1AC Econ Inequality NC PRO-UNION CP ECON DISAD 1AR ALL NR PRO-UNION 2AR PRO-UNION
Novice Circuit Tournament
4
Opponent: MB | Judge: Clark-Villanueva, Leah
AC- ECON INEQUALITY NC- PRO-ACT CP ECON DISAD AR- ALL NR- PRO-ACT CP AC- ALL
Peninsula Invitational
1
Opponent: YC | Judge: Dee, Blake
1AC- Space Mining Debris 1NC- Astroid Mining DA legal trust CP 1AR- Everything NR- Everything 2AR- Everything
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Cites
Entry
Date
0 - Contact
Tournament: NA | Round: 1 | Opponent: NA | Judge: NA Hi! I'm Georgia (she/her). georgiazander25@marlborough.org
10/11/21
Jan-Feb
Tournament: Harvard Westlake Debates | Round: 1 | Opponent: NW | Judge: Siegel, Zachary Asteroid Mining DA New V The private sector is essential for asteroid mining – competition is key and government development is not effective, efficient, or cheap enough. Thiessen 21: Marc Thiessen, 6-1, 21, Washington Post, Opinion: SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/ It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism. Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. At a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel. If you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing — including docking — without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared “the Eagle has landed.” On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean — ready to be used again. That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 — a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion — making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years — far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle. The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies — including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so — for more than $1 billion less than its competitor. That spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk’s goal — the reason he founded SpaceX — is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints. Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth?
Space regulation scares investors away and spills over to other space activities. Freeland 05 Steven Freeland (BCom, LLB, LLM, University of New South Wales; Senior Lecturer in International Law, University of Western Sydney, Australia; and a member of the Paris-based International Institute of Space Law). “Up, Up and … Back: The Emergence of Space Tourism and Its Impact on the International Law of Outer Space.” Chicago Journal of International Law: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 4. 2005. JDN. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1269andcontext=cjil V. THE NEED FOR CELESTIAL PROPERTY RIGHTS? ¶ The fundamental principle of "non-appropriation" upon which the international law of outer space is based stems from the desire of the international community to ensure that outer space remains an area beyond the jurisdiction of any state(s). Similar ideals emerge from UNCLOS (in relation to the High Seas) as well as the Antarctic Treaty, 42 although in the case of the latter treaty, it was finalised after a number of claims of sovereignty had already been made by various States and therefore was structured to "postpone" rather than prejudice or renounce those previously asserted claims.43 In the case of outer space, its exploitation and use is expressed in Article I of the Outer Space Treaty to be "the province of all mankind," a term whose meaning is not entirely clear but has been interpreted by most commentators as evincing the desire to ensure that any State is free to engage in space activities without reference to any sovereign claims of other States. This freedom is reinforced by other parts of the same Article and is repeated in the Moon Agreement (which also applies to "other celestial bodies within the solar system, other than the earth")." Even though both the scope for space activities and the number of private participants have expanded significantly since these treaties were finalised, it has still been suggested that the nonappropriation principle constitutes "an absolute barrier in the realization of every kind of space activity., 4 ' The amount of capital expenditure required to research, scope, trial, and implement a new space activity is significant. To bring this activity to the point where it can represent a viable "stand alone" commercial venture takes many years and almost limitless funding. From the perspective of a private enterprise contemplating such an activity, it would quite obviously be an important element in its decision to devote resources to this activity that it is able to secure the highest degree of legal rights in order to protect its investment. Security of patent and other intellectual property rights, for example, are vital prerequisites for private enterprise research activity on the ISS, and these rights are specifically addressed by the ISS Agreement between the partners to the project and were applicable to the experiments undertaken by Mark Shuttleworth when he was onboard the ISS.46
