Only Two Countries Can Still Claim Antarctica

What Hacker News said

Cites jack9 · 2016-01 · on “The Great Republican Land Heist”

> The government owns all land until it is transferred/sold to a private owner. That's not a new thing: that precedent goes back to Day 1 of the United States, and maybe further I think you are talking about the fluidity of borders and lands worldwide. In reality, country borders are based on if land can be defended from other claimants ( [LINK] ). This is the final arbitration, even after exploring existing treaties (which arent always followed, [this video] ). The idea that the US federal government owns land until it's disseminated is one of those american myths that the US Govt tries REALLY hard to let alone, despite most federal lands being originally acquired by fiat and in the last 200 yea

Cites nommm-nommm · 2016-03 · on “Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly”

Plenty of countries have claimed overlapping areas of Antarctica. Currently an international treaty reserves Antarctica for mostly science and nature (no military, no mining) but the treaty isn't permanent. [this video]

Cites LinuxBender · 2022-08 · on “Political Situation once Mars gets colonized”

In my opinion before we even get to that point Elon and others will first have to figure out how to include only people with psychological and physical profiles conducive to such a lifestyle. Even one unstable person could cause entire pods or groups of pods to be destroyed and mass evacuations, assuming evacuation is feasible. Limited versions of these experiments have occurred on earth with sub-optimal results. There are also some long term low-gravity induced health issues that will have to be addressed and that is work-in-progress. Here [1] was some recent discussion on this as well. I suspect that initially there will be teams of robots belonging to different governments and maybe a sma