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Psst. Wanna Buy a Planet?

© Laurence B. Winn

In October of the last year of the second millennium, Space.com published the "Top Ten Reasons to Inhabit Outer Space" by a free-lancer called Yasha Husain. The list:

• To secure a future for humanity
• To build a new frontier
• To find new energy sources
• To build an industrial settlement on the moon
• Better-quality images of the universe
• The SETI effort (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
• Mining
• Learning the history of our universe
• Environmental benefits
• Meeting the challenge

Note that all of these reasons are about us collectively: our future, our environment, our understanding of science. In the history of human beings, none of these reasons have mattered. Only one does: the answer to the question, what's in it for me?

Historically, the answer people most wanted to hear when they asked "what's in it for me?" seems to have been: money. Economic prosperity. A chance to make good.

The next most sought-after answer was, and is: refuge for holders of unpopular beliefs. Tolerance. Freedom. A chance to make a difference.

Behold the individual, the product, according to historian Walter Prescott Webb, of "the Great Frontier in which men could think, believe, and labor without finding themselves in conflict with the hoary institutions of an old order."(1)

Individualism in the United States, where it was the root of American culture for at least three hundred years, has been largely submerged by the ideal of the corporate collective. And the desperate, sometimes amusing, struggle against corporate domination is expressed by popular cartoon strips like "Dilbert", whose troubles reflect the absurdities of conglomerate life. Like Dilbert, the individual craves revenge.

Our purpose is to examine the particulars of a proposal to choke the corporation by feeding it a succulent bone, one that will tempt it with such profits that it will be unable to resist delivering up what physicist Jerry O'Neill has called the "High Frontier" and producer Gene Roddenberry "The Final Frontier".

The Space Settlement Initiative, a legislative proposal by activist Alan Wasser, suggests that the U.S. Congress (a collection of individuals if there ever was one) give land grants on the moon and Mars to corporations or multinationals that build space settlements and transportation systems to get people there at a reasonable cost.

There are a host of details, most of them aimed at getting around the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits national sovereignty over heavenly bodies, but does not address private ownership. The U.S would recognize and defend the rights of the moguls to subdivide and resell their claims at regolith-cheap prices of $100 an acre of so for prime lunar real estate.