Asteroid mining can happen with private sector innovation and is key to solve a laundry list of impacts--climate change, economic decline and asteroid collisions. Taylor 19 Chris Taylor journalist, 19 - ("How asteroid mining will save the Earth — and mint trillionaires," Mashable, 2019, accessed 12-13-2021, https://mashable.com/feature/asteroid-mining-space-economy)//ML How much, exactly? We’re only just beginning to guess. Asterank, a service that keeps track of some 6,000 asteroids in NASA’s database, prices out the estimated mineral content in each one in the current world market. More than 500 are listed as “$100 trillion.” The estimated profit on just the top 10 asteroids judged “most cost effective” — that is, the easiest to reach and to mine, subtracting rocket fuel and other operating costs, is around $1.5 trillion.¶ Is it ours for the taking? Well, here’s the thing — we’re taking it already, and have been doing so since we started mining metals thousands of years ago. Asteroid strikes are the only reason rare metals exist in the Earth’s crust; the native ones were all sucked into our planet’s merciless iron core millions of years ago. Why not go to the source?¶ As a side project, space mining can grab water from the rocks and comets — water which, with a little processing makes rocket fuel. Which in turn makes even more currently unimaginable space operations possible, including ones that could give the planet all the energy it needs to avert climate catastrophe. Cislunar space — the bit around us and the moon, the local neighborhood, basically — is about to get very interesting.¶ It’s hard, even for the most asteroid-minded visionaries, to truly believe the full scope of this future space economy right now. Just as hard as it would have been in 1945, when an engineer named Vannevar Bush first proposed a vast library of shared knowledge that people the world over would access via personal computers, to see that mushroom into a global network of streaming movies and grandmas posting photos and trolls and spies who move the needle on presidential elections. ¶ No technology’s pioneer can predict its second-order effects.¶ The space vision thing is particularly difficult in 2019. Not only do we have plenty of urgent problems with democracy and justice to keep us occupied, but the only two companies on the planet to have gone public with asteroid-mining business plans, startups that seemed to be going strong and had launched satellites already, were just bought by larger companies that are, shall we say, less comfortable executing on long-term visions.¶ Planetary Resources was founded in 2012 in a blaze of publicity. Its funding came from, among others, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot, and the country of Luxembourg. It had inked an orbital launch deal with Virgin Galactic. And it was sold last October to a blockchain software company. (To 21st century readers, this paragraph would look like I’m playing tech world mad libs.)¶ In January, the other company, Deep Space Industries, also partly funded by Luxembourg (way to get in the space race, Luxembourg!), was sold to Bradford Space, owned by a U.S. investment group called the American Industrial Acquisition Corporation. Maybe these new overlords plan on continuing their acquisitions' asteroid mining endeavors rather than stripping the companies for parts. Both companies have been notably silent on the subject. “The asteroid mining bubble has burst,” declared The Space Review, one of the few online publications to even pay attention.¶ That’s also to be expected. After all, anyone trying to build Google in 1945 would go bankrupt. Just as the internet needed a half-dozen major leaps forward in computing before it could even exist, space industry needs its launch infrastructure.¶ Currently, the world’s richest person and its most well-known entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, respectively, are working on the relatively cheap reusable rockets asteroid pioneers will need. (As I was writing this, Bezos announced in an email blast that one of his New Shepherd rockets had flown to space and back five times like it was nothing, delivering 38 payloads for various customers while remaining entirely intact.) ¶ Meanwhile, quietly, Earth’s scientists are laying the groundwork of research the space economy needs. Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has been in orbit around asteroid Ryugu for the last year and a half, learning everything it can. (Ryugu, worth $30 billion according to Asterank, is the website's #1 most cost-effective target.) The craft dropped tiny hopping robot rovers and a small bomb on its target; pictures of the small crater that resulted were released afterwards.¶ Officially, the mission is to help us figure out how the solar system formed. Unofficially, it will help us understand whether all those useful metals clump together at the heart of an asteroid, as some theorize. If so, it’s game on for asteroid prospectors. If not, we can still get at the metals with other techniques, such as optical mining (which basically involves sticking an asteroid in a bag and drilling with sunlight; sounds nuts to us, but NASA has proved it in the lab). It’ll just take more time.¶ Effectively, we’ve just made our first mark at the base of the first space mineshaft. And there’s more to come in 2020 when Hayabusa 2 returns to Earth bearing samples. If its buckets of sand contain a modicum of gold dust, tiny chunks of platinum or pebbles of compressed carbon — aka diamonds — then the Duchy of Luxembourg won’t be the only deep-pocketed investor to sit up and take notice.¶ The possibility of private missions to asteroids, with or without a human crew, is almost here. The next step in the process that takes us from here to where you are? Tell us an inspiring story about it, one that makes people believe, and start to imagine themselves mining in space. How would you explain the world-changing nature of the internet to 1945? How would you persuade them that there was gold to be mined in Vannevar Bush’s idea? You’d let the new economy and its benefits play out in the form of a novel.