Who should get property rights to asteroids?
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 2871 votes
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 27 comments
The ones with a First Post.... (Score:5, Funny)
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the what act? The only reference I can find to legislation even closely worded like that is the National Aeronautics and Space Act 1958 which laid the framework and authorised the founding of NASA. The Outer Space Treaty 1967 (Resolution 2222 (XXI)) governs the ENTIRETY of space activity by mutual agreement by all but I think THREE UN member states (two of which don't even have their own space programs, Burundi I don't know about but for some reason they refused to sign), Article 3 of which forbids sovereig
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Hasn't been signed into law yet by the executive, but has passed House and Senate. [congress.gov]
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You don't have to own something to extract resources from it. The fishing industry in general doesn't own the waters they fish in, but they bring fish to port and act like they own the fish. Does the treaty cover anything extracted from a celestial body?
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You can own anything that you have applied a delta-v to of >1m per second.
So, anyone who wants to potentially cause an extinction-level event here on Earth, because they changed the orbit of one object, which in turn perturbs the orbits of 'n' objects, any number of which in 'n' years could come crashing down on Earth and kill us all? Nope.jpg, not a good plan IMO.
Re:Is that really the right Question? (Score:4, Informative)
Realistically, any object they can change the orbit of they can obviously change again and I am not sure you understand the size of the objects and the distances involved and how that impacts the gravitational affect of those objects, unless that relatively small asteroid hits something nothing much will change.
Mining stuff in space for a bunch of centuries will not be about using that stuff on earth but using that stuff in space. So asteroids back to earth is just not realistic, Asteroids back to a habitation, processing and manufacturing Asteroid to be used on the further expansion into space. Bringing material from space to earth, processing and sending back into space makes no sense. Basically it will mainly be people who go and come back or remain in space, as humanity slowly but surely expands out into space. There is a whole galaxy out there and if we stay on this rock in space, eventually we will cease to exist on this single rock in space.
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Re:Is that really the right Question? (Score:5, Funny)
"... quantum singularity inside one ..."
Ah. Too many Star Trek episodes.
Worry away man.
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Now, as to the rest: Where in the solar system (other than Earth) do you currently live, and for how long, and could you post the highlights of your asteroid mining career? What's that? You've never lived anywhere other than Earth, and have no experience with asteroid mining? Have you even been to LEO? No? Well, then I guess you're not any more qualified to
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The problem isn't a lack of caution, the problem is with people who try to shut down conversation under the guise of caution.
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1. Iran will be checked, and they have already stated that they don't want nuclear weapons. So loudly that even Mossad and the CIA don't think they want weapons
2. Yes, the climate changes, but never this quickly without some massive collision which killed most things. You wouldn't set fire to your life boat and then deny the fire exists, would you?
You might just want to educate yourself before showing everyone just how little you know yet just how much you think of yourself. It will save you further em
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what is this, a contest to see how much BS you can spout in one post?
Re:Is that really the right Question? (Score:5, Insightful)
Iran.. global warming.. nukes.. GMOs..
For bringing your personal agenda of political bullshit into a discussion about space, you can go fuck yourself sideways with a rusty chainsaw, you worthless fuckstain. You took what was a theoretical discussion about living and working in the asteroid belt, and turned it into the same pedestrian shit that every gods-be-damned news cycle is jammed full of. Fuck the fuck off you fucking fuck, I hate you.
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they have already stated that they don't want nuclear weapons. So loudly that even Mossad and the CIA don't think they want weapons
"Lol, I told them we don't want nuclear weapons. I think they believed that."
(Spoiler: of course they want nukes, they'd become a because-I-say-so superpower in their own local neighborhood. And of course foreign intelligence knows this, and thinks they want nukes, no matter what anyone says)
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they need their money, that we've been quasilegally detaining, even more.
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It's not setting fire to the life boat and denying fire exists. It's setting fire to the life boat, then claiming fire has existed naturally for millennia, so there's no way to prove that the guy with the lighter and gasoline started it...
