Property Rights in Space Sounds Great, Until We're Actually There

Did you ever see the connection between property rights and space settlement? No? Well, we see it all the time! In fact, it’s hard to imagine the future of human civilization in space without addressing property rights. New America’s Dennis Wille and Chris Mellon spoke with sci-fi writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck about the role of property rights in their critically acclaimed novel series, “The Expanse,” now a TV series on Amazon Prime. The series is set hundreds of years in the future in a colonized Solar System where three major powers based on Earth, Mars, and the asteroid belt, jockey for power. The following transcript has been lightly edited.

Dennis Wille: So, the first thing that we're just going to broadly ask is, how did you come to write this thing called "The Expanse?" What was that original motivation?

Daniel Abraham: Well, the original motivation was that I was playing in Ty's tabletop role-playing game, and he had done all of the world building and all of the homework and all the prep work. And I thought it was fun and that we could write it up and sell it for pizza money. That was literally how the book started.

Dennis Wille: That's brilliant! So as you built the world of ”The Expanse”—which we now understand was a tabletop game—what inspired you to think about projecting humans into the future of space settlement in a couple hundred years? I mean, are there any sci-fi influences or historical influences that you might have had?

Daniel Abraham: I mean, a book called The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, which was written in the 50's and which I read when I was about ten. It takes place in a fully inhabited solar system, but doesn't have any sort of hyper drive or light speed or anything, so the only planets people live on are the ones in this solar system. I found that really interesting when I was a kid. And also, that book has a war between the inner and outer planets—sort of in the background of the story it's telling—which I found an interesting idea.

Ty Franck: And then in addition to that, watching the movie Alien when I was like 12. The idea that people could work in space. So, the characters in the movie Alien—Parker and Brett, they're the two guys who have got jumpsuits on, they've got tool belts, they're fixing the ship. And they don't ever act like astronauts. They act like merchant marines. They're worried they don't get paid enough, they're worried that the contracts are unfair. The idea that space could just be the place where you work and not feel special is one I found very interesting. For me, historically, you know, the first time somebody crossed the Atlantic to get to the New World it was an incredibly dangerous journey. Like, it required enormous resources to do that. But you fast-forward a hundred years, and you've got merchant marine ships going back and forth all the time and it's routine. And this idea that crossing space could become routine and not feel like an adventure anymore is one I found very interesting.

Chris Mellon: I found it noteworthy when I started watching the series how much privatization there was in general—Star Helix, the private police force, etc. Is that something that you felt was likely to happen when we started settling the solar system? What was behind that decision to have so much of the activity that is normally governmental privatized?

Daniel Abraham: It's happening now.

Ty Franck: One of the things about science fiction is that it's almost always as much about when it is being written as when it is set. So when you start talking about privatized organizations in partnership with governments, we're pulling that into the future because it's what we're living in at the moment.

Dennis Wille: That makes sense. As a military guy, I've looked at these transitions within the space industry. Obviously, it was the government launching all the satellites in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but eventually satellite communications became very privatized to the point where satellite communications is done completely for private reasons. And I've drawn analogies—it goes back to when we expanded after the Louisiana Purchase and other points in history— to when the Army Corps of Engineers as a government institution built roads and bridges and ferries and canals. They don't do that today, but they do some maintenance and oversight of those things. So again, you're right. We're already a long way through some of these transitions, and I think the big thing that we as a population still haven't wrapped our heads around is regular human beings being a part of that transition in space. And I think that was one of the great things that “The Expanse” did for me.It projected us so that everybody can see themselves existing in that world.

Ty Franck: And we wanted to have it be a project that was really focused on the Bretts and Parkers—focused on the kind of...

Daniel Abraham: ...blue-collar guys in space.

Ty Franck: Yeah, the living day-to-day experience. And I don't think we're at any point trying to take a stance saying that privatization is good or privatization is bad—or government oversight is the best way to go—so much as saying that these are structures of power and finance that do fill different niches, and all those niches will continue to exist moving forward.

Chris Mellon: That makes a lot of sense. Maybe it seems more glaring to me because in space you can be so isolated. If you’re on a rock somewhere out in the belt with a private company running the show, you're subject to a lot more control from the powers that be than if you were on earth. I thought the psychological effect of that was really interesting in the show. One example is that the Earthers and the Belters have very different attitudes toward private property, with people like Anderson Dawes saying, "Earthers can't look at a thing without wondering immediately who owns it." Can you dive into that?

Ty Franck: Well, we've done the studies on this, and one of the things that you see is that people who are in poverty—people who are not living in abundance—are actually more generous in their charitable giving than people who are wealthy. There is an isolation that comes with a certain level of wealth because you are capable of disconnecting from the community. When you rely upon the community for your safety and existence, the understanding of why you invest in community is a lot more obvious. You see more free child care in poor neighborhoods than you do in rich suburbs. It's that kind of dynamic writ large.

Dennis Wille: Right. And this is deviating a little bit, but there’s this idea of the company town. A corporation might be licensed by a sovereign country on earth to do moon habitat sustainment or something like that, giving them a leg up for settlement. How does a government ensure that there continues to be significant competition between corporations so that we don't hit a company town situation on the moon?

