Within Reason - #63 A.C. Grayling - Who Will Own the Moon?

Episode Date: April 14, 2024

A.C. Grayling is a British philosopher and author. In 2011 he founded and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities, an independent undergraduate college in London. Buy "Who Owns the Moon?" here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A.C. Grayling, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. You've written a book called Who Owns the Moon, which tracks some of the history of humanity's attempts to claim ownership over lands like the Antarctic and the oceans and also the Scramble for Africa with a view towards, I suppose, essentially warning people about similar conflict being possible as we begin to make travel to the moon a lot more easier and affordable. The first question I have for you, which I know you've addressed in the book itself, but for our audience, is why? Why choose to write about this? We have more than enough

conflicts already right here on planet Earth. Why should we be spending the time thinking about what sounds a lot like a science fiction battle somewhere way off in the future in space? Well, it's a good question because, you know, the natural thing to think is that we should be devoting our energies to trying to solve the problems that we're facing now. But my is that if we had thought ahead 20 years ago about some of the problems that we might be facing today, then perhaps we could have either avoided or mitigated them. And for that reason, now that we see that the scramble for the moon is really starting to take off, it seems to me to be appropriate that we should try to put in place some sort

of framework, some set of agreements about how things are going to happen out there. Because at the moment, the leading players in this scramble for the moon are agencies like, on the one hand, China, and on the other hand, a lot of very wealthy individuals and private corporations who, if they continue to operate pretty well as they're operating now, are going to set the terms for how things develop, not just on the moon, but in Mars and space in general. And therefore, if you look at the precedents, and you mentioned there, the Antarctic and the oceans, and what happened in Africa in the 19th century, we see that the profit motive, the motive to claim sovereignty or to have power, to be first in the game, that these things

are very fruitful in the potential for conflict. And indeed, far too often in the past there have been. Human history is littered with the results of these sorts of scrambles. And therefore, we should be thinking about you now. Well, how far off are we from something like a real scramble for the moon, as it were. I mean, it seems quite difficult to imagine it being taken seriously in like a parliamentary debate or discussion or something like this. If I heard my elected politicians taking up floor time to be seriously debating what to do about the potential of China going and setting up a military base on the moon, I think that at the very least the rest of the MPs probably wouldn't take it too seriously. But is that a mistake? Is this not perhaps as far

office people would predict? Yes, it's a serious mistake for two reasons. The first is that even though there have been lots of news stories just in the last couple of years, particularly more recently, about lunar landing, some of which have failed, one or two which have been successful, and people say, oh, well, you know, so far away and the technical difficulties are so great and so on. This is not something we should be worrying about now. But the two points are these.

First, all these new stories are just coming very late to the day, because for the last quarter of a century, really, certainly the whole of this century so far, huge amounts of money, hundreds of billions of dollars, have been invested in this project. And you can easily see that people are not going to be spending that kind of money without a real expectation of return. I mean, when people talk about what resources there are on the moon, some of them in increasingly short supply on Earth, you can see that the inducement there is tremendous. That's number one. The second point is, again, if you look at the last two, three decades, at the rate of technological change, I mean, you know, people age now are astonished, amazed, dazed by the rapidity with which.

the world has changed technologically, the kinds of things that we can do now that we just undreamed of 30 years ago, 25 years ago. And so the thought that the technological and engineering difficulties about getting to the moon, establishing bases on the moon, mining on the moon, bringing back resources to Earth, you know, all those, all the skepticism about whether that's at all possible will be dissolved in the next five to ten years because of the rapidity of that development. So put the two together, technology is racing ahead, huge sums of money have been invested in this, it is inevitable.

That's in the next five, ten years, certainly before the mid-century, there are going to be bases on the moon, there are going to be commercial operations on the moon, and yet there is almost nothing in place, apart from a now very outdated treaty, which you might want to ask me about, a very outdated treaty which is a very minimalist in its approach to this, There is nothing in place to prevent this becoming a real problem. Well, certainly my next question was going to be what we have in place here. I mean, you say that it's minimal, but perhaps it's promising that there's at least something? Well, it should be promising, but the nature of the treaty in question and the precedence that we've already mentioned jointly suggest that actually it's simply not enough.

So what is in place is a United Nations treaty from 1967 called the Outer Space Treaty. But you can imagine that that prompted a lot of jokes at the time too because, you know, that was just science fiction of the day. In fact, that treaty was the outcome of an effort by the U.S. and the USSR, as it then was, the Soviet Union of the day, to try to park as many marginal and sort of utre things that they could in order to minimize the possibility of triggers for major conflict. So you can imagine, you know, in the Arctic, the United States and the Soviet Union pretty well abutted one another. Their borders were so close,

and the Arctic was a serious, you know, site of possible conflict. But the Antarctic at that time was, you know, already been parked by the Antarctic Treaty of 1961, so there was a model for how you could just try to set something aside and there wouldn't be a difficulty. So they came up with this, and it was the United Nations Treaty, it's a very minimal treaty, it says, no nuclear testing or nuclear weapons on the moon, no military bases on the moon, and that's it. It then goes on to say quite explicitly, the moon is a terra nullius.