Re:Is that really the right Question? (Score:4, Insightful)
Spoiler: nukes don't work that way. Nukes can be a good protection against being conquered, but aside from that I haven't noticed them being useful. The fact that Britain could have annihilated Argentinian cities in the 1982 Falklands War made, as far as I could tell, no difference. I was following the news fairly closely, and never saw that alluded to. I thought of it myself a few months later.
There already is a wacko Islamist nuclear-armed country: Pakistan. Iran can't be any worse. There hasn't been any use of nukes for any hostile purpose since 1945, and that includes Pakistan's and North Korea's.
However, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 made it very clear to lots of countries that they'd be better off with nukes, if they have any fear of a US invasion.
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Moving asteroids near Earth is the bootstrap process though. You need a CHON asteroid to make fuel from to ope the door to everything else. You then need aluminum to start building stuff from. The rights to that stuff will have to be worked out, but realistically, territory belongs to he who can defend it, and anyone who can push asteroids around near Earth has once heck of a military advantage. Whatever we work out for those first few rocks will likely set the precedent for quite some time.
Once we can
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But we don't have to move asteroids to accomplish that - we already have tons of them sharing our orbit, in the L4 and L5 points, mostly undetected because they're poorly lit from our angle. Yes, you could theoretically move them into an Earth or Lunar orbit, but there's lots of risk if anything goes wrong (not to mention political risk even if things go right - that military advantage you mention), and not actually that much point to doing so.
Distance in space is measured primarily in terms of delta-v,
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You make a good point. We want a fuel depot in LEO, no need to have the asteroids there. Just waiting on autonomous robotics to be up to the task now, I guess.
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It would be DNS squatting all over again.
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What's the problem? You can always inherit. And since when life is fair? Btw, there are millions of Kuiper belt objects, if you are so unlucky that you can't claim one, you can still join someone who did, or just go to Jupiter and start an anti-matter scooping operation.
Fast fish and loose fish (Score:5, Interesting)
This is moot at the moment, since nobody is able to enforce property law in space. However, there is some precedent for this situation, as described eloquently by Herman Melville in Chapter 89 of Moby Dick, Fast Fish and Loose Fish [princeton.edu].
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Yeah, unless there's some sort of permanent space pirate installation in the asteroid belt, it'd be pretty easy to dole out enforcement once they get back (or to their sponsoring entities even before they get back)
Re:Fast fish and loose fish (Score:4, Insightful)
You make an assumption that they would even need to come back. Sure initially the only market will be surface side on earth. But if space mining really takes off an off planet market for materials will rapidly develop and there would be no reason at all (other than for shore leave) for anyone to come back. You can mine all the oxygen and water you need up there, all you need is energy and food and with the right systems you could get that too.
One of the interesting things about space is that it becomes very easy to smelt minerals using basically solar concentrators, most people don't realize this because so little of solar energy actually makes it to the surface on earth. In earth orbit, sun facing surfaces rapidly approach 300+ degrees F. Even out at the asteroid belt it wouldn't take much concentration (magnification) of solar to reach multi thousand degree temps making it possible to smelt iron with little more than an insulated cauldron and a big magnifying glass. The only challenging thing would be developing the systems to ensure the metal doesn't cool to quickly which ruins the crystalline structure.
My main point is your assumption that you always have a way of enforcing the law by just waiting for them to come back would rapidly become moot.
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"insulated cauldron"
Insulated from what? You won't need a cauldron, at least not for heat reasons.
"cool to quickly"
The heat is absorbed by what, exactly? You've got infrared black body radiation, and that's about it. How many years until your iron nugget quits glowing?
People seem to think that space is 'cold' for some reason. Interesting.
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Out of direct sunlight space is roughly 3^ Kelvin. I'd call that pretty friggen cold when you can freeze oxygen.
