"White, Ryan" wrote:
>
> I don't remember where I saw this (twas a long time ago), but I discovered I
> was looking at a map of the lunar surface, which was all divvied up between
> countries/corporations? by what appeared to be property lines. I also
> remember hearing about people selling acreage on the moon. Is this reality?
> Who owns the moon? How was that determined? Are other concentrations of
> matter/energy out there in space similarly 'claimed'? I remember reading
> discussions about mining asteroids and such. Is there a UN sanctioned rule
> somewhere, whereby institutions might go about claiming ownership of
> celestial objects? Should I anticipate hearing about the 'Microsoft
> galaxy'? Anybody out there know the rules to that game?
Some lunatic (pun intended) has sent claims to the UN and other national
governments that he owns the moon, and has a website where he sells titles to
sections of the moon, and he's trying to put together, I've heard, a virtual
reality world that is based on these homesteaders developing the moon. Since he,
and nobody he is associated with, has ever been to the moon, he has no legal
basis for claiming it. He claims that by divvying up a map of the moon into
plots that that is somehow 'adding value' to the moon to support his land claim,
but since he has never been there and done actual surveying, laying out guide
posts, etc. those claims are baseless. All his site is good for is illustrating
how many people there are who are either gullible, or who have too much spare
money they are willing to spend on meaningless things.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:35:16 MDT