It doesn't belong to anybody, it's a wild west, it's an open season. If you can get there, you can do what you like there. That's pretty well the explicit content of the treaty, so far as that's concerned. But of course, with the increase in, again, development of technologies and the Apollo space missions that followed in the late 60s, the United Nations tried again. In 1979, they wanted to try to get a firmer, a fuller. treaty that would govern how things should happen out there in space. And of course, the space-active nations were not interested in strained.

They didn't want to have any further limits posed on them. And so the 1979 effort ended up, not as a treaty, but as a set of agreements, which fundamentally say, well, we'll all just be good chaps. And we now are that ends. So there is at the moment, and again, as I say, it's a problem. But in a way, thinking about treaties, especially as pertains to the moon, can it really ever be anything more than just a promise that we're going to be good chaps, as you say? Because I'm thinking to myself, I mean, you know, we can all sign a bit of paper that says, okay, yeah, sure, no military bases. But like, I mean, in your book, you talk about the human history of scrambles for land and battles over territory.

And I think we can learn from that, too, that that signature on a bit of paper isn't going to stop people eventually when they feel like they have the military prowess and ability to do so. Because what are you going to do if somebody sets up a military base on the moon? What, you know, send the police after them? It'll have to be something like, what sanctions on planet Earth? Like, what happens here if somebody signs this treaty and says, sure, you know, I'm not going to set up a military base. We're all going to be, we're all going to sort of abide by these rules. Like, can that sort of quell our concerns? Surely we'd still be worried about countries just one day deciding to throw that treaty in the lunar trash can.

Well, your skepticism is very well justified because, of course, it is a phenomenon of history that parties to agreements and to treaties will only abide by them so long as it's in their self-interest to do so. And the minute that it ceases to be in their self-interest, of course, they'll just junk it. And of course, the classic example of this is the treaty between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty, which, of course, the Nazis threw in a rubbish bin as soon as they invaded. So you're right to be skeptical about it. But on the other hand, international treaties do have at least a moderating effect. At least they hold for a time. Because the other side of the coin here is that nation states do try to appear to be reasonably

responsible global citizens for a while anyway, and certain kinds of norms and expectations get set up by these treaties, so that when they are violated, of course, there's a huge not that that really stops the really bad actors and doing what they want to do, but they do have, as I say, a moderating and a restraining effect. And they are the best that we can achieve. I mean, the alternative to not trying to have something in place is to have nothing in place and just to throw one's hands up and leave it up to the billionaires and to the Chinese to decide what the future of humanities' endeavors in space is going to look like. Quite. And I mean, this all sounds very political and the book is quite political and

historical, but I also wanted to ask you about, I suppose, the philosophy of ownership, because this is all very interesting and also very concerning, but what immediately strikes me when considering this question and perhaps needs to be addressed prior to the political concerns is what ownership really means and can mean, thinking about the concept of owning the moon. I think intuitively, people have an idea that there's something wrong about me just hopping in a spaceship, going up to the moon, planting down a flag, and not just saying, you know, look, here I am, but saying this is mine now. In fact, I wouldn't even have to go there. I could say right now, I could just declare, I could pick a comet, you know,

that's somewhere in my telescope and say, that's mine. You know, I own it. And if somebody attempted to go and land on that comet or try to extract resources from that comet, I'd say, you're not allowed to do that because it's mine. And the fact that they'd be able to do it anyway, don't have a military up there, you know, that doesn't seem in itself to prove that I don't own it. I mean, if the UK military just suddenly, you know, caught a disease and died and we were susceptible to a foreign invasion, I think people would say that even though we're not in a position to defend our country, it's still our country. But I'm thinking about the fact that although it makes sense to doubt the legitimacy of just showing up and claiming the land,

because I'm the first one there, I can't think of an example of land ownership that we do recognize currently as legitimate, that doesn't trace back to a similar expedition. And so if we're going to be, if we're going to rule out the possibility that people can just show up on the moon, say this is mine now, and say that this is something we're not going to allow on point of principle. It seems unethical and politically disastrous. what does that say about our philosophy of land ownership by countries right here on earth if they were sort of all if they all originate in a similar similar way well it's an

excellent point you raise because of course it's a very very undecided and fuzzy question this one in the past historically the explorer nations you know they when Europe began to globalize after the 15th century and the idea that you could turn up on a piece of land, whether or not occupied, and plant a flag in it and say this is our territory. Well, look at the example of Australia. Look much earlier at the example of the Americas, the West Indies and South America, for example, when the Spanish and Portuguese went there. Irrespective of the fact that there were plenty of people there who had a, as it were, a right of tenure, which was established by long occupancy and by the fact that they had invested in an effort to, and cultivating it and building there and so on.

Despite that, ownership was claimed. And ownership was forced in those cases, very often militarily. So, you know, they were stolen lands, essentially. And the idea that you could steal a land and it would become yours, therefore, is one way in which, after time has elapsed at any rate, people try to sustain a claim to ownership. Think about contemporary world now. Think about the eastern part of the Ukraine and what the Russians say about it.

Or think about the Falkland Islands, which is still in contention about who owns it. There have been any number of conflicts over sovereignty. So, for example, Argentina, again, and Chile have very often even gone to war over sovereignty claims about islands in the ocean between the chip of South America and Antarctica. So it's a very vexed issue, this. If you go to the question of individual ownership, your ownership of your microphone, for example, well, there's a chain of events like going somewhere, exchanging money for it, assuming that the people who sold it to you themselves had property and they've transferred the property of it to you and now you are legitimately the owner of it.