¶ As Hayabusa dropped a bomb on Ryugu, Daniel Suarez was making the exact same asteroid the target of his fiction. Suarez is a tech consultant and developer turned New York Times bestselling author. His novels thus far have been techno-thrillers: his debut, Daemon, a novel of Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare, AI run rampant, made more than a million dollars.¶ So it was a telling shift in cultural mood that Suarez’s latest thriller is also a very in-depth description of — and thinly-disguised advocacy for — asteroid mining. In Delta-v, published in April, a billionaire in the 2030s named Nathan Joyce recruits a team of adventurers who know nothing about space — a world-renowned cave-diver, a world-renowned mountaineer — for the first crewed asteroid mission.¶ Elon Musk fans might expect this to be Joyce’s tale, but he soon fades into the background. The asteroid-nauts are the true heroes of Delta-v. Not only are they offered a massive payday — $6 million each for four years’ work — they also have agency in key decisions in the distant enterprise. Suarez deliberately based them on present-day heroes. The mission is essential, Joyce declares, to save Earth from its major problems. First of all, the fictional billionaire wheels in a fictional Nobel economist to demonstrate the actual truth that the entire global economy is sitting on a mountain of debt. It has to keep growing or it will implode, so we might as well take the majority of the industrial growth off-world where it can’t do any more harm to the biosphere.¶ Secondly, there’s the climate change fix. Suarez sees asteroid mining as the only way we’re going to build solar power satellites. Which, as you probably know, is a form of uninterrupted solar power collection that is theoretically more effective, inch for inch, than any solar panels on Earth at high noon, but operating 24/7. (In space, basically, it’s always double high noon). ¶ The power collected is beamed back to large receptors on Earth with large, low-power microwaves, which researchers think will be harmless enough to let humans and animals pass through the beam. A space solar power array like the one China is said to be working on could reliably supply 2,000 gigawatts — or over 1,000 times more power than the largest solar farm currently in existence. ¶ “We're looking at a 20-year window to completely replace human civilization's power infrastructure,” Suarez told me, citing the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the coming catastrophe. Solar satellite technology “has existed since the 1970s. What we were missing is millions of tons of construction materials in orbit. Asteroid mining can place it there.”¶ The Earth-centric early 21st century can’t really wrap its brain around this, but the idea is not to bring all that building material and precious metals down into our gravity well. Far better to create a whole new commodities exchange in space. You mine the useful stuff of asteroids both near to Earth and far, thousands of them taking less energy to reach than the moon. That’s something else we’re still grasping, how relatively easy it is to ship stuff in zero-G environments. ¶ Robot craft can move 10-meter boulders like they’re nothing. You bring it all back to sell to companies that will refine and synthesize it in orbit for a myriad of purposes. Big pharma, to take one controversial industry, would benefit by taking its manufacturing off-world. The molecular structure of many chemicals grows better in microgravity.¶ The expectation is that a lot of these space businesses — and all the orbital infrastructure designed to support them — will be automated, controlled remotely via telepresence, and monitored by AI. But Suarez is adamant that thousands if not millions of actual human workers will thrive in the space economy, even as robots take their jobs in old industries back on Earth.¶ “Our initial expansion into space will most likely be unsettled and experimental. Human beings excel in such environments,” he says. “Humans can improvise and figure things out as we go. Robots must be purpose-built, and it's going to take time and experience for us to design and build them.”¶ Which is another way startups back on Earth will get rich in the new economy: designing and building those robots, the nearest thing to selling picks and shovels to prospectors in the space gold rush. Thousands of humans in space at any one time will also require the design and construction of stations that spin to create artificial gravity. Again, this isn’t a great stretch: Using centrifugal force to simulate gravity in space was first proposed by scientists in the 19th century. NASA has had workable designs for spinning cislunar habitats called O’Neill cylinders since the 1970s. We just haven’t funded them. ¶ But the trillionaires clearly will.¶ In short, Suarez has carefully laid out a vision of the orbital economy that offers something for everyone in our divided society. For Green New Deal Millennials, there’s the prospect of removing our reliance on fossil fuels at a stroke and literally lifting dirty industries off the face of the planet. For libertarians and other rugged individualists, there’s a whole new frontier to be developed, largely beyond the reach of government. ¶ For those who worry about asteroids that could wipe out civilization — though luckily, this isn't likely to happen any time soon — here is a way for humanity to get proficient in moving them out of the way, fast. Indeed, the National Space Society has offered a proposal to capture the asteroid Aphosis (which is set to miss Earth in the year 2029, but not by a very comfortable margin), keep it in orbit, and turn it into 150 small solar-power satellites, as a proof of concept. ¶ For the woke folks who care about the bloody history of diamond production, there’s the likelihood that space mining would wipe out Earth’s entire diamond industry. “They will be found in quantities unattainable on Earth,” claims Suarez, with good reason. We are starting to discover that there is more crystalized carbon in the cosmos than we ever suspected. Astronomers have identified one distant planet made entirely of diamond; there may be more, but they are, ironically, hard to see. ¶ We don’t have diamond planets in our solar system (and we can’t do interstellar missions), but we do have diamond-studded asteroids. Mine them for long enough and you will wear diamonds on the soles of your shoes.