties are responsible for 70% of American GDP. Since you failed 5th grade math, that means for every dollar a republican produces with his work, a democrat produces $2.33.
I'm sure you're going to quote some newsmax for me and rant to stop the steal. But I'll save you the work. I won't bother reading your response here. But you should post it anywise and hit refresh every 5 minutes for the next hour just to be sure.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @11:36PM (1 child)
"Financial aid" is a stupid red herring. Most of this "aid" is for infrastructure used to make deliveries to and between said states. And most of the "wealth" in blue states is a result of population density creating a pressure of market forces, it has nothing ot do with anything productive. If anything it is overtly opressive to have corporations that service populations in Red states be headquartered in Blue states, thus creating an invisible tax on all services rendered because they have to pay their workers premium to live in an area that is overpopulated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2020, @02:43AM
That is the sound of wheels spinning.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 31 2020, @12:24AM (4 children)
Roughly 60% of Americans live in three rather small regions, where the price of living is highly inflated. When unions clamor for raises, they don't speak for flyover country, they only worry about those three biggest cities, and the areas around them. So, yeah, they make more than twice the money, but they can't buy twice the groceries. Sane people shake their heads and cry when city people talk about 30 million dollar mansions.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2020, @02:42AM
Yah like 30 mil is average. You're not even talking rich. Everyone has one and a spare in case the Red hoardes encrouch the city limits *spit*
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Thursday December 31 2020, @10:29AM (2 children)
Except salaries aren't part of the GDP number, so I'm not talking about making money. I am talking about how many dollars of GDP is produced by the person - how productive that person is. Assuming half the country is democrat and half is republican - which is close enough, a democrat is 2.33 times more productive than a republican. So what you say doesn't actually have a point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2020, @01:26PM (1 child)
That is a distinction without a difference. GDP is recorded when those very same people spend their salaries, and they spend them in the same states they earn them. Inflated prices = inflated GDP. Purchasing power parity is what matters (which is why red states are actually more productive than blue ones, and also why China's economy actually passed the US's a while back). Insurance salesmen and bankers passing money back and forth in New York racks up the GDP numbers, and it doesn't accomplish a damned thing. Farmers and factory workers in Michigan, Nebraska, and Alabama do.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Thursday December 31 2020, @03:12PM
so, lemme get this straight, your method to show republicans produce more dgp and just divide the democrat number till it gets lower than the republican one? brilliant!
here in the real world, a republican person still produces over twice less than a democrat, and china's economy is a joke compared to ours. you know, because 70% is higher than 30% and 13 trillion is lower than 20 trillion.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Friday January 01 2021, @04:26PM (2 children)
Yes. For the exact same reasons the United States ended up better than just about everything that came before it.
1) Learning from the past. We got to see what worked, what didn't work, and what needed improving. And we did it, mostly. There was a good deal of ideological sacrifice in exchange for pragmatic compromise, but it was still better than every other major system prior. Same thing with Mars. It's not hard to list a thousand possible improvements to our political system that few would disagree with. But they'll never happen because of inertia, corruption, and so on. Same thing for e.g. the British Empire (and Spanish and Dutch and...) in the 18th century and prior. The only way to really fix things is to start over. But that's become impossible on Earth since there remain no lands that can be reasonably claimed by a new nation. By contrast space offers effectively infinite lands subject only to very foreseeable technological advances.
2) Attracting great minds. The freedom and opportunity available within America helped to attract the best the world had to offer and, in turn, created an exponential explosion of knowledge and progress within the country. On Mars this will be exponentially more the case. There's going to be a bit of a paradox in that the main people who will be desired on Mars will be those who can thrive in the systems we have on Earth, yet are effectively willing to give it all up to move to a rock 40 million miles away from everything. That takes a certain kind of crazy that's going to make the early Mars generations something that's very likely to yield great dividends for all of us.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Friday January 01 2021, @04:38PM (1 child)
Me: do you think corporations running the government instead of people voting is going to be better than what we have here now?
You: Yes, because we have the best government.
Irrelevant of what you think happens here on earth, the reason we have the best goverment is because it is indirectly run by the people voting and making rules to keep the corporations in check. You mention learning from things that didn't work. You need to learn some middle school history to learn from history. You should, um, look up what the corporations did to the people before the government stepped in. Thing like shooting striking workers with guns and making 12yo kids work in a coal mine 80 hours a week.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2021, @08:00PM
So government saved people from corporations, eh? One of the first things you've said that actually makes me believe you a product of the US education system. When you look at the sort of things [wikipedia.org] you reference, whose side do you think the government took? It was inevitably the wealthy and connected. This has always been the case and likely always will be. Those people did not earn their freedoms with votes - they earned them with blood. Men who never stand up for themselves will, inch by inch, be driven into servitude.
The realization of this is what made America so great and unique. The founding fathers understood that governments inevitably trend towards authoritarianism, incompetence, and corruption; that government is, at its best, a necessary evil. Rather than trying to imagine the best of humanity, it assumed the worst. We aimed to create a government that would work not under ideal circumstances which never exist, but in real circumstances. It was designed to be minimal and largely dysfunctional with excessive checks and balances. And by contrast states, and even the people within them, were designed to be relatively strong and ready to resist against the inevitably tyranny of the empowered. When the second amendment speaks of the security of a free State, who do you think they are speaking of protecting themselves from?
Governments with immense power can achieve great things when they are well run and benevolent. In the 60s China was literally starving to death by the tens of millions. Today they're already the world's largest economy and are likely to soon become the most dominant power in the entire world. Yet that same power will also be what inevitably leads to their return to ruins, perhaps even during our lifetime - mirroring their past of periods of disunity and unity quite strongly. Their leadership will inevitably fall victim to corruption and/or ineptitude, and the impact of this will be immense with such an incredibly powerful government.
Yet we too are now going down the same path as China with an ever more powerful, more authoritarian, and more centralized government. And this is no doubt playing into our gradual decline that began sometime around November 22, 1963. The founding fathers would recoil in disgust at what we, on both a government and social level, have become. So how did this happen? There's an immense amount we can learn from ourselves, and this can be put to use in the birth of what will inevitably become the next great civilization. Yet another pattern that has repeated itself over and over throughout history. The only difference this time is it will be on another rock.