We'll go back and even more sort of primitive way of thinking about this. John Locke in his writings on Apologics says that ownership is established by mixing your labor with something. So if you came to an empty bit of ground and you dug it up and planted some tomatoes there, then the tomatoes are yours because you had mixed your labor with the natural resources. But all these things are still very vague. There are obviously legal parameters about who owns what. You need to establish title from anybody you're purchasing, if there was a transparent transaction and so on. So at one extreme you get those sorts of ideas, the other extreme you get the planting

the flag idea. Now after the Second World War and in the efforts that the United Nations has made to try to manage and control how people behave in these respects, the idea is the idea is that you simply can't go to the moon and plant a flag and say it's yours. There is actually a flag on the moon. There's an American flag on the moon. Another one was planted by the Chinese. And whether this was regarded as being a kind of preemptive bid to say, well, if we don't own it,

then at least we have a special kind of interest in it, that is a real question, which at some point is going to have to be settled, and for which there is. is, at the moment, no legal framework. So one final point on this, in the Antarctic at the moment, you know, the Antarctic Treaty, which you saw claim to be a very, very successful example of an international treaty, but for reasons which, if you like we can talk about, is fraying very badly at the edges. But one of the things that's happened there is this, that the Chinese became parties to the Antarctic Treaty system back in the 80s.

And they immediately started to set up research stations there. They now have five. And technically, the research stations, what happens there, what they contain, should be agreed to by all the other treaty parties. But I'm afraid this isn't always observed. But what the Chinese has begun to do is to say, well, round our research stations for actually quite considerable areas, We want to have recognized a zone of special interest.

That's just a very weasily way of just saying that this is ours. This is our sovereign territory. And one motivation for this is that in 2048, so not very far off now, the moratorium on mining in the Antarctic comes to an end. And you can bet your bottom dollar. Now, what the Chinese are hoping to do is to establish territorial claim. de facto and then therefore to say that they're free to start digging holes in the Antarctic and putting out mineral resources and this is just such a wonderful example of the kind of thing that's going to cause a problem and you can see very direct analogies with what

might happen on the moon yes yes you can and I suppose that's what's what really matters is the de facto ownership. I mean, it's nice to have legally recognized claims to a bit of land, but as long as you are in practice, the only person with access here, the only person with control of the region, surely that's all that matters. And I suppose I'm thinking about what ownership of the moon would really look like. I mean, if somebody did go out there and set up a colony or set up a base or something like that, and they're so far away. that I'm sure if it was serious enough, you know, the United States or some other country could send something up there to try to destroy it. But like in the time that they're up there,

in practice, they're just there. And there's no one to challenge that claim. It takes at least as long as the journey to get to the moon with some kind of, you know, some kind of bomb to blow up the base that they're building or something like that. In that moment when they're up there and they say, this is mine. And everyone back on earth is shouting back at them, you know, no, it's not. And they say, well, you know, what are you going to do about it? Maybe they'll find out in, you know, a day or two. But in that period, who's to say that they don't own that land? What does it mean in practice to own something, including a bit of land?

Well, the first thing to notice is that if you put a base, even if it were a robot operated and controlled base on the moon, you would certainly not want anybody else to try to do the same thing anywhere near what you're doing for the very good reason that them landing something on the moon could sandblast your equipment or knock it over or knock out the electronics or the communications and so on so you're going to say right we're near and you've got to stay this far away and that immediately of course is a disguise sovereignty claim but look Alex the essential point is that if somebody goes up to the moon sets up a base and says, right, the hundred square kilometers around this belongs to X, Y, and Z, or to, you know, X, you know, Musk or something, if anybody says that, the trouble

is not on the moon, it's back here on Earth. This is where the arguing and the quarreling and the fighting and the legalism and the sanctions and what have you. The point about competition turning into conflict on the moon is that the conflict will occur here. And that's the thing that people tend to forget. They think, oh, well, the moon is 263,000 miles away. So even if conflict did break out there, it's not such a bother. No, the conflict is here back on Earth. Yeah, it's interesting.

It's sort of the first land grab where the shots would be fired, like an unfathomable distance from the land under dispute. Look, what's going to ask? already. So sorry, Alex, to interrupt you, but of course it's happened already. So, you know, you can imagine Spain and Portugal, say, laying claim to some territory in South America back in the 16th century, let's say, and they're in dispute with one another about it. They may be fighting, but there's almost certainly going to be fighting back on the Iberian Peninsula. So you can see how these things redound on the, you know, the home patch of the agencies

who are involved. That's the risk with the moon. Yeah. I was really interested in what you said a moment ago about just going up there. I mean, people tend to agree that even if nobody owns the moon, nobody has a sovereignty claim. We should still, as a species, be able to go to the moon and be able to extract resources that we need. I mean, the moon is rich with what, lithium and helium-3 and usable and finite resources. And so, you know, We'll have to do some extracting. And as you point out, the moment that someone lands on the moon and says,

