David Friedman, James Bennett | Space Development Property Rights & Legal Considerations

8:25AM Oct 14, 2021

Speakers:

Keywords:

people

space

property

problem

system

issue

earth

accelerator

land

enforce

property rights

commons

scarce

commitment

long

world

allocation

kinetic weapons

point

resources

So my topic today is property in space. And I'm going to be discussing first, how like could get to a space economy because there are different paths with different implications. Second, the general issue of why it makes sense for some things to be treated as property and some is comments. Third, applying those ideas to space, what things make sense to treat as property in space. And then there's no point in defining something as property if there's no way of enforcing new rule. So what can be enforced? And how can it be enforced in space. So those are my topics today. Let me start with the two general different ways when might end up with a space economy. One of them is if you have some cheap way of getting between Earth and Space, which at the moment we don't have, such as a space elevators, that standard, clever, maybe unworkable way of doing it. And that would give you an economy closely linked to Earth where people were going up and down, routinely stop was going up and down routinely. If you can't do that, so far, we can't. The alternative is to bootstrap, to use the present expensive methods in order to get a few people tools, maybe a reactor in space, put it on an asteroid, mining the asteroid, build stuff with that material. Repeat with a very small trickle of people and material coming up for Earth. You are not ever going to lift a large population offers at present costs. But we have a well developed established technology for producing people. And given time and and a new starting population in space. You could use natural reproduction to build the population. And you then end up with an economy that has very little connection to Earth. Most people on earth will never get off it most people in space will never visit Earth, and then has rather different implications, not so much for what ought to be property ideally, as for what what property rights will be practical to enforce. Let me discuss the general issue with property versus Collins. We're all familiar with property, a person or an organization, I'm not going to be distinguishing between private property and government property, this level of analysis, own something, gain control how it is used, it can transfer the ownership that sort of a standard set of institutions we're used to. But the alternative is a commons. A Commons there is no owner, anybody can use it to get at it. Basically, there are lots of examples of that in our society. Most ideas and information in our society are not treated as intellectual property, but it's Commons. The English language itself is a common is you don't have to pay a licensing fee to use a word even if some identifiable person had bedded that word and propagandized it, seawater is a commons, you can draw as much out as you like, in many societies, wild animals to hunger Commons, to some extent they are in, in our society, and in some societies is sometimes much of the land was Commons. So those are the two alternative systems for controlling stuff, basically. And what is the trade off between them? The benefit of treating things as property is there really two basic ones. The first is that if somebody has to be produced the fact that the producer will own it, gives them an incentive to produce it, and to maintain it to take care of it, a car that anybody could use, it's likely to be in poor shape and empty of gas next time you want to use it. Furthermore, you've got to figure out quite suddenly deciding who used something might make trade is pretty expensive way of doing that. So you have things in limited supply. property is a mechanism for allocating them to their highest valued use, because the owner can rent them or sell them do whoever values them more. But there were costs as well, which is well, we don't in fact, treat the English language property. Why many things are common ones. First, in order to have a property system, you have to monitor who is using it and enforce the owners control over. That is not costly. And in some cases, it can be very expensive. Furthermore, in order that anybody other than the owner can use it, you have to have a transaction. If you imagine the case, where you want to do is to translate an outage period out of print, work by an author no longer alive and you have to get copyright permission. Rarely finding the owner could be quite costly. And then you've got to negotiate with the owner to get it.

