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Originally Posted by Gullible Jones
If we establish a colony of outpost of some sort on an uninhabited celestial body, it's property of Earth. IMHO, no nation, person, or corporation should be allowed to own a celestial object.
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Why not? What makes land on a planet/moon/asteroid/whatever so fundamentally different than land on the celestial object we currently inhabit that warrants complete rejection of current systems of property rights? Imagine if your government decided that land should not belong to anyone, that it was the property of all mankind, and therefore would not recognize any claim of ownership by any person, corporatation, or goverernment? Property would still be owned in the sense that if you came to my house with enough firepower you could effectively own my house and I would have no way to reclaim it without bringing in even more firepower. Property rights are a cornerstone of civil society, and I see no reason why in the future when issues of land ownership beyond Earth become non-hypothetical people will demand more than impractical "for all mankind" property law.
Will we carry warfare with us into space? Probably. Along with creativity, hope, art, love, stupidity, science, religion, crime, and basically everything that represents what humanity is. There's no point getting upset about it or expecting that there should be some kind of Star Trek utopian society in space simply because it's "space." You have to work with the Homo sapiens you have, not the Homo sapiens you wish you had.