claim to mining rights

Why impose any such restriction in the first place? Far more cost effective would be to have no such restriction.

For example...
Divide the Moon into 1km square plots. Plots could be claimed by individuals, one per individual, from a distributing body. There would be no fee paid, except perhaps a nominal administration fee to the distributing body. All that would be required to claim your plot would be proper identification, contact addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, etc. Then you would receive a deed.

Once you've claimed your plot, you could hold it or sell it. It would be a piece of fully-tradable property: you could sell it to a corporation or to another individual or to a government or to some other buying entity.

Mining companies would advertise their willingness to buy plots. [ I imagine that the plots in the polar regions would have the highest market values... What do you think? ]

Thus, a mining company could secure property before investing millions in a robotic probe. This reduces risk. I'd hate to have a situation where we have disputing parties asserting that "My probe got here first!" and "No way, mine did!". Yuck. I want secure property rights well in advance of any probes.

As for the "distributing body", others in this thread have mentioned the United Nations as a possibility. Maybe. I would offer another possibility: have a non-profit organization such as the Archimedes Institute be the distributing body. As the plots are distributed and trading begins, property would be created "de facto" if not "de jure" according to the U.N. But if it's de facto property for long enough, then various nations and perhaps eventually the U.N. would eventually de jure recognize the property. I offer this alternative to the U.N. because I fear that many of the constituent nations of the U.N. are hostile to private property. The issue might get tied up in some U.N. subcommittee, never to emerge from the beauracracy.

The Archimedes Institute or some other non-profit could quickly organize such an effort, and we could have active trading in Moon mining rights within a year or two. As it is the case that nobody's really ready to mine on the Moon just yet, this long delay between the acquisition of mining rights and the actual mining would allow the transition from de facto to de jure to happen.

Ravenart@...
02/27/2001 10:49 AM

<< Let's get this property out into the private sector as soon as possible.
If we impose the restriction that one must handle or improve the asteroid,
then we'll have to wait a lot longer, and this property will remain in a
nebulous and uncertain legal state.>>

Ron Menich,

What if we used the robots to stake our claim to mining rights on an
asteroid? It's more cost-effective this way.

Carl