I'm doing this for the sake of humanity, you know, there's no governmental authority overseeing this. I'm just here as a representative of the species. You know, at some point, they're going to need to go to sleep. They're going to need to have a shower. They're going to need to use the loo. And if I walked into their part of the base and sort of burst into their bedroom where they were sleeping or burst into the bathroom while they were having a shower and said,

well, who the hell are you to tell me? I can't be in here. We're on the moon. Nobody owns, you don't own this room. And in fact, no government owns this room and is leasing it to you. So you've got no authority that you can turn to. Just in practice, as you point out, any level of human activity on the moon will immediately require at least even just a minimal amount of space where you exclude not just, you know, other countries and their missions, but also just, you know, your fellow explorers from coming into your space. This seems so integral to the way that human beings behave that I suppose I'm suspicious as to whether it's possible to have any kind of exploration and use of the moon

that doesn't involve some sense of immediate ownership by the people who are there, if you see what I'm saying. Yes, I do indeed, yeah. Look, there are two points that do get kind of tangled up in this discussion, which it's good to mention in order to park them. One is that there would be any number of very, very good things as a result of, you know, developments on the moon and in space in general. You know, we think about teflon frying pans. Well, that was an outcome of the, you know, 1960s, 70s space activities. So that's just one minor example of all sorts of technological spinoffs, which will be of great value to humanity.

So there are good things, good things technologically. Also, you know, better to mine on the moon than on Earth, obviously we've already messed things up here. So there isn't the same danger environmentally into other life forms and things on the moon so far as we know. And also it's the case that human imagination and human perspectives are going to be pretty remarkably expanded. by all the activities that are going to happen out in space this century. So there are lots of good things. That's one thing to remember. The second thing to remember is that there is a presumption,

a very powerful one to the effect, that the laws that govern people in their nation states on Earth will apply wherever human beings are. So if person A murders person B on the moon, then they are subject to laws about murder and do the remedy against it, back in their own country or back in an international court on earth now. So in that sense, things like invading privacy, I mean, walking in on somebody in their shower,

for example, the person in the shower has a claim there that their privacy has been invaded, quite separate from the question of whether or not the person is trespassing on their property. but the point that you do raise there which is a great importance is this question of the right to a bit of the moon that is exclusively yours and how do you come by that right how can you establish that ownership the mere fact of being there like so many instances in the past when people planted flags in far foreign parts of the earth that just doesn't seem enough it doesn't seem to wash. There has to be some kind of due process, some kind of recognition, formal recognition, agreement about how that recognition is going to be observed and what the

remedies are if that agreement is not observed. So you're quite right. The implication of what you say is that there has to be something in place. It cannot just be completely a sort of wild west. If we go back to the United States, well, the America, North America in the 19th century, outside the limits of the sort of end of the Civil War, United States, the Wild West. There, the only law was the law of the gun. I mean, famously, so many movies, you know. And what we don't want to see is a repeat of that on the moon or in space, that the law of the gun is the only law available to try to,

direct and restrain what happens out then. Yes, the law of the space laser doesn't sound like a very promising future, but does sound like a cool science fiction movie, perhaps. I wanted to now, we've spoken a lot

about what we think should happen and what we hope will happen, but what I wanted to do was ask you, with your sort of realist, pessimist hat on, what do you think will actually happen in in practice as we begin to get to the point where sending probes to the moon is cheapest chips like are you optimistic about our ability to come together and not only come up with a

treaty but also agree upon it and then also stick to it or do you think that it will require something like an actual conflict in order to motivate such a such a treaty as in the past, a great deal of our sort of agreement between nations has come as a result of some kind of conflict and we say, we don't want that to happen again. Do you think it's going to take something like that, or are you more optimistic about our ability to set this up beforehand? Well, I have to say that I'm a bit of a pessimist about it in a way, because I think the most relevant precedent here is the attempt that the United Nations

is made to come up with a law of the sea, to govern what happens in the deep oceans on the seabed of the open seas, those parts of the oceans of the world which are not within territorial waters or spheres of influence. Because the thought there is that the deep oceans are a world inheritance, you know, the phrase, a possession of all mankind. and we'll come back to this point because the idea that nobody owns the moon implies everybody does and so what the United Nations has tried to do with the oceans might be a model for what happens on the moon. So in the case of the oceans, what the UN wanted to do was to put in place

a very detailed framework which would govern exploitation of the seabed. There are very, very valuable minerals on the seabed. And those minerals, some of them are in very short supply, difficult to get in other parts of the planet. And so, of course, there are folks and corporations and so on who are eager to try to exploit them. Now, in the case of the deep oceans, there are serious environmental considerations too, because if you mine on the seabed, of course, you're going to destroy the ecology of that part

of the seabed. You're going to disturb the water column above it. You're going to create noise which will distract whales and dolphins and so forth. So, I mean, there are certain problems there. But what the UN wanted to say was this. Given that the resources there are the common inheritance of mankind, of mankind, all of humankind should benefit from it. So they wanted to have in place an arrangement by which if a corporation makes a profit, out of mining the seabed, some part of that profit should be shared even with countries that don't have a shoreline, because this is something that belongs to all of humanity. Now that is exactly why big, big players like the United States refused to be party to the

