Dragon Con Question and Answer

I had a great time at Dragon Con.  My son, his girlfriend, and I went to panels, bought art from the art show, and bravely let the son donate blood.  We didn’t get in to see either David Tennant or Brandon Sanderson, but I saw the lines for each snaking around the hotel and stretching all the way to Chattanooga.  I was glad the writer had just as long a line as the actor.  Everywhere you looked you saw people in costume.  A cavalcade of Wonder Women had a meet up.  Dr. Strange was so good I wondered if he wasn’t actually Benedict Cumberbatch.  Who knows.  Maybe he was?  Weirdly, I saw no Klingons or Vulcans.  I think they were more popular in the cons of my youth. We got to some good panels, including one that had both Jim Butcher and David Weber.

I was on two panels.  The first was about why we aren’t at Mars yet.  It was on Saturday afternoon and absolutely packed.  The Challenges of the Outer Space Treaty panel was on Sunday morning, but my son and his girlfriend nobly and valiantly roused themselves at the crack of 10 and provided moral and technical support.  It was great, with Nick Eftimiades, a national security expert, and Dauna Bartley, an ethics attorney.

One of the questions I got from Dauna was how science fiction affected space law.  It’s invaluable, of course, for a space lawyer to have read a lot of science fiction.  It allows said lawyer to worry about things like whether an alien would need a reentry license from the FAA.  The alien is from elsewhere and has thus never left Earth and thus is not reentering.  Houston, have we found a loophole?  Also, science fiction offers a host of hypothetical scenarios for exams for space law classes.  This is all good.  However, there are drawbacks.

Getting to space is hard.  Getting to the Moon is hard.

But if you read or watch science fiction, you might think it isn’t.  Instead, you’ll internalize the notion that going to space is like going to Ohio — totally doable.  Star Wars has its main characters in different solar systems in the blink of an eye.  Star Trek seems to take longer and employ a wee bit more effort, but they’re still pretty speedy.  Even the Expanse has people zipping around.  They say that repeated visualized images, even knowing they’re fiction, lead a person to believe somewhere in the back of his brain that what he’s seen is what is true.

I am a science fiction fan.  I love the stuff.  However, could it be that science fiction being fiction, it must, of necessity, be full of conflict and squabbles?  There’s not a lot of drama if everybody’s nice to each other, respects boundaries, and honors their contracts.  Also, science fiction being fiction, does it have the tendency to shrink entire planets–never mind continents–to the size of Rhode Island?  All this makes us think, perhaps incorrectly, that there’s some sort of crying need for rules.  Now.  Right now.

(I still get annoyed at the “dairy planet” in Battlestar Galactica.  Seriously?  A dairy planet?  The whole planet?  Or the Star Trek episode with the Dana Buchman planet?  Do these writers not know economics?  Heinlein may have said that specialization is for insects, but spacefaring economies require specialization and diversification.)

Anyway, with the access difficulties downplayed, the vast sizes shrunk, and the potential conflicts clear in our minds, we tend to think that, if not next month, at least by next year, we’ll have water wars at the lunar south pole, boundary disputes between corporations on Mars, and a battle for scarce regolith.  This seems a wee bit premature.

Space is big.  Even the Moon is big.  Not only is it bigger than the United States, it’s bigger than Texas.  I’d bet anything that the first person or corporation to get to the Moon and figure out how to stay a whole month is going to be alone.  For a long time.  I was talking to Goddard’s deputy director for the Hubble program the other day.   He told me the James Webb Space Telescope would be going to L2, a Lagrange point beyond the Moon.  Being not only a science fiction fan but a lawyer, I, of course, asked him if anyone had any concerns over NASA’s use of L2.  Did anyone else want it?  He was very gracious about my ignorance.  That would be like trying to claim Earth, he pointed out.  L2 is huge.  Ok, then.

Did I say I was immune to the phenomenon described above?  I did not.

Where am I going with all of this?  Just this:  perhaps we don’t need a myriad of rules for things that haven’t happened yet.  The common law grew organically over millennia.   Principles from the middles ages got discarded or changed to fit new circumstances.

I still remember reading a Texas judge in a water case in law school.  Faced with an argument that he should employ precedent from  a case arising in damp and rainy England, the Texan drily pointed out that Texas is not England.  Sure enough, Texas evolved different rules and nuances for water rights than England.

But if a bunch of English people had sat down and come up with rules — in advance — for water rights in the new world, had meetings, written articles, and been thoroughly logical if a touch uninformed, they could have still gotten it wrong for large chunks of the North American continent.  Remember, Texas is big.

Other common law principles stand with us to this day, but modified for modern circumstances.  Trying to assess in advance that we need rules for colonists or industry smacks of hubris.  Personally, I’m a fan of applying principles of adverse possession in outer space, but that’s because I, too, am guilty of the need to get those things I care about ironed out.  I blame science fiction.

While we are on the topic, I have a new book out.  Simple Service has no space law, but does offer space opera.  It’s full of conflict, including between brothers, and is set in First Landing, the one terraformed valley of Not What We Were Looking For.  First Landing, however, is the size of the Chiang Mai valley in north Thailand, and does not take up the whole planet.  Instead, it’s in the Nwwwlf equivalent of northwestern North Carolina.  Life is precarious.  Technology is degrading.  And the two settlement factions don’t play nicely.

It’s on Amazon in paperback and ebook form.

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