So Those are the, there's the third one, which slindon less obvious. And that is if you are trying to prioritize something already exists such as land, then individuals or any compete to get it, their land is valuable. And if you're giving it away, there are going to be lots of takers. You get land by being the first settler under a homesteading system that leads to plains race to premature settlement as people settle land and appointment farming, it is loss, but by farming if they get eventual ship the solution to this problem suggested by the economist who first raised the dis to auction the land off. But as I think I've shown elsewhere, that also raises a set of problems. So I'm not going to discuss them here given briefly in this talk. Then the question of whether or not something wants to be property ends up as you would see from this depending on the trade off between the costs and the benefits of treating it as property. If something already exists, that's an argument against treating it as property that's the homesteading problem. If it is not scarce, such as sea water, that's there's no need to allocate use, no reason to eat, it's hard to monitor it. That's an argument against and of course, the opposite of each of these arguments against original argument for examples. Land already exists, which is an argument against but it is scarce, which is an argument for monitoring its use is easy for farmland, you can see who's growing stuff on it not so easy. If you've got to see who's funding across your vast forest writings have to be created. So that's an argument for treating them as property. But once created, a writing is not scarce. Two people can read the same book at the same time, as long as they have gift copies. So that's an argument against enforcement for printing print books after be printed in large quantities. It's relatively easy to monitor and enforce copyright. For digital books, it's much it's much harder. So those are some examples. General issues. Let me now go on to the case of property in space, space itself, empty volume up there is a quite plentiful supply, and it's already there. So it's not scarce. However, there are some parts of space, which are scarce, and therefore, for which property rights make a good deal of sense. And the obvious one at the moment is geosynchronous orbit, which is already getting crowded. James may know what the relevant rules are, I doubt I'm really a theorist not not a student of current law. But you can see that would be desirable to have some mechanism. So if I've got a satellite, a geosynchronous, it's really no longer but used to be, I've got an incentive to somehow bring it down and sell that chunk of orbit to somebody else who wants to put one there without running anything else. Move a little bit farther forward in time, which we have space habitats, and l four and l five, the Lagrangian points of the earth loon system, which are stable positions where if you put something it stays there, then become potentially scarce and value property and somebody may want it old them go farther, much farther future and stuff you've driven to the Dyson swarm around the sun. We have a nice thermonuclear reactor conveniently located in your 90 to a million miles from here. Why waste Eddy without foot and once we've got the kind of space civilizations they can use it, and now solid angle on the sun becomes a valuable resource. And you are going to want ideally, rules that will keep you from putting a solar cell satellite where it's shading my solar cells. This is already a real issue on Earth, both in the solar cells and with hotels who don't want their sweet will shade in hotels. Those are real legal cases. What What about solid stuff, asteroids and moods. On the one hand, there are a lot of them. But information on which ones are worth lining is going to be valuable. If the valuable ones are scarce, and the information is cheap, then you back with the homesteading problem. And that would be an argument for auctioning off ownership. This is the first point in this talk where I get to the idea in the chapter about using this to give people capital so they can survive after we're all unemployed due to robots, which is an interesting set of ideas but not one I've thought a lot about.

On the other hand, if the information is expensive, we've got to actually go there and drill holes in the asteroid and says find out what's there. Then it makes sense to treat it as the property of the first discover rather like a mining claim. All right, then the next issue, which arises is what rights can be enforced and up in the forest. So one possibility is by courts on Earth, if the economies are closely linked, that was my first path, because then you can have some organization, possibly something like the UN, possibly a state, you might have a state which has some sort of a first mover advantage for controlling space. And the obvious one be the state state that controlled the space elevator if there were one past examples of that pattern at the single state and posing an effective national law with the abolition of the slave slave trade in the 19th century by the UK and the Monroe Doctrine. Also in the 19th century by the US, maybe some kind of space government will develop on that true that's very unlikely or even desirable, but it's certainly a possibility. And then you might have code enforcement in space. Well, more interesting to me are the mechanisms by which you might have privately enforced property rights, of which there are lots of historical examples. Again, people can look at my legal system very different look, it's they're curious about that sort of stuff. One current example were trade secrets, trade secret law, and makes it easier to protect Jade secrets for trade secrets long predate trade secret law. You just don't tell anybody. That's a way of maintaining your property right? information on what is on an asteroid starts out as a trade secret. But once you start mining it, others can see it. And so you might need legal enforcement of some sort. Or maybe the fact that you're on the asteroid gives you a military advantage, the first mover, you've got lots of rock to hide behind if people are throwing things at you, and lots of rock to throw at people. So maybe taking the spaceship and being the second lander on a asteroid already be dissuaded is going to be a losing deal. Well, finally, there is possibility that I find particularly seeing this again I I've written about, which is a system of rights enforced by a mutually recognized set of strategies. And the early example of this is territorial behavior in that there are quite a lot of number of animals where one individual marks out the territory he is claiming, and somehow turns of switching his brain. And that's the way I like to think of it such that he will fight more and more desperately against the Trespasser of his own species. agender the fire through the Trespasser comes in a fight to the death is usually a loss for the winner as well as the loser. So if you recognize that commitment strategy, you don't trespass does not work perfectly, but it does work. The my standard human example is the Falklands War, the UK was willing to spend much more than the islands were worth in order to demonstrate that it was committed committed to fight pretty hard. Thanks, anybody tried to seize its territory. That kind of mechanism can work provided that everybody knows who owns what, hence who will fight for what. It does not require any more belief in ownership. It does not require any legal structure ownership, but it does require a shared perception of this is your stuff which you will fight for, this is my stuff than I'll fight for, I will fight your hard to take your stuff because it's not worth doing. And similarly the other way around. So that gives a further possibility for how you can enforce property rights in space. What else? Are there other things we might want to property ties, spaceships and space habitats, raise issues, we're already familiar with their ordinary owned property objects. Presented via habit habitat will also have rules internally within it for its inhabitants. But I'm not really discussing that. Planets race issues similar to asteroids and moons. Why haven't I talked about planets? Because once you've climbed out of a well, it doesn't make a lot of sense to jump down to another one. What am I missing? I don't know. But some of you may have suggestions for other sorts of things that would make sense to treat as property. And then the final question, which I'm not going to offer an answer is what if someone else is out there? What if at some point we'd encounter another spacefaring species, which could happen, but probably not in this solar system.