UN Convention on the Royal of the Sea, because they don't want to constrain their own companies. They don't want, they want their companies to enjoy the profits that they can make out of the sea. doing it. So that is why I'm pessimistic about the moon, because if some kind of UN treaty is arrived at, we're trying to regulate what happens on the moon, and built into it is the idea that as the common inheritance of humankind, the moon, profits from the moon, benefits from the moon should be shared by humankind, then that, of course, is immediately going to fall foul of the people who say, look, I spend. the last 20 years spending billions and billions of dollars to get there, I've got a claim

that I've put the time, the effort, the energy in, I did the digging, I got the stuff out, I've transported it back to earth. If nothing doesn't give me a claim to ownership of this and I don't know what does, why should I share it with anybody else? So that is the imperative which is going to make it, I would say, almost impossibly difficult to get that kind of agreement. But that's separate from the question of how you regulate activity on the moon so that you minimize the possibilities of actual conflict, how you apportion the moon, how you can license access to parts of the moon that are safe for a period of time, five or ten years or something like that, you know, and very deliberately to block any effort to make the presence on the moon of any agency. a ground for claiming sovereignty to that part of it.

So what about this question of conflict? Do you think that we require a conflict in order to get nations to take this seriously? Or do you think that by having conversations like these, writing books like the book that you've written, that will be enough to bring about some sort of serious attention here? Or do you think that ultimately people need to actually see in practice this is what's going to happen again if we don't solve this problem? Well, a bit of both, really. I mean, again, if you look at history, and in particular, if you look at the period

between the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 and 1914, admittedly, there were conflicts like the Primean conflict and the Franco-Prussian War and the Boer War, but those were conflicts which were relatively. speaking short when, of course, the Civil War in the United States, which was a particularly bloody one, but they were relatively short and also relatively localized. And then, of course, First World War and everything has followed from it, second and Cold War and what have you, major, major conflicts precipitated by what happened in the run-up to 1914. But the world was a very different place in 1914 than it was in 1815 and 1820 when the Congress of Vienna

set up what was a very, very long period of relative peace in the world. So you can see that an analog of the Congress of Vienna might restrain the type and frequency of conflicts for long enough for other things to happen, like the Industrial Revolution and so forth. And then when conditions change or when certain kinds of urgency is supervened, then of course those arrangements come to be out of date. So the answer to your question is a bit yes and no in a way. The Second World War and the horrors of the Second World War, in particular the Holocaust,

was what was a huge motivation for the UN and for the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. And of course, what people don't tend to remember or know enough about is that the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was a statement of aspirations, which were turned into two major conventions on human rights and civil liberties, political, economic, social, and the rest, over the course of the decades that followed. And it's those which have come to be statutory international law, which are appealed to in the International Human Rights Court and so on. As we said very much earlier on, they're not infallible. They don't stop human rights violations, but they do have the effect of being somewhat constraining and also providing a ground on which you can complain like hell if something goes wrong, and sometimes those complaints can make a difference. So it's that sort of, you know, ameliorist rather than perfectibilist outcome, you know,

trying to mitigate problems and to reduce them or to some extent to avoid them. And who knows, you know, some of these agreements, because you can do counterfactual history and you can say if the agreement didn't exist, might something have happened that, in fact, hasn't happened precisely because there were such agreements. So in general, you should strive to achieve those agreements, in general, propose a certain degree of optimism in their restraining function. But being realistic, we just remember Molotrop and Rupertrop again, we know that we have to refresh them, we have to be vigilant, we've got to renew things, we've got to understand change conditions.

And when the 1967 Outer Space Treaty came into force, nobody could imagine for a minute that a private company would be sending lunar landing modules with the aim eventually of doing commercial operations on the moon. That just seems science fiction. Yeah. Someone's got to be the administrator of this, though, right? So, like, if we all decide as a planet, maybe it's the UN, we come up with the treaty and we say, look, you are not allowed to go and set up a military base on the moon. Okay, then some country, Finland, I don't know, develops a space program, sends a shuttle out there and sets up a military base. What happens?

Well, probably the rest of the world gets together and somebody goes up there with some kind of destructive materials and blows up the base. So you can't have a military base, so we're going to go and destroy it. Presumably after that, if Finland started sending rockets up to the moon again, we'd be like, we don't really want you going back. back there because we know what you're up to. So maybe we try to stop them. In other words, the moment that something goes wrong here, it seems to me like what you'd end up with is sort of Finland v. the rest of the world in what would essentially be an ownership claim. Once the rest of the world has started saying, okay, everybody but Finland. Finland can't go up there because they've tried to establish a military base. The only thing you could do is prevent them

from flying there. The only thing you could do is prevent them from their activities. And so Finland says, well, I want to go here and do this. The rest of the world says, you can't do that. And they have like a hot battle over it. Like the moment that you realize somebody's going to have to do the administration here, I mean, we can all just sort of hope that nothing goes wrong. But the moment that it does, ultimately someone's writ has to run, right? Well, look, Alex, I mean, you can draw pretty direct parallels in a way

between what's happening in Ukraine at the moment and the sort of scenario that you're painting for Finland on the moon in the following way. And again, it's quite interesting here to sort of fly up to the moon and look back down on earth and get a bigger and a longer perspective. You know, Soviet communism and German Nazism, neither of them survived. In the case of Soviet communism,

It was, what, you know, more than half a century, in the case of Nazism, it was 15 years. But the rest of the world didn't tolerate them. And they kind of ganging up against it ultimately played a big, big role in their fall. And I rather suspect that in the case of Ukraine, the same thing will happen. So Russia has invaded Ukraine, claiming territorial sovereignty over the eastern parts, Donetsk, and so on. The conflict hasn't yet spilled out beyond the borders of Ukraine because of NATO. So NATO, the existence of NATO and the all for one and one for all policy of NATO is checking at least at the moment anyway Russian activity.

