re space marketing would be wonderfull in article c dv k agora rain com jhart agora rain com jim hart writes if anybody has a strong claim to control of the the night sky it is astronomers check out the common law in the days when wild lands weren t scarce pioneers laid claim to the land by putting it to use eg clearing and growing a crop even trespassers can lay claim to the right of passage if if they ve done it for long enough and the owners have not complained or taken steps to stop them usage begets property rights astronomers have been using the night sky for thousands of years they own it eg light polluters they will lose their common law right of ownership another consequence of their ownership is that they are free to sell it now astronomers need money for their work if light polluting billboards and mirrors go up they will need even more money to buy extra image processing equipment filters space telescopes etc to get around the problem so as long as we can define who astronomers are eg do they include amateur astronomers nature lovers we can set up a system of voluntary consensus to solve this dispute instead invoking bans regulations etc enforced by bribed politicians at the point of a gun why do folks always think of that sordid solution we ought to pass a law to solve problems first instead of as a last resort when other methods have failed stuff deleted this proposal certainly needs work but how about working on these kind of ideas first before writing there ought to be a law letters to our congresscritters let s give noncoercive consensus via the free market a chance to solve this problem jim hart jhart agora rain com would mr hart please explain how one could get every nation on earth and every corporation to agree that astronomers own the night sky without coercion remember that not every nation follows the english common law in most countries for most of history it was probably true that the rulers owned everything not explicitly owned by individuals even in north america where by the principle enunciated the aboriginal inhabitants should have owned everything when new arrivals wanted to use land and resources they just took it over in case mr hart hasn t noticed there is currently a brutal war going on in bosnia about who owns what of course if some friendly super power were to give an international astronomy organization some anti satelite missiles and also agree to defend it if attacked such a proposal might work but it would hardly be non coercive some of us nutty environmentalists think it might make sense first to try to mobilize public opinion against advertising in space and also to use governmental actions like taxing power for example to discourage them this of course would be too coercive for mr hart leonard evens len math nwu edu dept of mathematics northwestern univ evanston il
