One interesting space thing is that a number of groups have claimed celestial bodies and rights thereto on behalf of their religious myths. In the late 90s, a group of Navajo objected to the scattering of ashes on the Moon on this bases. A Yemeni group claimed Mars.
I'd be curious how many religions and traditions involve either a claim on some celestial body or some claim about rights to exclude certain behaviors. I would think a lot, at least for the Sun and Moon.
I feel there's this weird thing where on the one hand we ought to carefully consider the views of downtrodden groups. On the other hand, like, claiming rights to Mars because an antecedent of yours said something a few millennia ago won't work and probably has bad ramifications.
There's a long legal tradition where you can't gain title to something just by saying dibs - you have to perform some action. People fight about what the action is (see it? stand on it? spend a while? have a baby there?) but it seems reasonable to have some standard.
Otherwise you'd have to say if anyone in the past said "the bottom of the ocean is mine" we'd have to live with it. This strikes me as even more dicey if the claims can be based on fables which presumably were never intended as something like formal claims to minerals?
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Astronaut Frank Borman's biography is mostly pretty straightforward, but he gets oddly eloquent when talking about his family. This is him recalling his thoughts before his flight on Gemini 7. He didn't sleep at all the night prior to launch:
“I didn’t feel fear; I felt agonizing concern for the wife and sons I loved. I didn’t want to be a heroic casualty in man’s conquest of space and I was not oblivious to the hazards involved. I wanted to stay a living, breathing husband and father.
There's a dichotomy in all this, a kind of conflict of interest. On one hand, there's a sense of mission accomplishment that becomes a very self-centered thing; the mission has been pounded until it alone is in sharp focus, with everything else blurred.
For the Space Book, a lot of reading time has gone into space law. Part of what I do is just search amazon books for any text that looks vaguely relevant. This led me to Nate Schachner's justifiably overlooked 1953 sci fi novel "Space Lawyer."
Schachner only wrote this one novel, and was pretty old at the time, and the book has a very much early 20th century America feel. There's a grumpy/old clever capitalist with a sexy/smart daughter. The young protagonist is hired by the capitalist and wants the firm to modernize.
He also wants the girl, but is rejected by the boss. There's also an evil villain capitalist. The difference between the villain and the grumpy boss here is basically that the grumpy boss is ruthless, but with a basic core of decency. The villain is willing to cheat/murder/etc.
This Jewish Space Lasers thing is pretty insulting. Do you really think Jews are stupid enough to go with space lasers? Directed energy weapons have been studied by RAND repeatedly, and they are basically useless as weapons.
[short thread]
They can be thwarted by fog or rain. They require enormous constant energy. You have to have a stationary target because lasers aren't powerful enough to harm it in a short pulse. And you're going to deal with all this from Low Earth Orbit?
If the Jews were employing space weapons, for God's sake, grant us that we'd use either a conventional missile system or a network of kinetic weapons that could threaten most of the world with large tungsten rods.
I don't like quote-tweeting for the purpose of argument, but I want to quickly push back against an apparently popular tweet saying people don't want to come to America. This is, of course, nonsense.
The US remains the most popular destination of choice for immigrants, though we take far fewer people per capita than e.g. Canada or Australia.
To use an overused word, it's a sign of privilege that you think there aren't people who'd love even a lower class American lifestyle.
The groups least likely to immigrate here are the ones with the least to gain. If you're a wealthy European, you've got to have a pretty good offer on the table to come. Or a loved one you want to be with. Or you really like American cheese, perhaps.
I have only read a few books, but I get the impression big international law has been really hard for something like 40 years. Is that true, and if so, why? It feels like the UN, in trying to give everybody a seat, has perversely made law very hard.
Like, with Antarctic mineral rights - the UN doesn't want a regime just for nations that claim Antarctica, because other countries don't get anything. But claimants have no incentive to give up rights. It's basically unsolvable at that point, it seems to me.
Put another way, if you're, like... Switzerland... you have no incentive NOT to tell someone with a chunk of Antarctica that they have to share. Likewise, if you're Australia, with the largest claimed sector, why would you give up mineral rights for nothing?
This isn't nearly the biggest deal, but something that excites me about having a boring president is that the news will stop screwing up life for authors. Bryan was going to have a TV spot for our Open Borders book (on Fox Business!) which got bumped for impeachment stuff.
It's selfish of me to care about this too much, but the environment that produced it should bother us all. In the longterm, how we view ideas like immigration matters more than almost any particular half hour of news. And it's not just my stuff at stake here.
I know plenty of authors who had to deploy brand new books into a world that had hardly any attention span held out for non-political content. This negatively impacted plenty of careers, but it's also indicative of something very bad in culture, I suspect.