The more that NATO countries and other European countries arm and supply and support the Ukraine, irritated Mr. Putin might get, and then there might be a problem. But at the moment, we see how it works. So you can analogize this to how things might happen in the moon. Finland, doing what you describe, are on the moon, is paralleled by Russia doing what it's doing in the Ukraine. There could be, you know, shooting war on the moon or back on Earth. Certainly a lot of the problems are going to be on Earth, of course, as we said earlier. But in the, in the ultimate, The way things play at the moment in our world is that these sorts of bad actor activities do tend to fall foul themselves eventually.

So if the history of the last 100 and 125 years is anything to go by, then we would expect that however long it takes, however bitter it is, at whatever cost there is, that bad acting is less rather than more likely to prevail. Let me give you another example, which is also very closely analogous to the moon, which I considered writing about in the book, but then didn't. And this is Chinese irredentism. Now, the Chinese regard any part of the world that they at any point in history used to own or occupy as belonging to them, not just Tibet and Taiwan, but things like the Spratley Islands in the South China Sea.

And what we've seen in the last few years is then establishing military bases on the Spratley Islands. These islands are closer to Vietnam and Indonesia than they are to China. And yet the reason that China has taken them over is allied, of course, to the reason why it's done these deep water ports in Pakistan and Myanmar, Burma. And that is because of the huge energy hunger that China has, and it wants safe sea routes for oil tankers from the Gulf to China. So it's very geopolitically strategic, these sorts of moves. But they are allied to this historical view that the Chinese have about their claims. And therefore, their preparedness to defend those claims militarily, including an eventual. will attend, it's a military attempt, maybe to take back Taiwan. So you can see how these things

could proliferate. So if on the moon, for example, the Chinese established an area of several hundred kilometers, square kilometers were mining on it, they did want any kind of interference, even perhaps sort of fly over interference and so on. The kinds of tensions that would arise from that would be exactly parallel to the ones that we see in the case of Ukraine and of Chinese irritantism. Is there not a disanalogy in the fact that

in the case of earthly conflicts it's competing claims to the same bit of land? It'll be an invasion as essentially somebody saying, I know you think this is yours, but it's mine now. Whereas in the case of the moon, we're aspiring for something like, I know you think this is yours, but it's not anybody's. It's not ours either.

We're just protecting it for the common interests of mankind. We're not trying to sort of bring it back into our own fold because we think we own this land. We're just saying you're not allowed to own it. Does that sort of change the nature of the conflict? Well, in the particular case of the moon, there is this consideration that there is nothing to protect on the moon. What there is to protect is that the possibility of bad conflicts happening on Earth because of quarrels about the moon. So it's not as though the moon is an environment that needs to be protective and kept pristine and so on. You know, when you talk to people now about the fact that the Apollo astronauts left their

diapers on the moon, this is a very unattracted thought, and that people want to be buried on the moon. I mean, there's even been a couple of moonshots with people's ashes in them to be buried on the moon, or people wanting mementos to be left on the moon, okay? This kind of thing. Leaving aside the fact that in the past, you know, people could buy a little one meter square plots on the moon. There was some scan to that effect. So it speaks to your point about laying claim. But in all those cases, it's not a matter of protecting the environment.

I don't think that the microbes in the diapers of the Apollo astronauts survive very long when they were abandoned there. So we didn't think of pollution in that sense. What we think of instead, we should be thinking of, focusing on, It's this kind of thing. I set up a base. I'm operating it, even if there are no people there, it's robots who are doing it. But I don't want anybody else nearby for the reasons I described earlier,

that it would interfere with those operations. I've invested billions in this. Don't mess with this. And if you do mess with it, it's not going to be out there on the moon that I'm going to draw my six-shooter out of my hostel. It's going to be back there on Earth. So unless there are these really, really serious, clear, consistent. principles, which people could be encouraged to abide by, and for which there are some

remedies, for example, a parallel of the International Human Rights Court, like an international space court, back on earth, where these things could be litigated. Unless there was something like that, then there's not even the chance of any kind of restraint. And I think that's sort of the essential point. But of course, as we've mentioned a few times now, you need to have that space. if I go and like you say, invest billions of dollars into some kind of scientific activity, if some nefarious actor comes along and wants to mess around with it, maybe they want to sort of disrupt my progress or something.