To produce any metal you need to be able to melt the ore and be able to skim the slag (the elements you don't want). Then you need to form the metal into whatever shape you need. The metal must remain molten for most of this procedure and at 3^ Kelvin the metal would cool far too rapidly. You would need insulation to retain the heat to allow the metal to cool slowly to allow the proper crystalline
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Ever observed firewalkers? They walk barefoot across a fire that's reduced to glowing coals. It's genuinely hot there, and there is no protection on the walkers' feet. The reason it works is that the heat transfer is slow, and so five seconds on the coals isn't going to transfer enough energy to the soles of the feet to hurt. It isn't necessarily the temperature, it's the rate of heat transfer, that determines how fast something gets hotter or colder.
Similarly, space is cold. The cosmic background r
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I'm not surprised you don't understand how this works when you don't understand how fire walking works.
It's the sweat on the feet that protects the fire walker, not the time of contact because I can guarantee you that if you touch a 500 degree oven it only takes a millionth of a second to transfer enough heat to give you a nasty burn and coals burn at about 2500. But because the sweat on the feet is there a small portion of it is instantly vaporized and acts as a steam buffer between the coals and the feet
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Space is also a vacuum meaning there is nothing to transfer the heat into.
Thermoses are made by creating a vacuum between an inner and outer shell to prevent the heat transfer. Space is a giant Thermos. It's more likely that we would have to find some way to create a heat transfer to cool down the metal at an acceptable rate.
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Thermoses [explainthatstuff.com], also known as vacuum flasks [wikipedia.org], work because there is a vacuum gap between inner and outer walls. This includes liquid nitrogen and helium dewars.
The blackbody emission power is independent of the environmental temperature. The 3 K in space is irrelevant to the amount of power that the metal will emit. If you're referring to the radiation that the metal would have otherwise absorbed in a warm environment, keep in mind that the Stefan-Boltzmann law [wikipedia.org] goes as T^4. The amount of radiation lost by the
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Oh, don't worry. cooling quickly wont be a problem.
in fact the opposite will be the problem.
the spoils to the winners (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe this falls under the common rule of finders keepers
Whoever gets there first and works them (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it should be handled like mineral claims are (were) handled, if you get there first AND you work the claim then you get the proceeds. I don't want it to just be "got there first" or corporations/nations will just go claim everything without any intent of actually extracting the resources. Obviously what constitutes working the claim would need to be determined but that shouldn't be too hard. The problem is that the US can't just legislate this on their own, there needs to be agreement from all nations, or at least all space-faring nations.
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I don't want it to just be "got there first" or corporations/nations will just go claim everything without any intent of actually extracting the resources
If we're ever at a point where a corporation can send a probe to an asteroid just for the hell of it then we will have had a lot more time to consider sensible space law.
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It would hardly be difficult. For a few thousand bucks you can launch a pound of payload into orbit, maybe a few times that to launch it out of Earth's gravity well entirely. Then you fragment into a half-dozen tiny solar sail or ion-drive crafts carrying little solar-powered radios transmitting "property of MegaCorp" to stake claims to whatever asteroids you want a few years later. Apple could afford to claim millions of asteroids today without even drawing heavily on their cash reserves.
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You must be new here.
By "here", I mean on Earth.
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Duplication in poll (Score:5, Funny)
There's a duplicate in there. The winning entry, "Whoever gets there first", is a duplicate of the later (also correct) answer "The robots who enslave us".
First robot (Score:2)
The mineral rights belong to whoever owns the robots that get there first.
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Well, it's like that old adage "Early bird gets the worm, but second mouse gets the cheese"
The last (and presumably most advanced) robot to arrive is going to claim the processed haul plus whatever scrap metal it scavenges from the earlier robots.
No corporation or country is going to go to war over a robot "accidentally" mining away another robot.
I see an emerging market for "space squatters"... humans (in varying degrees of suspended animation or liveliness) being sent out to plant flags and hold on to sta
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Well, to be a corpsicle you have to already be dead, so I doubt murder charges could be leveled against someone removing the purely theoretical ability to eventually re-animate you. In fact thanks to the fact that your cells will all rupture during the freezing process you'll be more thoroughly dead than pretty much anyone who hasn't already decomposed. At best some hypothetical future "reanimation" procedure would have to either rebuild every cell in your body, or scan the brain connections and build a n
Define "Get There" (Score:2)
Re:Define "Get There" (Score:5, Funny)
In the great days of the asteroid rush of 2027 one Barnibus T. Musk sent an armada of flea sized landers to claim the entirety of the asteroid belt due to a misguided loophole in the 2015 law which valued touchdown as more significant than developing the celestial objects. The great asteroid licensing rush of 2040 led to the eventual construction of the first space elevator consisting of legal briefs that reached to the leavens...