I've written up a much longer version of this talk and web debt. It is part of a collection of chapters that are on a wide variety of things that I intend to eventually turn into one or more books, and it's on my web page, people want to look at it. So that's the URL and I will leave that URL up for a little bit. Stop talking. Thank you.

Wow, fantastic. You really covered it all. And if you don't mind, would you mind sharing the URL maybe in in the chat as well. Otherwise, I can try to Google it. And thank you. Okay. Awesome. And thank you so much. Okay. Lovely. And, and I think, you know, interestingly, like Robin Hanson gave the talk really at the beginning of this year on very alien. So it's like, okay, when could we meet other people who are also people, whatever, entities that are there. And okay, I think before we hop into a q&a, and let's have Jim, do this contribution, and then we can just, you know, maybe have a little bit more of a of a back and forth, because I already see a lot of comments in the chat. Okay, Jim, if you want to tell us a little bit more on the practical side on legal considerations for elders registration and development? We would love to hear from you. And I'll share your bio in the chat. Okay.

Can everyone hear me? And so first of all, compliment David on his excellent basic discussion of property rights. And I think you do have to start with the, with the basic idea, why do we have property rights at all? And what are the pros and cons of it? Can you get some really astute points about, there are areas where common good makes sense. And there's areas where property makes sense. And there's kind of a gray zone in between, which is been the source of most conflict in human history, these competing titles to property, and that have been the source of a lot of conflicts. So resolving these issues beforehand, with a rational system, or an understandable system can probably save a lot of trouble in the long term. Most of my comments are going to be on us reaction to my first reading of the chapter that you posted on the universal basic income and inheritance, K, and some of the issues that that raises and how they interact with the whole concept of property. First of all, I just want to make a few comments about scenarios for how space might develop because they're a bit different from David's. And since it has hasn't actually happened, you know, we we can all argue about which one is more plausible, but we won't know until something actually happens. So without denigration of anybody else's model, what I'm looking at, first of all, I think within 24 months, we will have it demonstrated whether we're going to lower the cost of getting people in cargo orbit by maybe two orders of magnitude, ie when super heavy, instruct ship, fly if it performs as advertised, or reasonably so that that's a revolution right there. I mean, most of the things that space advocates have been talking about for the last 50 or 60 years have always depended on it. Well, when we get low cost to orbit, we can do X, Y, Z, we're about to get that. So we had better be prepared for the consequences. Secondly, there's an intermediate step between spaceships and space elevators, which I think is probably going to happen happen fairly soon. And this is one system under test right now, which is some kind of vast accelerator from Earth, which would require only a small upper rocket stage to circularize the orbit, spin launches, building a test article of this right now at spaceport America, we will know again in a few years, how well that works. If you have that than any mass that can stand high acceleration. And I'm talking you know, 10,000 G's or something can be sent to orbit extremely cheaply, like dollars per pound. You send people in starship, you send everything else lead accelerator and you have a pretty good system there. And as to what you can put under 10 G's acceleration, look at smart artillery shells that have proximity fuses or other devices, which pull up to 30,000 G's at the time they were fired. So we already have a lot of experience with high g nonliving mass acceleration. So that is going to allow us to do a great deal of stuff in low Earth orbit pretty cheaply. I like Tom maronna in our Global's his concept of putting the most activity in equitorial low Earth orbit habitats, O'Neal type habitats, but about five or 600 miles straight up because you are still within the Earth's radiation shield. So you don't have to worry about radiation shielding mass. If you have an equatorial orbit, you don't go over the South Atlantic Anomaly, which is where most radiation exposure occurs in low Earth orbit. So the nice thing about that is these habitats don't actually have to be self sustaining, they can be dependent on accelerated launch of food, water, oxygen, whatever you want, they should rerun the biosphere to experiment with unlimited water and oxygen and see what happens that way. Although launching food is going to be so cheap, and it will be compressed a little because of the GS, but it won't be like kind of like freeze dried meat or something.

