Who Owns the Moon?
In Defence of Humanity's Common Interests in Space
A. C. Grayling 2024 Beaverton Lib 629.GRA
No time to read.
Brief skim: Much history (hysterics? unfair perjorative dismissal?) about colonization claims (Africa, Antarctica 1800s to present). Extrapolated to speculatively "semi-owned" places like the sea, the sea floor, Antarctica, and the Moon.
Not the poorly defined volumes between those surface places.
This is a sorta-philosophical book, seemingly extrapolating from grievances past into the future.
The book doesn't come close to considering the fundamental problem: an infinity (aleph-null ℵ₀) of ill-defined points in space, each point "threaded" by a larger infinity (aleph-one ?) of time-evolving elliptical orbit curves, complicated by general relativity and different perceptions of time.
Which boils down to "you are in orbit A, I am in orbit B, at some time in the future our orbits may cross and we may collide ... what should we do about this? Who pays damages if we do collide? Who is responsible for tweaking their orbit to avoid a collision? For N of us, do we arrange N² relationships for all pairs of us, and > N factorial relationships for all possible combinations of us, evolving over time?
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio (Tony?), than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I doubt that a grievance model will be productive, much less more productive than an ownership model or a regulatory model. Perhaps we can construct more accurate and just models, but I suspect these will be computational rather than emotionally accessible. Bridging the gap to models that most humans can accept (if not understand) will be an enormous intellectual challenge, followed by a super-enormous justification and persuasion problem. I hope there is a "humanities supergenius" of Einstein-level genius who can glimpse the organizing principles, and engage all 8 billion of us in elaborating the details and synchronizing our efforts.
Until then, free-market exchange is an awful organizing method for billions of us, but the least awful method discovered so far that sorta-kinda scales. Before you break what you have, arrange replacements and test their durability first.