Ty Franck: Well—and you mentioned the company town—if you're a Belter, and you work in a mine on an asteroid, you don't own that asteroid, and you don't own that mine. You probably live in some sort of habitat that's been set up to house the miners who live there or the factory workers who live there. But you don't own any of those things. Some corporation back on Mars or Earth owns those things, so that sort of feeling that "because I live here and I work here I own it" may not even be part of that culture.

Chris Mellon: I have some more questions about property rights, especially about the fourth novel in the series, Cibola Burn. The central conflict there is between a group of refugees and a UN-chartered corporation with competing claims to settle a planet, so it seems that property rights play a really important role in the drama as well as the world building. I was wondering if there is any particular moment where you realized that you would have to start thinking about property rights? Or was that something that developed organically as you were plotting this out?

Ty Franck: No, I mean, it's just the way the world works. The Belters were always intended to be an oppressed underclass and were very deliberately based on places like African countries that are filled with incredibly valuable rare earth metals, but the people who live there—the people who dig it up—are not rich. You have people who live on top of enormous wealth who don’t get to share in it because somebody else is taking it out of the ground, taking it away, and making billions. That's just based on how our world works.

Daniel Abraham: And Cibola in particular was always built to be our western. That was the one that was wrestling with the idea of the frontier of civilization and who gets to make the rules, and the ambiguities when the scientific commission with the big corporation behind it got permission from a big government. Why does that government get to decide who gets to own the land? And the people who are already there then don't recognize that authority. And all of the clashing narratives that come with the physical reality of the land.

Ty Franck: And the entire concept of eminent domain. In a western when they were laying down railroad tracks, the government would just come and say, "we own X amount of land on either side of these tracks." And it didn't matter who was there before. And it still happens today. If the state decides to run a freeway through your yard, they will just use eminent domain to take your house away from you. So that idea of government giving themselves the right to just decide who things belong to.

Chris Mellon: Absolutely. And I was wondering as I read that book whether you had been looking at the UN Outer Space Treaty and other sorts of sources. It strikes me that Cibola draws out really well a lot of the ambiguities around how property is currently conceived of in space—particularly this issue of having a supranational organization like the UN license someone and grant them settlement rights vs. a much more traditional, natural law idea of use and occupation. You know, the refugees from Ganymede are already there.

Daniel Abraham: We were aware of a lot of the laws, some of the treaties in place now, and some of the confusion about that. But a lot of what we were pulling from was historical precedent. And a lot of what we were talking about were things that have played out on the surface of the planet over time and abstracting them forward into the issues of a land rush.

There have been plenty of situations in which there was a tremendous amount of wealth suddenly available, and there were conflicting narratives about exactly who deserved it, who had a right to it, and who was willing to kill how many people to get it. And all of that seems of a piece to us so that the expansion of those issues out into space—with a few asymmetries—really does kind of rhyme with the past.

Ty Franck: I think it's really easy to make laws like "nobody gets to claim a celestial body" when it's a thing that's unlikely to happen because we can't go there. I think, when you get a bunch of settlements on some place like the moon or Mars, you're going to have to revisit that. There were a bunch of different countries that had settlements in North America. No one country could claim the whole thing. But, the minute there were enough of us here in North America to sort of decide we should be our own country, that changed. And now, most of North America is Canada and the United States.

I think those "none of us can claim it" things...when you get a bunch of people living on Mars they're going to have an opinion on that. On the asteroid side, all of this goes away when there's money. The minute that somebody finds a way to actually make money using those rocks, all of the rules are going to change. It's just a fact. Because the minute somebody pulls a trillion dollars in platinum out of an asteroid, some government is going to want to tax that. We're not just going to be okay with some random guy suddenly being richer than most of the countries on earth because he found a platinum asteroid. All of these rules, I think, look great on paper. They sound great right up until we're actually doing it. And then we're completely rewriting that rule book.

Daniel Abraham: To go back to what Ty was saying, all of the rules about how nobody can own a celestial body are very easy when nobody can actually practicably own a celestial body. I don't know how well that’ll stand up.

Ty Franck: Yeah, that feels like making rules about theoretical things. And rules about theoretical things always fall apart when the thing becomes real. When you can't actually build a base on Mars, you can make as many rules about who's allowed to build a base on Mars as you want because there's no consequences to them. The minute that those rules have consequences, I think they'll change.

Dennis Wille: What final messages would you like to give people who maybe haven't seen or read the books? What do we need to be thinking about now that helps us set the conditions for the themes and the philosophy that you laid out in the books?

Daniel Abraham: Well, I think that, if you look at the themes and philosophies in the books, one of the most consistent things throughout all of them is a real skepticism of tribalism and tribal affiliation as a basis for human culture. It's something we've always done, and it's always come with a terrible price. Moving into space, we have the opportunity to reconsider what it is to be human—to be part of a group. And it would be a terrible crisis to miss.

Update: The piece has been updated from the original to correct attribution of some quotes. The quotes have not been changed, just the attribution.