In practice, I'm going to need to be able to say, no, no, no, you know, stay away, stay away. And any kind of international space court would have to recognize some kind of right to do that. Because otherwise, you just can't get anywhere because countries will just be interfering with each other's programs up on the moon. You need to have some sense in which, well, because I got here and because I put down my shuttle and built my base and started doing my researching and my mining, you know, I have the right to refuse someone entry if they try to come onto that plot of land. That sounds a lot like saying, look, as long as you're the first one there and you're the first one to plant a flag, yeah, sure, it's yours. You know, like, in the same way that we might

have this slightly utopian vision that the earth belongs to everyone. and we're all one human race, and we have international courts, but we still recognize that, well, you have your national borders, and you're able to say, I'm not allowed to go into Lithuania or something, even though, you know, idealistically, we imagine the earth as the property of humanity. We recognize that in practice, yeah, we need these borders. It's the same thing not just inevitably going to happen on the moon, and wouldn't that just be ownership by another name? Well, I agree. I mean, I think that is a real danger. I think you're right about that. And the great problem there is that a point I made earlier about the Native American tribes in South America who could claim the sovereignty of their region because of the length of their tenure. So if you establish a base on the moon and there was some dispute about somebody else wanting to have a base nearby, a court might say, well, so long as you were present in that part of the moon and you've got to. your equipment there, you own the equipment at least, and you're conducting operations there, you have a right not to be interfered with while you do it. Now, even if that would take and not to entail that you actually own that bit of the moon that you're doing it on, that in effect

that you only have a right of exclusivity for as long as you're there. Nevertheless, the longer you stay there and the more you do there and the bigger your settlement gets and so on, the the much more, you know, power you have to your elbow to claim a right of tenure is a right of ownership. And so you're dead right about this. I mean, that could very well happen. Indeed, in a way, it's what one feels, why, that it's almost inevitable that would happen. And let me put that remark into the context of something which is sort of even more, you

know, amazing to contemplate. Way back in the 1930s, there was a guy who was thinking. about the claim to sovereignty over the air above our heads, the space above our heads, the atmosphere. And this was in connection first with radio waves, because there were people a bit worried about, hey, your radio waves are beaming across my airspace. But then it became a much more realistic and concrete thing, which is about aircraft flying over your airspace. So how much of the air above your head is national air, and how far do you go before it becomes anybody? So that became a question.

Now, this guy began to think. He extrapolated from that to the moon and to Mars and to space in general. And he then said, I can, and this is back in the 30s ago, he then said, one could imagine in the future development of technology human colonies being established on the moon and Mars. And one can imagine then that they, in their turn, will, like colonies on Earth today, he said, want to become independent of Earth. So you could, you know, H.G. Wells' War of the World scenario now starts to, you know, or Star Trek or something anyway. But something begins to loom into consciousness here about where this all goes to.

You know, we're thinking now about what looked like relatively feeble attempts to get lunar modules on the moon. But by the mid-century, I mean, by the time you're an old man, there will be bases on the moon. They may very well be bases on Mars. And they're very well made be people, not just robots, in these bases. And so imagining this man of the 1930s that some big colony on Mars would eventually say, oh, to hell with this, I don't want to be under the government of the US or China or anything else, and become independent. It becomes a world possibility.

So that scenario is one where, you know, we've put your anxiety about ownership of bits of the move onto steroids yeah and as you say it seems inevitable and as we mentioned earlier or perhaps inevitable i should say and as we mentioned earlier the thing that countries really care about here or that actors really care about here is de facto ownership you know it doesn't really matter to them if they if you say like you said a moment ago okay well you own the equipment and you have a right not to be interfered within your activities and so you don't own that bit of the land but no one else is allowed to enter it without your permission and you own everything on it. It's a bit like saying you don't own this bit of land on earth, you know, where you live. You don't own

this bit of land, but you do own all of the bricks that make up the building, all of the objects inside of the building. You're also able to stop people from coming into the building if you want to. And if they try to come into the building and don't listen when you tell them to stop, you can use force to keep them out. But you don't own it, technically speaking. If I were being offered that, I'd probably just say, yeah, yeah, sure, I'll take it, because I don't care if you sort of say that I own it on a bit of paper, because in practice, that's what I've got here. And the point I'm making is not so much that I fear that this will happen on the moon, but that I cannot envision a way of doing any kind of, engaging in any kind of human activity that doesn't necessitate this

de facto ownership, in other words. So, you know, as for, as for, as for, your book, Who Owns the Moon? Can we ever answer with something like everybody or nobody? Or when we're speaking in practice here, do we have to admit that there's always going to be some kind of ownership going on? And this idea of common ownership will have to be one that's essentially consigned to a bit of paper just to remind us that we should sort of, you know, all be friendly in this space of de facto ownership. Well, these are very good. points. And in fact, I've been developing the idea that we should have something analogous to the freehold, leasehold distinction that we have with property in England, anywhere where

it applies to Scotland. But there the idea is that somebody might be the freeholder of a piece of land and might lease the use of that piece of land to somebody else to build the house on it. Now, the person who builds the house of it owns the house and the contents, but not the land that it sits on. So you can begin to see the possibility of a parallel emerging here. But in order to make the parallel complete, what we would have to do in a formal way to invest ownership of the moon in humanity and make the UN the holder of that title. And then what the UN does is it leases for periods of time, as happens with these sold in properties in England, lease for a period of time, those bits of the moon where somebody is going to install

equipment and carry out commercial operations. Now, this would formalize it. This would provide a really clear-cut way of dealing with violations of it, because we've got plenty of precedent for that on earth. So this is an idea that we'll probably be laughed at, if we put it now, let's say humanity legally owns the moon, all humanity, that the United Nations is the estate agent for the moon on behalf of humanity, and that it is empowered to lease bits of the moon to people who want to do stuff there. People might laugh at that. but you know what I would guess I would guess by the mid-century

that that idea as probably the best idea of dealing with this will be one that would be front and central of discussion one final thing I wanted to ask you about is an idea I heard discussed there's a video on YouTube called Who Owns the Moon by Michael Stevens of V-sauce is the name of the channel

and he raises the point that If we remove the traditional political and financial incentives involved in exploration, if you imagine a planet Earth where countries were not able to say, I'm going to send out a boat, and if you land there and you find something, then you can bring it back and it's going to be ours and you're going to have great riches and you can actually set up a colony on that land and that land will be yours. if that wasn't an option, I think it's fair to say that exploration would have at least been slowed down. There would have been much less of an incentive for countries to go and explore the world and develop colonies.

