As the human race grows ever larger, it will face, among others, two major problems. The first will be the need to invent employment for the surplus population (the very first of these invented occupations, thousands of years ago, are now known as lawyers). Inevitably, a hefty percentage of these new jobs will be in administration, spinning thousands of miles more bureaucratic yarn. The second will be the need to branch out beyond our own planet Earth, which by that time should be unsuitably reduced to a barren husk fit only for refuse collection and the occasional nuclear war.
It won't be all bouncing about if immigration get their hands on it
Anyone who has been through terrestrial immigration procedures knows that the collision of these two factors could trigger a substantial increase in the amount of arse-ache endured by extraterrestrial travellers. Not only is space immigration going to be a chore, it is going to have whole economies dependent on it being that way.
Turning away from the dark side of the moon momentarily, it might be wise to take a gander at how space immigration might work if commercial, extraterrestrial travel was for real. Surprisingly, there might be nothing to work.
Queuing would be a nightmare
In 1959, the United Nations created COPUOS (Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space). Between the late 60s and 70s, COPUOS crafted five international treaties, with varying success. The 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, or ‘Outer Space Treaty’, was by far the most successful of these, and includes the following stipulations alongside other verbiage and legal nomenclature (the below points have been paraphrased for the sake of banality):
• Exploring outer space should be done for the benefit of all humankind, not specific countries or territories;
• Outer space should be free for all states and countries to explore;
• No terrestrial country or state can claim sovereignty or ownership over space.
The document trawls on quite a bit, but the above places the notion of space immigration in a dilly of a pickle. Immigration entails the crossing of a border, the movement from one country, sovereignty or state to another via a specific set of laws, if you wish your immigration to be legal. Yet it appears, bizarrely and quite wonderfully, that while humankind is still busy trying to figure out how to make money from outer space, we are quite happy to share the turf.
Tell that to Dennis Hope, a man so forward-thinking he is a full round-the-bend away from those ahead of the curve. Hope (an apt moniker) is head of the Lunar Embassy Corporation, a company engaged in the sale or real estate on the Moon. So far, Hope has roped in nearly four million people. Before you assume anything, these people clearly had their heads screwed on as they demanded legal protection of their land. If you are going to buy a piece of dead soil on an airless grey wasteland a full three days travel away in the biggest spacecraft ever created by human hand, you need to make sure everything is spot-on. So, five years ago Hope created his own government with its own congress, currency and constitution to cement the deal.
Do you own the Moon?
Hope bases this ownership of the Moon on an unanswered registration of a claim on lunar soil to the UN in 1980. The UN did not respond to the claim, so Hope took this to mean that he had full rights to sell the land on to whoever he so wished, a move so audacious you almost feel like he deserves it. In actual fact, the UN did not answer because there was no need - the Outer Space Treaty signed by 98 separate parties a full decade earlier had declared the Moon and any other objects in the solar system out of bounds for any prospective estate agents.
Clearly, until an economically viable method of extracting resources from extraterrestrial bodies is figured out or chanced upon, the noble Outer Space Treaty will hold fast. A strong moral code is easier to maintain when food on the table does not depend upon it bending or breaking. Still, beyond this cynicism, if territories were to be established on the Moon and other bodies in the solar system, what kind of immigration procedure would be put in place?
Well, if you think swine flu and terrorism is causing problems for international travellers, space travel would be an entirely new level of brutal interrogation. First off, it is unlikely that any extraterrestrial territory would want to admit anyone through its border who was incapable of surviving under the conditions of the particular moon or planet being visited. The morbidly obese would be the outer space equivalent of lepers. Next, quarantine procedures would be super-harsh. Even the slightest cold would be entirely frowned upon, with living conditions likely to be in closed atmospheres on planets where the atmosphere was unsuitable, i.e. currently all of them. So to guarantee a holiday, you would have to go into self-imposed quarantine for a good month beforehand, and provide some kind of documentary evidence or undergo a series of increasingly violent innoculations before you were allowed to depart home turf. As for terrorism, the prospect of an exploding commercial spaceliner of any kind is the sort of thing that makes Bin Laden’s bum wheeze with excitement, so security would have to be nearly hyperactive in its intrusiveness, and there would most likely be strikes as security guards demanded to be armed with Star Wars-style lasers rather than Uzis. Full rectal examinations would have to be performed by lottery and shoes would have to be checked in, leading to increased ticket prices due to spaceports requiring full carpeting throughout.
This is the security just to buy 500 Superkings
These suggestions are both hypothetical and entirely ridiculous. Having said that, if you were to explain the current airline immigration procedures to someone only 50 years ago, you would most likely have been met with derision and a definite nod that, yes, there must be an easier way to go about such things. Of course there is. Until jobs depend on it.
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