We can make fun of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, but its bosses are ahead. Way ahead.
Their latest feat was legislation granting extraction rights for raw materials from extraterrestrial sources. Etienne Schneider, the social-democratic vice-president and finance minister of the Grand Duchy, hastened to reassure that Luxembourg would not claim ownership of any extraterrestrial territory or celestial body. Only ownership of the resources themselves, whatever they might be and wherever they are found.
The Grand Duchy is the first European state to offer such legal guarantees. It has no space program, but it does have down-to-earth incentives: to attract the “headquarters” of the space gold-diggers to its territory. Yet we spot (perhaps out of ignorance…) a knot in Scheider’s statements: how can ownership of raw materials (i.e., the finds on the ground) be secured without securing ownership of the ground itself?
If we’re not mistaken, the English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgians, French and the rest were after “raw materials”, not jungles and rivers, in their colonial conquests. The fact that they soon ended up fighting each other over the spoils might mean the grand duchy’s bright ideas never got a chance to mingle—either because they didn’t exist yet or were simply irrelevant.
Naaah…