But you don't have those constraints where all the self sufficiency doesn't work, we die in a month. So that's going to that's going to change as to what people will do their economically, well, it's going to be within what I call the connective sphere, the area in which you can have non time delayed communication up and down. And we have the bandwidth for that now. And we've just run a two year experiment in how people can earn a living if they can't meet face to face. Turns out about 50% of the population right now, with zero preparation or adjustment time managed to operate as if they were in the fourth robot. So Leo's is kind of golden interface between the connected sphere and zero gravity and the rest of the universe, you're you're outside of the gravity, well, you can send ships to the asteroids and back real material and use them in Leo. At the same time, you're on this phone talking to your best friend down on Earth, or having your business meetings or having a meeting like this, I could have a meeting like this from Leo, and you wouldn't notice we've barely noticed the difference. Actually, it's better than using a geosynchronous relay, there's less time lag. By the way, the question to who allocates still spectrum is its be called the world administrative radio Conference of the International Telecommunications Union. And it's a good example of a terrible way to divide a comments to make pseudo property out of it. Especially because it's like one, entity one, no slight allocation is the system. So like the Isle of Man, which is technically an independent government, as an allocation, Tanga has an allocation, they have been very clever about selling these effectively on the world market. And you're going to have this problem than any kind of equal distribution, which is who counts as equal. And that gets into some of the issues in the inheritance de UBI. And essay issues, not problems because, you know, maybe there's solutions, I don't try to discount that we might be able to resolve some of the issues here. But they have to be considered. Number one is, well, physical, hasn't been alluded to this physical cable requires defense requires enforcement, we don't have a world sovereign, we're not going to have one anytime in the foreseeable future. So you can either say individual countries can enforce the title of their own citizens, even if you distributed globally, which is great for Americans, Chinese and Russians, not so great for everyone else in the world. So that's not going to fly, at least without some adjustments. The other way to do it, is that you need to be plugged into the world economy, you need me to be able to sell your shares of your company on world markets, you need to know all sorts of interact with the banking system, you need a connection there. And we could say we will deny that connection to anybody who doesn't pay along with his right system. If you could get a multilateral agreement with that, among the g7 economies, you're most of the way there. I predict China will do its own thing goes on where ignore the international economy even. So we're just going to have to expect that there's going to be a couple of other people with capability and a disinclination to participate in international systems. And my suggestion is, you know, let the Wookie win there. We just have to wait, we have to design our system around the idea that there's got to be some holdouts just like the way Japanese and probably the most absent property system in the modern world. You know, they don't, they don't have eminent domain to any real degree. When you have a holdout. They just build around them. And we're going to have to accept that. If we give up on universality, we can do a great deal more than if we wait for universality to be achieved. And I think that, you know, monitoring it at the point of connection with the international global system is the more effectively and doesn't require that you build a huge space Navy, which taxpayers mostly won't go for. The second thing is that whenever says you may come up with With can't burden exploitation too much. For one thing, if you have this accelerator system going space resources, at least for the first 2030, maybe 50 years are going to have to compete really strongly against cheap. You know, lunar water, for instance, has always been talked about is the first thing like need to be exploited,

it's going to have to compete against accelerator at launch ice from Earth, and that's going to be pretty cheap. So before you build this big infrastructure, to mine ice on the moon, moon and send it to a new Earth orbit to be used, you're going to have to make to have to invest quite a bit of money. And maybe someone will figure out how to make accelerators cheaply in the meantime. So you have genuine competition for quite a while, if you artificially burdening the price of those extraterrestrial resources, you're just delay the development of them. And I'm not sure there's any particular good public reason to do that. So whatever method of giving this dividend from extraterrestrial resources, it shouldn't be just a in the tax or fee that you lay on at the beginning or a purchase price that you have to lay down some distributed owner, no matter how you drive, how you create that ownership.

So those are

some of the biggest issues, a couple other things and fairness

count,

on one hand seems really fair, but you need to do it almost instantaneously. At the beginning, you can't give people the idea that, oh, gee, if my country reads a lot more people real quickly, will be a lot more dividends from headcount. To look at the manual, Todd's work on population decline, the most certain way to reduce your rate of population growth is to educate women. Conversely, the best way to depress it is to deprive them of education, you don't want to give any state incentive to do that. So headcount handsome, the question marks to it. I'm getting to the end here, we just say, the other security issue is if you give out some kind of universal grant or benefit to everybody in the world, what's going to happen in the PRC, I think, what's going to happen is you're going to be expected to turn it in, you know, maybe they'll have a fig leaf like saying, well, we're going to have those China National Space Corporation, and you will exchange your share of titles in return for some shares in the China National Space Corporation, which may or may not ever have a dividend. And you know, as long as people aren't, somehow completely free actors to guard, you're going to deal with state authority seizing seizing Lee, from the dividend, so UBI alpha, natural resource, dividends, 10. With you, it's a pretty good system, it works well in Alaska, and Alaska is a first world state with a pretty good constitutional rights situation and strong property rights. And you're not going to have that globally. So we just need more theory on that.

Also, on my other channel,

if you have another one, go for it, you're on a roll.