¶ For investors and entrepreneurs, there is the thrill of racing to be the first member of the four-comma club. (Neil deGrasse Tyson believes that the first trillionaire will be an asteroid mining mogul; Suarez isn’t sure whether they’ll be the first, but he suspects that asteroid mining “will mint more trillionaires than any industry in history.”) ¶ For the regular guy or gal with a 401K, there’ll be a fast-rising stock market — inflated not by financial shenanigans this time, but an actual increase in what the world counts as wealth.¶ For workers, there is the promise of sharing in the untold riches, both legally and otherwise. It would be hard to stop miners attaining mineral wealth beyond their paycheck, under the table, when your bosses are millions of miles away. Then there’s the likelihood of rapid advancement in this new economy, where the miners fast gain the knowledge necessary to become moguls.¶ “After several tours in space working for others, perhaps on six-month or year-long contracts, it's likely that some workers will partner to set up their own businesses there,” says Suarez. “Either serving the needs of increasing numbers of workers and businesses in space, marketing services to Earth, or launching asteroid mining startups themselves.” All in all, it’s starting to sound a damn sight more beneficial to the human race than the internet economy is. Not a moment too soon. I’ve written encouragingly about asteroid mining several times before, each time touting the massive potential wealth that seems likely to be made. And each time there’s been a sense of disquiet among my readers, a sense that we’re taking our rapacious capitalist ways and exploiting space.¶ Whereas the truth is, this is exactly the version of capitalism humanity has needed all along: the kind where there is no ecosystem to destroy, no marginalized group to make miserable. A safe, dead space where capitalism’s most enthusiastic pioneers can go nuts to their hearts’ content, so long as they clean up their space junk. ¶ (Space junk is a real problem in orbital space because it has thousands of vulnerable satellites clustered closely together around our little blue rock. The vast emptiness of cislunar space, not so much.)¶ And because they’re up there making all the wealth on their commodities market, we down here on Earth can certainly afford to focus less on growing our stock market. Maybe even, whisper it low, we can afford a fully functioning social safety net, plus free healthcare and free education for everyone on the planet.¶ It’s also clearly the area where we should have focused space exploration all along. If we settle on Mars, we may disturb as-yet-undiscovered native bacteria — and as the character Nathan Joyce shouts at a group of “Mars-obsessed” entrepreneurs in Delta-V, Mars is basically filled with toxic sand and is thus looking increasingly impossible to colonize. (Sorry, Mark Watney from The Martian, those potatoes would probably kill you.) Warming causes extinction. Bill McKibben 19, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities; Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. "This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out." Rolling Stone. 4-9-2019. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/ Oh, it could get very bad. In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.” Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that would “likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.” A year later, above the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that had been trapped in the permafrost. The exposed body released anthrax into nearby water and soil, infecting two thousand reindeer grazing nearby, and they in turn infected some humans; a twelve-year-old boy died. As it turns out, permafrost is a “very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark” — scientists have managed to revive an eight-million-year-old bacterium they found beneath the surface of a glacier. Researchers believe there are fragments of the Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and Alaska. Or consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust. “That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,” explained the director of University College London’s Hazard Centre. Such a landslide happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age retreated and a Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf gave way, “plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of titanic waves that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life from coastal Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high. There’s even this: if we keep raising carbon dioxide levels, we may not be able to think straight anymore. At a thousand parts per million (which is within the realm of possibility for 