And so progress in terms of exploration and developing the world and discovering the world, at least insofar as Europeans might discover the world that's currently inhabited by other people, would have been slowed down. maybe that's a good thing because as I say in the case of European expansionism we're entering into lands where people are already living but with the moon we don't have that problem as far as we know there are no sort of lunar lunar natives although I'd be interested in what the implications would be for all of this if we discovered that beneath the surface there were living a community of lunar natives that's another question unto itself but we might say okay so that problem isn't there, without those financial and political incentives that drove arguably European expansionism, do we not run the risk of similarly slowing down space exploration because

people don't have that same level of motivation? We need to be perhaps a bit pessimistic about human nature and recognise that the real thing that's going to motivate people is being able to say, yeah, I own a bit of the moon, or being able to say that, you know, I have a sort of claim to sovereignty over this bit of equipment or this part of the moon because I got there first. And if that were available to people, it might speed things up a bit, maybe? No, I don't think so, actually, because the original motivation for European exploration in the 14, 15th, 16th centuries was trade. So, you know, all during the medieval period, these very, very value spices and other resources that were coming into Europe, were coming over at, and the Arabs were in control.

They were the middlemen, and they were making a nice profit out of it. Venice flourished hugely on the basis of the trade that came sort of across the Indian Ocean, but then to the Arab lands and then on to Eastern Europe. So what the Portuguese wanted to do was to find another route, the source of those treasures, and that's why they undertook their exploration. And in fact, if you have a look at my discussion of the Scramble for Africa, you notice that the British in the 19th century of the great imperial power, we're not wanting to colonize. Colonizing is expensive. You've got to put bureaucracy and government buildings and policemen and what have you. So don't do that. Just have your gunboat offshore keep other traders away so that your traders have exclusive access to that market. So, in fact, a very great deal of European expansion was predicated on the idea of trade, and it was only when, in order to control the sources of trade, that they began to take over bits of territory.

And in fact, the great initiators of doing that kind of thing in that way were the Portuguese and Dutch. They decided that they better establish a base, and then when they had established a base, they wanted extra territoriality. He wanted to be under the control of the local ruler, so they made a sovereignty claim around their base, and then they had to fight wars against the local ruler, so they expanded. You know, it all happened by accident, it was a domino thing, but the original imperative was commercial. And at this very moment, if you talked to people like Musk and Bezos and others who were involved in the private enterprise aspect of what's going to happen on the moon,

they will be, they'll be talking about profits. I mean, I know Musk is also talking about establishing human colonies in case we blow ourselves up here on Earth and so on. But the real driver is the expectation of financial return from these activities. And in that way, it kind of reprises what happened with European expansion, although you quite correctly point out that that all too naturally tips over into colonization. So what do you think happens if we do discover in this sort of unfathomable scenario that there is some kind of secret inhabitant or set of inhabitants on the moon? And we start going up there and all we want to do is dig for a bit of lithium.

And we discover that somewhere beneath the surface there is a native population of the moon. Maybe there's only 30 or 40 people. And they're on the other side of the planet and they don't use the lithium that we're trying to extract. They don't even know that it's there, but when we show up, they go, this is ours, go away. Do we listen to them? Do we recognize that just because they were there first, they are the ones who own the moon? Or do we say, I'm sorry, we've already agreed down here that this rock is actually the collective property of the species called human beings? And because we signed a treaty down on earth, that's just legally, you know, you have no recourse, you know, send a letter to the court if you like.

What do we do? Well, I think in that case, of course, the treaty on Earth, the decision made on Earth will be voided by the fact that we found sentient and communicating beings who, you know, have a prior tenure of the Moon. And we would be very wise, I think, and moral, if we would take that into account on the basis of history. That's to say, we now point the finger at ourselves about what we did. in South America and Central America and Australia, and we're not going to let that happen again here. By the way, the real possibility that there is life on the moons of Jupiter, a couple of them anyway, does raise questions about our environmental responsibilities out there in space. And of course, there are two sides to the coin of that.

One, about not disturbing them, you know, sort of a Star Trek principle there, the other about importing to our planet organisms that might be hugely dangerous to life on this planet. And so a great deal of care has to be taken about that, a lot of thought given to that. But even if in the very wild scenario you think about the troglodytes the moon popping their heads up and saying, what do you guys think you're doing here and so on, even in that very, very unlikely event, I do think that our quite correct anxiety about what our ancestors did when they went to Australia and Central South America, that should really stay on that. Well, the book is Who Owns the Moon? I'll make sure it's linked in the show notes or description if you're watching on YouTube. AC Grayling, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks, Alex. Thank you for having me.