Those were the the main things and at the end, if you are gonna have a UBI system, I like the idea of a natural resource dividend. But like I say, it can't. If you burden exploitation of a too much, you're self defeating. And especially with space resources, you're always competing against Earth's resources. And Earth's resources are far from finished, especially as you get down technology, you only might be able to get a lot of resources, say out of molecular seeding of seawater or some other method, which would be quite competitive with space derived resources for a long time, historically, and just leave it loose. This thought, we are really broadening in our way of thinking, because we're just beyond the end of a 10,000 year period of human history, which I call the great land hunger. When from the early Neolithic people began to understand that the best way of assuring general personal security food security community security is to own farmable land and to have the densest Papa possible population on that land in order to be defended for your neighbors. because historically Any more dense population of farmers has always seized and converted, the less densely populated land of its neighbors. And this is just because it's pretty solid record of this happening over the last 10,000 years, you know, we look at the last couple 100 years in North America, or, you know, Australia, or you should be looking at Manchuria and Hokkaido to but because it happens there, but that's just what happens when the more densely populated people also develop technology, and can accelerate the rate of absorption of the land around her. Oh, right. And that ended somewhere between 1880 and 1920, at least, using us as a MIDI indicator, when, for the average person, you were better off materially, socially. And in many other ways, moving to the city and taking an industrial job. Even though early Industrial Revolution, jobs weren't wonderful by our standards, they were better than working a farm with hand labor for 16 hours a day. So you started getting the move from, you know, we we started out at the time of the revolution, as I think 97% agricultural. And by the end of the 19th century, it was 5050. And now it's like I think unders under 1%, are engaged in agriculture and the farmlands, the big farm lands, say on the Great Plains, are emptying out of people, yet they produce more food than ever, because the automation of the automation of farming in which is going to continue. So this dynamic of property being like land in some way, is coming to an end, our instincts haven't caught up with this yet. And our political thinking hasn't caught up with that yet. And that's, you know, it's not going to be that way in space, we're not going to go to Mars to farm Mars, although we're going to have to grow food or produce food in some way on wires. But that's probably going to continue to be a small, a small fraction of the total population doing it. On the other hand, I also believe in the picture that Freeman Dyson painted infinite in all directions, where he observed that most everyone has been by individual initiative and people go there because for one reason or another, they want to go there. And I think that's going to continue in space. I think Elon Musk happens to have come across this in his own thinking, the saying, Well, what I want to do is create a system where anybody who can get a half million dollars together, can get a fear to Mars, or check out their fare twice for their family and, you know, some kind of habitation that's halfway decent.

So all right, that area, you know,

you'll probably see people going to Mars just because they like flatland and horizons. And they have these no instincts, colonists tend to colonize first, that eye and that's most like the place they left. So you know, people from England, went to the parts of North America that looked like England and made it look more like England. And after a while, that was less important. And so I think we're gonna get most of the population is going to be MBO habitats in the way of Global's and Rado describe, you're going to have a non trivial population on Mars, sort of, almost like role playing setting. And a bunch of Texans who will go to great lengths and expense to Crete tend to do is where they can raise capital, but

because, okay, well, they do. Well, I mean, where

you've got to be taken into account when you're thinking about inherit to this day.

Thank you so much, you have open up a box of Pandora configuration, if you want. So if you want the marsh guys, you can go to San Francisco a few times during the year when like wildfire, it's already like pretty, pretty daunting. But I think, you know, like there was terrible issues aside, like I think David had a few comments already one on your enforcement. And then David already distinguish between yours and his version. And especially how, what what would happen if if the US and China actually geared up to and to want to establish things as well, the David, maybe we can make a few comments to what Jim just said, and if anyone wants to chime in or raise your hand so I can monitor what's left to the chat with as well. What beautiful discussion

James is really just offering a more plausible version of my first path. That is to say I take the space elevator is sort of the limiting case. liquids. It's a really neat technology, we'd never do it. But it may well be he certainly knows more about it than I do, it may well be that with something much closer to our present technology we can can get low enough costs. To do it, I guess that would be my, my main my main response. And you know, if so I hope it's right. I'm going to try it any other comments, I've put up in the chat links for people who are interested in my idea of commitment strategies, which I've been arguing for some time, alright, what really underlie all societies. That's the mechanism that keeps us out of the Hoddesdon state of state of nature. And I've discussed that in an old piece, which is literally there's a link on my blog, on the sidebar in my blog to it. And I've discussed it. And more recently, in the third edition of my first book, where I have two chapters, which one of them is shorter setting framework, and then one, which is a positive account of rights that I think of rights in that sense, not as a legal or moral category is description of how people behave. And so I'm not sure I have anything, anything more to say James ideas are interesting there, he's thinking most well is the initial, his initial talk was thinking mostly in the fairly short range when we're still close to Earth. And I agree that certainly a possibility as a sort of an intermediate stage and the other the later part is sort of more interesting. One other point that is worth making, if we're thinking a century or a century and a half from now, is that if nothing goes wrong, average real incomes are going to be very much higher. things could go wrong, but the general trend from thinking about how much richer we are than people even even a century ago, century and half ago, it's I've been reading peach diary, which is quite fascinating. One of the things is peeps is reasonably well off sorted, often middle middle class person isn't important naval official, he routinely shares a bed with another man, and he has no particular emotional relationship with because there aren't enough bands. Basically, it's in a nother Megan, if a nother woman comes to Well, let me not go into details, but but it's just sort of neat seeing how much poorer 17th century England was a pretty prosperous society was. And if we have the kind of society where the average person has an income of $10 million a year, then, using our current technology, a slightly improved versions to take Christmas trips to space becomes much more metaphorical.