2100), human cognitive ability falls 21 percent. “The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy,” a Harvard study reported, which is too bad, as those skills are what we seem to need most. I could, in other words, do my best to scare you silly. I’m not opposed on principle — changing something as fundamental as the composition of the atmosphere, and hence the heat balance of the planet, is certain to trigger all manner of horror, and we shouldn’t shy away from it. The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all; the physical world is going from backdrop to foreground. (It’s like the contrast between politics in the old days, when you could forget about Washington for weeks at a time, and politics in the Trump era, when the president is always jumping out from behind a tree to yell at you.) But let’s try to occupy ourselves with the most likely scenarios, because they are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean. FOOD SUPPLY first. We’ve had an amazing run since the end of World War II, with crop yields growing fast enough to keep ahead of a fast-rising population. It’s come at great human cost — displaced peasant farmers fill many of the planet’s vast slums — but in terms of sheer volume, the Green Revolution’s fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery managed to push output sharply upward. That climb, however, now seems to be running into the brute facts of heat and drought. There are studies to demonstrate the dire effects of warming on coffee, cacao, chickpeas, and champagne, but it is cereals that we really need to worry about, given that they supply most of the planet’s calories: corn, wheat, and rice all evolved as crops in the climate of the last ten thousand years, and though plant breeders can change them, there are limits to those changes. You can move a person from Hanoi to Edmonton, and she might decide to open a Vietnamese restaurant. But if you move a rice plant, it will die. A 2017 study in Australia, home to some of the world’s highest-tech farming, found that “wheat productivity has flatlined as a direct result of climate change.” After tripling between 1900 and 1990, wheat yields had stagnated since, as temperatures increased a degree and rainfall declined by nearly a third. “The chance of that just being variable climate without the underlying factor of climate change is less than one in a hundred billion,” the researchers said, and it meant that despite all the expensive new technology farmers kept introducing, “they have succeeded only in standing still, not in moving forward.” Assuming the same trends continued, yields would actually start to decline inside of two decades, they reported. In June 2018, researchers found that a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature — which, recall, is what the Paris accords are now aiming for — could cut U.S. corn yields by 18 percent. A four-degree increase — which is where our current trajectory will take us — would cut the crop almost in half. The United States is the world’s largest producer of corn, which in turn is the planet’s most widely grown crop. Corn is vulnerable because even a week of high temperatures at the key moment can keep it from fertilizing. (“You only get one chance to pollinate a quadrillion kernels of corn,” the head of a commodity consulting firm explained.) But even the hardiest crops are susceptible. Sorghum, for instance, which is a staple for half a billion humans, is particularly hardy in dry conditions because it has big, fibrous roots that reach far down into the earth. Even it has limits, though, and they are being reached. Thirty years of data from the American Midwest show that heat waves affect the “vapor pressure deficit,” the difference between the water vapor in the sorghum leaf’s interior and that in the surrounding air. Hotter weather means the sorghum releases more moisture into the atmosphere. Warm the planet’s temperature by two degrees Celsius — which is, again, now the world’s goal — and sorghum yields drop 17 percent. Warm it five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit), and yields drop almost 60 percent. It’s hard to imagine a topic duller than sorghum yields. It’s the precise opposite of clickbait. But people have to eat; in the human game, the single most important question is probably “What’s for dinner?” And when the answer is “Not much,” things deteriorate fast. In 2010 a severe heat wave hit Russia, and it wrecked the grain harvest, which led the Kremlin to ban exports. The global price of wheat spiked, and that helped trigger the Arab Spring — Egypt at the time was the largest wheat importer on the planet. That experience set academics and insurers to work gaming out what the next food shock might look like. In 2017 one team imagined a vigorous El Niño, with the attendant floods and droughts — for a season, in their scenario, corn and soy yields declined by 10 percent, and wheat and rice by 7 percent. The result was chaos: “quadrupled commodity prices, civil unrest, significant negative humanitarian consequences . . . Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose ten percent.” At about the same time, a team of British researchers released a study demonstrating that even if you can grow plenty of food, the transportation system that distributes it runs through just fourteen major choke-points, and those are vulnerable to — you guessed it — massive disruption from climate change. For instance, U.S. rivers and canals carry a third of the world’s corn and soy, and they’ve been frequently shut down or crimped by flooding and drought in recent years. Brazil accounts for 17 percent of the world’s grain exports, but heavy rainfall in 2017 stranded three thousand trucks. “It’s the glide path to a perfect storm,” said one of the report’s authors. Five weeks after that, another report raised an even deeper question. What if you can figure out how to grow plenty of food, and you can figure out how to guarantee its distribution, but the food itself has lost much of its value? The paper, in the journal Environmental Research, said that rising carbon dioxide levels, by speeding plant growth, seem to have reduced the amount of protein in basic staple crops, a finding so startling that, for many years, agronomists had overlooked hints that it was happening. But it seems to be true: when researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by about the same amount. In the developing world, where people rely on plants for their protein, that means huge reductions in nutrition: India alone could lose 5 percent of the protein in its total diet, putting 53 million people at new risk for protein deficiency. The loss of zinc, essential for maternal and infant health, could endanger 138 million people around the world. In 2018, rice researchers found “significantly less protein” when they grew eighteen varieties of rice in high–carbon dioxide test plots. “The idea that food became less nutritious was a surprise,” said one researcher. “It’s not intuitive. But I think we should continue to expect surprises. We are completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system.” And not just ours. People don’t depend on goldenrod, for instance, but bees do. When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that dated back to 1842, they found that the protein content of its pollen had “declined by a third since the industrial revolution — and the change closely tracks with the rise in carbon dioxide.” Bees help crops, obviously, so that’s scary news. But in August 2018, a massive new study found something just as frightening: crop pests were thriving in the new heat. “It gets better and better for them,” said one University of Colorado researcher. Even if we hit the UN target of limiting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, pests should cut wheat yields by 46 percent, corn by 31 percent, and rice by 19 percent. “Warmer temperatures accelerate the metabolism of insect pests like aphids and corn borers at a predictable rate,” the researchers found. “That makes them hungrier, and warmer temperatures also speed up their reproduction.” Even fossilized plants from fifty million years ago make the point: “Plant damage from insects correlated with rising and falling temperatures, reaching a maximum during the warmest periods.” An asteroid collision would ensure extinction – would fundamentally alter the biosphere, don’t underestimate its risk. Hudson 19 Wesley Hudson ’19, news reporter for Express, “Asteroid alert: NASA warning as kilometre long space rock set to skim Earth at 25,000mph”, 8/28/19, Express, https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1170826/asteroid-news-NASA-latest-space-rock-asteroid-1998-HL1-earth-danger-apocalypse AN ASTEROID almost a kilometre wide is currently barreling through space at more than 25,000mph and is due to skim the earth towards the end of October. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) claim the space rock will shoot past the earth within a “close” proximity of the planet in the early hours of October 26. The asteroid, dubbed 1998 HL1, is a so-called Near-Earth Object (NEO) flying on a Close Approach Trajectory. NASA expects the 1998 HL1 to come flying by dangerously close around 1.21am BST (17.21pm PDT). The daunting moment will mark anther journey around the sun for the asteroid since it was discovered in 1998. The asteroid will be travelling at a staggering speed of over 25,000mph as it barrels past the Earth. The JPL predict the asteroid could be between 440m and 990m wide. At its largest an asteroid of this size is bigger than the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Even at it’s smallest, 1998 HL1 is still bigger than The Shard. Since it was discovered, 1998 HL1 has been seen up to 408 times. An NEO is an asteroid or comet which is on an orbital path intersecting that of the Earth's. This asteroid will miss the Earth by almost four million miles. If it were to strike the Earth, an asteroid of this size would cause catastrophic damage. The extinction of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Tertiary event 65million years ago is famously believed to have been caused by a massive asteroid impact. The Chicxulub Crater in Mexico is the most commonly accepted point of impact, with the responsible body thought to be around 10km in diameter. A car-sized asteroid is estimated to hit the Earth roughly once a year. The majority of asteroids on track for the planet are usually burnt up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has previously warned a potential asteroid collision is more likely then people realise. He said: "We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood, it's not about the movies. "This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life - and that is the planet Earth.” NASA is currently in the process of developing the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). DART will test if it is possible to redirect asteroids that are threatening to impact with Earth. SpaceX chief Elon Musk had previously tweeted fears of a deadly collision that Earth was not prepared for. Mr Musk tweeted: “A big rock will hit Earth eventually and we currently have no defence.”
