The commercialisation of the cosmos is already underway, and our current laws aren’t fit for purpose
If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception.
The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, each star a sun like ours, many with planets orbiting them. In 1995, the Hubble space telescope captured its first deep-field image: this showed us that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our known universe, huge wheeling collections of stars dispersed through space.
Let’s take the International Astronomical Union’s definition of space as everything in the universe apart from our planet and atmosphere. Asking the question “who owns space?” seems laughable. Hubris at a whole new level. The idea that we could lay claim to the rest of the universe is beyond conceit. It’s like a group of atoms in my little toe becoming sentient and declaring that they now own my whole body.