Alright, I think, you know, one thing that I just want to preface with before we get to the next one that said, you know, all of the things that we're discussing are really, really hard questions. In the chapter, we basically quote gentleman in what he said about a problem in which humans and an ever thought experiment would encounter an alien fleet. And he says, even if you could secure just one galaxy as 100 billion as consolation prize within music, this will translate into 50 personal star systems for every human alive today, this illustrates two things. One, even if we mostly screw up, things might turn out to be pretty okay, Indian. And second, the worst we can do is continue our current political zero sum game, which cut those 15 galaxies per second. So this is I think, just to say that, you know, like, the details are really, really hard to figure out. But there's a lot to gain potentially. And with that preface that I think Mark had another comment, and then I'll take questions again for the check. Um,

first of all, I love both of these talks. I love how well they fit together. And I love how well both both of them explore a lot of the problematic aspects of all what we're proposing with the inheritance day, on as we wrote the chapter, we were very aware that this is a very, very problematic proposal. And I love that you guys are both on exploring and deepening the what the issues are of any approach like this, or the particular question I have is for Jim, with regard to what you said about geostationary orbit, and about how we did it with a equal distribution of initial rights that included like the Isle of Man as a equal recipient, but that the result was that they could sell it, and that they've been very good about selling it. That seems to me like a almost completely perfectly positive outcome. And I'll invoke the Coase theorem with regard to it, which is, I think what that Yeah, yeah, I don't know anything about it other than what you said, But assuming that the property rights abilities to to to buy and sell and trade these things, after the initial allocation are working well. It sounds like this shows that it does. Doesn't matter to a very wide extent how weird or wrong or questionable the initial allocation is that as long as you can trade from there, all the trade will reallocate to the appropriate uses. So why is this not almost a perfectly positive

example?

Well, it certainly didn't benefit the people of the very large states who only got a couple of slots themselves.

They could if if it's so much more valuable to the people of the large states, then starting from that initial allocation wouldn't pricing and trade reallocated according to that to that differential benefit?

One of the problems is that the governments haven't been perfect actors. Oh,

the Yeah.

The, you know, one of the things about the Pacific Islands getting allocations is that they weren't even aware that they had a valuable resource. A bunch of lawyers came in from first world countries, and talk them into basically very bad deals, whereby the lawyers and their shell companies got most of the benefit from it, which again, shows the problem with just random distribution. And assuming all parties are equally well informed, actors.

Okay, so so just one more follow up. There we go. Next person, the so can we divide up the problem into two sub problems. One is, what the initial allocation is. And the other one is whether the decision makers, that those initial allocations are left with our decision makers who who one can expect to rationally respond to market incentives on the on the part of whom of the constituents they represent.

Yeah, I accept that.

Okay. There's also just an another point that Russia, for instance, or the Soviet Union at the time, which came out low on the allocations, putting a lot more resources into non geosynchronous satellite communication methods. So there was a competing, niche or not rationed at all. So even that allocation of resources was subject to competition from substitution.

Okay, well, I'm asking you guys to interrupt me in case you have aggression by just raising your hand, because I'm not exactly sure what in the chat should make it easier. So just raise your hand if you want to say something out here. One thing that, you know, rebates, we walk through three problems that we see in North many more. One is, you know, the distribution and you know, we argue for something like a graduate relieved by or something like the trust. The second one is property rights. So the problem of dividing up the of the pie. And then the third one is the legitimacy. So no, can we have even come? How would it look like if we have competing title registries and so forth, right, to me, are almost the second one of dividing up, the property rights almost seemed the hardest. And I think we haven't talked very much about this yet. Anybody have any ideas here on renewables, basically, just two strategies of how we may be able to figure out a better, right Division One is by copying something like the wealth management funds, they're pulling us when the private sector market economy and then the other one is by doing kind of cake cutting game like strategies or simulation they have, do you have any idea of you know, how we may get around to a better resolution that is appropriate for our state resources?