Don’t write our impacts off as low probability – asteroid collision is complex and the existence of space keyholes exponentially increases the risk of collision. Vereš ’19 Peter Vereš ’19, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “Chapter 6 Vision of Perfect Observation Capabilities”, 2019, Planetary Defense, Space and Society, https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/634091/mod_resource/content/1/Planetary20Defence.pdf Often, uncertain orbits are a source of elevated impact risks of some NEOs with the Earth. The impact probability of an asteroid with Earth is a complex problem. First, the orbits of Earth and the asteroid should be close enough or even intersect; second, the Earth and asteroid should meet at the intersection at the same time. If these conditions are met, then one can assess how close the asteroid flies around the Earth at a given time, or whether it will hit the Earth. One must remember that each asteroid orbit comes with uncertainties and therefore, instead of a single accurate solution where the asteroid will hit the Earth or miss it, there is always a realm of possible solutions within the orbit uncertainties. The tangent plane to the asteroid’s trajectory at the time of impact, or close approach, is called a b-plane. At a given time of a predicted impact, all possible closest distances to the Earth of possible orbits create an area on the tangent plane. If the area contains the Earth, then the impact probability for that epoch is non-zero and in a simple approximation can be denoted as a ratio of an area of Earth cross section and the entire area with possible orbits going through the b-plane. It happens that a newly discovered NEO with a short arc that is coming very close to the Earth has a non-zero impact probability, because its orbit is highly uncertain and the area on the b-plane is very large. Typically, further observations improve the orbit, and the impact risk for a given epoch falls to zero. Some objects, however, have orbits with low orbital uncertainty, but still have non-zero impact probability, such as Bennu. The non-zero impact probability is computed for a given time in the future, but even if the orbit is known very well today, small perturbations from planets and non-gravitational forces increase the uncertainty for future impacts. That is why NASA’s Sentry is providing predictions only for the next 100 years. A close flyby of a spacecraft around an asteroid may improve the asteroid’s orbit significantly, however, it does not fully mitigate its impact in the future, due to the presence of keyholes (Chodas 1999)—small areas in space near Earth. Keyholes are specific for asteroids flying very close to the Earth and are rather small, from a few to hundreds of kilometers across. If the keyhole is hit during the NEO flyby, the orbit of the NEO becomes resonant with Earth and the NEO will return to Earth regularly, increasing its impact probability. Thus, in case of a very near Earth flyby, the orbit needs to be known with such precision (km) that keyhole avoidance is confirmed. NASA has even created the NEO Deflection App,1 where the public can try to change the orbit of a hypothesized NEO on direct impact trajectory. For Earth impact monitoring, the accuracy of orbits and orbital uncertainties is crucial and deserves more attention. The future of orbit determination and uncertainty mitigation will depend more and more on sophisticated software that will be able to handle orbital computation in detail; assess uncertainties and errors of measurements; coordinate a list of objects that are crucial for follow-up or orbit improvement, or even automatically point the telescopes in a network to observe those asteroids; measure their positions; and submit the data to MPC. This automated process is more or less implanted by several surveys (CSS, LCOGT) and agencies (ESA, MPC).
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Tournament: Harvard Westlake Debates | Round: 1 | Opponent: NW | Judge: Siegel, Zachary NC - Long TEXT: The Outer Space Treaty ought to be amended to establish an international legal trust system governing outer space. Finoa 21 Ivan Finoa (Department of Law University of Turin), “Building a New Legal Model for Settlements on Mars,” A. Froehlich (ed.), Assessing a Mars Agreement Including Human Settlements, Studies in Space Policy 30, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65013-1_7CT 7.5 A Proposal for an International Legal Trust System Since several legal and policy issues may arise from the actual legal framework, a new international legal regime for outer space shall: (a) Provide for property rights or a lease allocation system, both incentivising investments in the space sector. The system would be supervised and led by the United Nations (UN) through the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). (b) Establish the rule of law in outer space. A laissez faire system could turn into anarchy whereby countries and companies could race to grab as many resources as possible bringing considerable potential conflict. (c) Recognise outer space as common heritage of mankind, instead of res communis.24 (d) Provide a sustainable exploitation of celestial bodies, to avoid the uncontrolled production of space debris or to prevent the complete exhaustion of the celestial bodies’ masses or their natural orbits.25 The United Nations should manage the ordered and sustainable economic development in outer space for the present and future generations. (e) Prevent