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First entity to mine something productive from it, with a minimum amount of, say, a metric ton, to prevent somebody from just sending smart dust to mine 3 grams from a zillion asteroids.
The problem with "get there first" (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with "get there first" is it becomes a shitty problem. As a recent example, North America. Most people living there couldn't be based on that reasoning, only Native Americans/Eskimos/Inuit. And we can't even guarantee that ever made sense, either, because none of those people deeded the property once it was discovered.
Europe is another bag of hell, how many times has land changed hands since it was discovered, typically unwillingly?
The correct answer, which is missing, is "Whoever is using it and willing to defend it". If you aggress against someone using land (who isn't already aggressing against someone else) and the other person defends it, now we know who is the owner. Done.
Re:The problem with "get there first" (Score:5, Interesting)
The scarcity won't be due to a dearth of asteroids. There will be some that are a lot easier to get to than others, but you're not going to be up there shooting away your competition.
There is the problem though with the trend for those running such operations to be of a common mentally damaged mindset.
That mindset can be summed up as "It is not enough to simply succeed. No, everyone else must fail, and fail epically."
So the question is, how can we reduce the chances that those who eventually end up being in the upper echelons of any organizations conducting such ventures from being of the sociopathic "everyone else must lose" school of unreasoning?
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From TheEuropeanImperialist.com: (if such a thing existed around 1600 AD)
Explorers estimate the New World also contains more than 750,000 large parcels of land larger than three-fifths of a mile (1 km) in diameter and millions of smaller ones.
I don't predict a shortage in the foreseeable future. By the time we run out, we'll have moved on to other New Worlds.
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Whoever brings it back (Score:3)
No need to let anyone claim an entire asteroid. Just let them claim whatever piece they manage to extract and return to Earth.
Great - another form of WMD (Score:2)
No need to let anyone claim an entire asteroid. Just let them claim whatever piece they manage to extract and return to Earth.
Do you REALLY want people dropping large pieces of asteroid on the surface of the Earth? That's pretty much the very definition of a terrible idea. Extinctions have been caused [wikipedia.org] by that very thing.
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Kind of defeats most o the point of asteroid mining though. Most of the available material is practically worthless on Earth, but valuable in space expressly because of its location. Ship a load of refined rocket fuel down to Earth and you've just reduced it's value by 99.9...%
Who should get property rights to asteroids? (Score:4, Funny)
Me!
Why was this choice not provided?
Doesn't matter who "should"... (Score:2)
Who actually WILL have "rights" to them are large economies like Russia and China (those with the ability to send stuff up there) who are perfectly willing to make sure others' operations have "accidents," and who don't care about other countries' opinions of their actions. You can't really enforce any laws out there effectively, so the first person to say "oops! looks like your equipment is dead!" wins.
This is especially true if the returns from the mining operations outweigh any kind of sanctions.
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You seem to believe that "good guy' is a synonym for "weakling that can't fight back, can only complain"
Not true.The main reason the US and other countries don't use military force to get our way the way the hawks think is that 9/10 times the hawks are over-reacting and don't consider the cost.
The hawks always think that talking does nothing and that fighting always wins. Not true. Fighting loses 50% of the ti
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That's generally true here on Earth. It's a lot easier to defend yourself here (and also prove that there was actually an agressor).
Out in space, the environment is bad enough, without someone coming along and purposely sabotaging stuff. Add to that the difficulty of knowing exactly what's going on unless you actually have people there. Letting someone else do the work of finding a good site, then moving in and taking over might be an attractive business plan for some.