That's always been the big problem in any of these UBI schemes. And ones linked to physical resources are particularly problematic. You know, Alaska, again, they just did a, you know, equal distribution based off of a, you know, basically resource tax that was easy to collect, and was easy to shore fairly equitable distribution, again, because you had a constitutional democracy with a pretty well functioning legal and court system. We and we, there's no way to get this where the global system so that's one of the reasons why I'm kind of skeptical about resource based global UBI schemes even though I think they're attractive in the theoretical aspect. I will certainly continue to think about it.

David, do you any comment? No.

I was interested to hear from James that we may be closer to having a viable near space civilization than I thought. I hope he's right. I mean, look curious about the accelerators. Is this using magnetic

acceleration or?

Yeah, look up spin launch, I think the spin launch LLC and see what they're doing. But there's other there's a whole bunch of different

theories, even all science fiction idea. I mean, after all in oneness, I've actually ministers that's what they're using to throw rocks down at Earth.

Can you remember at the end, one of the resolutions was the earth urging to create an accelerator system on Earth, to lower the cost of transporting goods to the moon, which is, I mean, right now we have to pay more attention to the offer of that spec. So the other problem and you know, you do have a problem, because you're not shooting in a vacuum. But, you know, there's solutions. Some of them involve, well, I think he nailed it in Bolivia, on the high auto panel. So

do you have to worry about the potential military use of these that if you are good enough, you throw things up, when in orbit where they're gonna come down again, and they're gonna hit pretty hard.

They're a little Well, you can also put warheads on them. So they need

Wham. And we just going back to find like where we were we actually used to throw racks and picking up the equivalent of that for this technology,

kinetic weapons. And actually, in the last couple of decades in wars, we've found that dud ammunition that doesn't go off does almost as much damage as the ammunition that does go off. And one of the ships lost in the Falklands on the UK side was a was hit with a missile whose warhead failed to explode. But there was still fuel left in the rocket and continue to burn which set the superstructure and fire, though Yeah, kinetic weapons are a genuine issue. On the other hand, there, they are vulnerable to counter fire, because we know with absolute precision where the launch is coming from, yes, mobile rocket launchers would have the same effect, and would be much harder to guard against because they're mobile. I guess just because

I read science fiction, I'm now imagining a plot where you use your accelerator to launch lots and lots of things, one after another, and it's only when the first wind comes down. people realize what you're doing. By that time. It's too late to take out the accelerator.

Yeah, um, there's been some thinking in the military about bundled kinetic weapons to just be a long series of WYSIWYG Lance's that you drop from orbit and then called rods from God.

crowbars from space was the term that I remember a long time ago on that issue, same thing. And they Jerry pournelle says that if I remember,

Mark Stigler also had a story with that. Yeah,

Americans didn't want Canada to be the world's largest space power. So it was next.

Well, we're terrified.

Yeah, I want

to explore the issue of commitment strategies, and the degree to which are automated weapon systems on and in general automation, can can create credible commitments. And just to serve as seed the conversation on mentioning three examples. One is on Dr. Strangelove, why build a doomsday machine and not tell anybody about it? the you know, the whole nuclear deterrence thing relies on a commitment, which is that after a first strike, it's probably not in the interest to want a second strike, but it's in the interest to be credible that you would, but that's a very, very dangerous game to play as

that was the light of the doomsday machine. Of course, the doomsday Bishop is the offering as a simplified version of what we already had. And once that races, which I know two people discuss much is if you're the last engineer out of the doomsday machine cave, the last thing you do is to cut the cable because you never want it to go off. So you have the problem of how when you build such a thing, you convincingly persuade the other side, it's real. Okay.

Then, the, the other two things I just you to see the conversation is in the world of blockchain where it's not an issue of of robotics and it's not an issue of automated use of violence. But it is it is an issue of simply the kind of Tom shelling value of commitment to follow through on something that might not be in your interest to follow through in that way at the time. blocked blockchain shows that the inspect ability, the public inspect ability, and the lack of control one set in motion is a tremendously powerful game theoretic tool for engaging in credible commitments, and getting the benefits of that. And then the third one, I just want to mention, going back to the issue of robotics and automated threats of violence, is The Day the Earth Stood Still, where they were, it's explained where the alien explains to the Earthlings that look, you're you're already in a system in which we've we have deployed a robotic police force and thrown away the key and it's going to enforce a basic set of punishment for violence, violent punishment for violence, and, and neutrality otherwise, and no one can stop it at this point. And that's an unlike Dr. Strangelove that was portrayed in a positive way.

So just, you know, I'm just I don't have a particular question, I just wanted to sort of seed more of a discussion with those as, as anchor examples for how one proceeds to do automated commitment with regards to this kind of property enforcement.