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Except that space is completely transparent, so it's pretty much impossible for anyone to hide what they're doing. All you need is a fairly rudimentary tracking system in place and you can trace the path of every craft in the inner solar system. Sure, the "cops" may not be able to do anything to stop the pirates, but they can warn you someone's coming potentially months in advance, and continue to track their movements indefinitely afterwards.
Who should get property rights to asteroids? (Score:5, Funny)
It's obvious that Atari owns the rights to Asteroids.
Come on people.
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Considering the enormous expense (Score:2)
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while it's in space, it's fair game. When you get it back to Earth, you can then lay claim to it - after all, bringing back just 400kg of material from the MOON cost an entire COUNTRY its economy for a decade and a half. I figure they deserve to go "MINE!" on what came back, but there's quadrillions of tons of Moon up there and the Outer Space Treaty 1967 Article 3 confirms what I just said: no claim of sovereignty or person on any celestial body.
If it's on Earth, it's not a celestial body by definition and
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Can I have some of what you are smoking? Apollo cost the US the entire GDP for 15 years? Maybe 4% of federal budget in total over the life-cycle.
US GDP from 60 to 75 ran from 3.08 trillion to 5.49 trillion 2009 dollars, while NASA's entire budget ran from 3 billion to a peak of 44 billion in 66 and then back down to 14 billion 2014 dollars.
Don't fall for the stupid argument that space flight eats an entire country's economy.
Watch out for black obelisks (Score:2)
not great choices (Score:2)
The correct answer is whoever gets there first and files a claim. This is perhaps modulo demonstrating ability to do anything with it to "improve the land" if you will. Sort of a replay of former homesteading claim justification.
The native population (Score:2)
Asteroidians obviously.
stagger from a stranger land loophole (Score:2)
in the book stranger from a stranger the astronaut thatt goes to Mars leave one behind or his kid or something. and he has claim to Mars (which is inhabited, but who cares about natives).
this creates a interesting loophole for the first to arrive/however lives there.
i can ship my retarded/drugged/scammed/overly-enthusiastic relative, and if they live out die, i inherit the meteor rights. and then i can send my drones to mine it out.
Space Invaders (Score:2)
is the correct answer, of course.
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Damn. An earlier poster said Atari which is the more clever answer.
Surely it is whoever can hold it? (Score:2)
Property laws, ownership, mining rights etc. They only exist because there is an entity that can enforce it.
Who gets to own asteroids will come down to who can enforce a claim. If the claiming entity has an exposure to earth then earth politics will influence it. If they don't then you need to give them a reason to care what someone on earth says. Either way it will come down to whoever can apply enough force, either military, diplomatic or economic that will decide who owns asteroids. Exactly as it do
Collectivism makes sense in this context. (Score:2)
A single metallic iron asteroid will contain more iron than the cumulative total mined in all of human history. If it's not collectively managed it will destroy the economy when it comes to market.
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Unless "coming to market" means "making craters where cities used to be," I don't understand how it would destroy the economy. Perhaps you meant it would aid the economy, by making metal a lot cheaper?
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I'd happily spend a fortune just to crash the gold market entirely. And a second one crashing the diamond market.
NOT whoever gets there first (Score:2)
Re:NOT whoever gets there first (Score:4, Insightful)
I say NOT whoever simply gets there first.
Should our species ever manage to escape this gravity well it will enjoy a long, long period of time where your mentality will hold no sway at all. That is the greatest promise of space.
Think of it. The end game for our species is to either perish completely, or rage outward into the stars without the least concern for your sensibilities about what is fair or just or what sort of "global consortium" you would prefer control it.
Either way, you lose.
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That's not how it works. Yes, establishing a toehold will involve a focused collective effort. It has always been thus. Magellan, Columbus and so-forth were all state sponsored.
Once the new frontier is open, however, everything changes. Those rugged individualist libertarians you've been trained to hate so much take over and go as far as they can, leaving people like you far behind to pound sand. There will be all sorts of evolution then, and almost none of it will align with your wishes.
You've pit
If it were fair... (Score:2)
Cowboy Neal (Score:2)
Clear winner on this issue.