One problem with that, is that the kind of system I'm working on, depends on their already existing a perception, a set of shelling points, such that I can't just say, Well, I'm committed to take your stuff. That's not only will whereas I've committed to keeping from taking my stuff is really cool. And if you're programming your commitments into computer guided weapons or something, it's not clear how you're going to get the equivalent of that. That's potential problem,

when and another thing is that the a game like that, between superpowers is relatively evenly managed. Whereas what we're expecting in space is a lot of people sending up, you know, small space took ships for a small community, and they're going to have a hard time fighting off the larger powers or credibly committee to be able to do anything. If somebody tries to take it off.

I'll make that cut just came up in the chat is that David Friedman's assumption that the doomsday machine wouldn't work because the last engineer would disable it assumes that the engineer is totally a rational actor, which is a decidedly modern misfires. So I think that in two days, engineering schools have many agents wouldn't ask those questions, because this would have to be decided by an ethics committee or whatever. And this is all institutionalized and capitalized and don't have these agents anymore. And I wonder if there are criteria that was quantified predictive rationality of conductive agents. So my there are reasons why many institutions stopped in the second or third generation to be rational agents or to behave as collective rational agents. And I suspect that's because individual, individual rationality, in the organization hierarchy is taken over. And it's often something that we don't take into account when we try to model collective agents at scale, that the incentives for all those rational agency at the different levels are not uniform, and that they change over time. And that they should predict how rational the agent can afford to act as a collective.

My standard definition of market failure is situations where individual rationality doesn't produce group rationality.

Rules be greatly different in space. So I mean on the earth, basically, if you're a superpower, nobody can attack you and you can pretty much do what you want and if you're not a superpower, they don't tend to attack you unless you try and conquer Europe or do some sort of thing which gets above whatever threshold and in space want to be the same if you have someone who's so dominant in space that the rest of the players cannot get in and discipline them will that player be able to do whatever they want

to begin with being able to do whatever you want maybe against your interest this and again, a commitment issue. That if I, if the circumstances are such that the efficient way of mining asteroids is not to have a big corporation if employees to do a bit of a bunch of crazy, you know, minor type stuff Though out of considerable risk, then the even if there were a single agency which had power, it has an incentive to somehow try and commit itself not to use that power to grab your asteroid. As soon as you found it was yours, you started mining.

But if it feels it's in their interests to grab there, but they're not going to be humans are going to be robots doing this, I suspect, but whoever's doing it, if it's in the powers interest to take the asteroid, what stops them,

when i'm saying is that the power made self has an incentive to try to set up things to stop them, in order to credibly commit not to take it

at work. The other conflict is between smaller groups. And unlike on Earth, you aren't in somebody's geographic territory, who has an incentive to protect your rights. And so it's on you to protect your rights. And now with alive, smaller, competing interests while being able to have on Sefton, whenever betweens is a problem.

That mean if we have to protect our own individual rights, that's a little bit of a wild west situation, which is not is not the most productive and conductive situation for commerce and everything else.

There is a book called the not so wild wild west, however, which explores the difference between the proverbial wild west and the real one.

I'm using a metaphor the Wild West, I'm not using the rabbits in

that sense, the real Wild West was more or less the situation you're describing how we turned out is better evidence than the proverbial version.

And, you know, I guess, I would just point people to I think it's in the third attempt or when we, when we introduce intelligent voluntary cooperation, and we introduce a few that I mean, other than agents could put in place and they are still very decentralized. That would ensure multipolarity or at least make it more likely that the system stays multipolar over the long run, including, you know, the compensating dynamics, such as where and likely used by the Peace of Westphalia, where that's actually in in others interests are actually credibly committed, that they won't go out. And even if they do, then there's active incentives that make others stand together and stuff. And so I think it depends a little bit, I guess, on the initial setup, and then on the dynamics that that are put in place. And that's a part of the thing that we were trying to do with each chapter is the set of initial conditions, at least 100 of my favorite reads, and they will be the default. Okay, we're now on time. And thank you so much for joining us today. We had a crazy wild walk, and one person abuse and you asked me like, I felt like I was in eighth and what I was in April when I read the chapter, but I checked it's not April Fool's. Actually, we were today. So but you know, and part of what we also say in the chapter is that we compared with the system that we are proposed with Bitcoin, in the sense that at the beginning, you know, Bitcoin was also like a crazy April idea, and people, you know, kind of discounted it. And now it's, you know, I guess, crypto and faith nerds that are at the first getting, initially getting discounted, until they grow so much that eventually there'll be someone to trade to even for those that that discount that idea. So I should just see whether we will actually have to have to say April Fool's Day or whether over the other people made out, make it. Okay, great. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining. Thank you, Jim. You're now one minute over your time and all the other heads up. I really, really appreciate it and I hope to see you all very soon.