Developers, Developers, Developers (Score:2)
It's not the first one to get there, it's the first one to build a working mine and develop the resources. Whether it's gold, titanium, iron-nickel, or hydrogen/oxygen from ice. The homesteaders or prospectors who settled the United States had to get there, and work a mine or bring in crops to reap the rewards.
Outer Space Treaty 1967 (Score:2)
Resolution 2222 (XXI) Article 3: outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
As at 1992, 98% of all Member States of the UN had signed, ratified, and legislated in compliance with, this treaty in whole. About the only exceptions were the Cook Islands (which doesn't have a space program of any description), Burundi, and Canada (which works in cooperation with the ESA but is not a member of that organisation).
Renders this p
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The poll asks who "SHOULD" get the property rights. There is an enormous difference between that and what's "legal.
If an asteroid cannot be claimed by any signatory to the treaty, doesn't that mean that it would be completely outside the legal jurisdiction of any earthly government? If so, wouldn't that also imply that a private entity who manages to reach it could do whatever they want with it? Although I suppose import laws would apply if they attempted to bring it back to earth.
Whoever owns the space territory they're in (Score:2)
Because that question is even further from settled than this one ;-).
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In fact it's so ridiculous as to be a joke. How exactly do you go about defining "space territory" in an asteroid belt, when the asteroids are all moving at different speeds? Claim a radius around arbitrary asteroid A, and within a few years the contents of that space will have completely changed. Two groups can claim asteroids on opposite sides of the sun, and unless they happen to have *exactly* the same orbital period they'll eventually end up being neighbors for a while.
NOT of asteroid, but of minerals. (Score:2)
IOW, it is setting this up to be a case of if you are working in an area, or if you have mined the items, that you own the minerals.
Of course ... (Score:2)
Disagree with all the options (Score:2)
There's only one option that's going to be true regardless of what you believe, and that's the might makes right point of view: The guy who is actively exploiting the asteroid gets whatever rights he wants with it, whether or not anyone else agrees with that. Whether or not they put a probe on that asteroid or there's a law in the US saying it's illegal.
He's there, and doing
No Robotic "exploration" (Score:2)
In the same way that unmanned probes are investigation, not exploration, those same probes can't cause the launcher to gain any rights to what they land on, Neither can nanoprobes, masses of linked Turing machines, replicators or anything else.
The only way of "staking a claim" involves actually going there and putting your (spacesuit) boots on it - while you are wearing them!
Last time (Score:2)
Last time, the who ever comes first eradicated the indigenous population. Interestingly, they did not count as being there first. True, there are most likely no lifeforms on these asteroids. However, human logic would then be: Hey when is valid for asteroids, it must be true for all other celestial objects. It is like the German intelligence service BND which spied on Germany with satellites, which is illegal. However, they claim that they did not spy from within Germany, the satellite is in space.
Already happened (Score:2)
The option "Whoever owns the space territory they're in"
Klingons have already orbited Uranus :-)
Possession is nine-tenths of the law (Score:2)
re (Score:2)
NONE of the above
you MISSED the MOST important one
" the body / entity that is ACTIVELY utilizing the resources "
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the Outer Space Treaty nullfies everything you just said. There is a caveat I think, that's been sort of tested and seems to work: bringing materials back to Earth. What you bring back is yours. To whit: the Apollo astronauts filled in customs declarations to bring back lunar samples (yes, really - the documents are scanned and are available but they didn't actually go through the usual baggage checks. The document was part joke, part getting the shit out of the way). Those samples are entirely claimed by t
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I like this idea, but you would probably need to define what constitutes "interfering". Obviously, deliberate acts of sabotage would qualify, but what about simply being nearby? Would being less than 1 meter away physically interfering? What about less than 10 meters? Less than 20? It is arguable that if th
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We wish. Genocide is ridiculously profitable, and makes that first wave of colonization far more cost effective. Without natives we're going to have to do all the hard work ourselves.
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The key phrase being national appropriation. So no nation may (legally) claim them unless/until the treaty is updated, fine.
Now, where does it say corporations or individuals can't own them?