the militarisation of outer space and favours the international collaboration, which are the same aims of the Outer Space Treaty’ drafters. (f) Consider the weak points of the Moon Agreement which led to nations’ refusal to sign. Only a widely accepted agreement would have the power of law in the international context. The abovementioned requirements could be met by establishing an international Legal Trust System (ILTS). A trust is an arrangement that assigns assets to one or more trustees that will manage them in the interest of one or more beneficiaries. The latter may include the trustee or the settlor.26 Translated in the ILTS, mankind would assume the role of settlor and beneficiary of the outer space resources. The UNOOSA would act as main trustee of outer space resources and trading property rights and leases to companies and countries. The rights over the celestial bodies or over its resources would depend on the nature of the celestial body itself. For example, property rights are preferable to a lease over asteroids, as they could just disappear after the exploitation. Both leases and property rights can be provided over lands and mining sites on Mars. Leases or defeasible titles are preferable for some land mass on those celestial bodies which could hypothetically be used by humankind pending an Earth disaster. In the case of lucrative activities, such as mining, companies will choose whether to get the exclusive use over the resource through payment of the lease or through annual payment linked to net proceeds or to production charges. 7.6 The Functioning of the International Legal Trust System When a company is interested in leasing or buying an outer space resource, before starting any operations, it must send a plan of work to the United Nations. The plan of work shall include all the details of the activity that would be carried out; it shall be consistent with pre-established parameters of sustainability and shall not interfere with other space activities. If the UN approves the company plan of work, the country of the company assumes the role of co-trustee for the specific resource. Thus, as a cotrustee, countries must investigate whether all activities of their national companies are consistent with the plan of work authorised by the UN. These supervisory duties would be added to the responsibility of nations for all space objects that are launched within their territory.27 The UN, as main trustee, would oversee that countries are performing their duties. This model would be the ordinary one. There would be also an extraordinary model, in which the UN would be the only trustee. This model would be possible in two instances: when the country of the applicant for a private company is not technologically able to act as a trustee or when the applicant of the activity is a country itself. Furthermore, as stated previously, the beneficiaries of this trust are the countries of the world and their citizens; hence all mankind would take concrete profit from lease transactions and benefit sharing. The income from the sales, leases and benefit sharing can be distributed to mankind by financing international global goals, following a similar model of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015, which addressed poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and peace and justice. Finally, the International Legal Trust System would meet acceptance because every country would obtain benefit sharing to improve its living standard and space faring nations would rely on property rights.
The legal trust would incentivize investment in space while preventing conflict and ensuring sustainable development and the equitable distributions of resources. Finoa ’20 – Ivan Finoa Department of Law, University of Turin, “An international legal trust system to deal with the new space era,” 71st International Astronautical Congress (IAC) – The CyberSpace Edition, (12-14 October 2020). https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/66728932/_IAC_20_E7.VP.8.x58518_An_international_legal_trust_system_to_deal_with_the_new_space_era_BY_IVAN_FINO-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1642044926andSignature=asvt6StaK5n9UnpXuJIlo4ziI839WzFYjDZy37bm70ObGy3vFJyHwWNGxhn2beze4QzYDPPX0pVEXAwYvDaINVNxN01Ify8YwG5loNRddlat-grf3iawic7KvwqPowxFe2GuemVvbB-KW8ZVBxigwS-gelSKIVy4KYR9UgiDrM6e6deEBnUTcULSwmsH-JdHNg13ytZ3vNVMMlxZW2MPOCRuB2WlOHdCLoC86VqafSoMwuec-d~Aisbgyt5F2vO-GjvI60bR7h2MSp0iT6P7apIDUUpHUsDGbvcdxp22HSxXdlvr7lSqtLnL5rKxujGDYq~R9B~WuGiorVL2hn74UQ__andKey-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZACT Considering the worsening climate change, in the future outer space might be our last Noah’s Ark. Now, humans must look to space as an opportunity to support growing resource requirements. Asteroids are rich in metals, which could be transported back to Earth. Unfortunately, the existing international legal framework discourages investments in the space economy. Once an enterprise invests billions of dollars in discovering and developing a mining site, it cannot claim any ownership because of the non-appropriation principle stipulated in Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty (OST). Thus, other entities could legally access and exploit the same resource without any participation in the initial financial investment, increasing the risk of potential conflict. Bearing this in mind, the question arises, which legal regime could ensure effective allocation of resources, avoiding a chaotic space race to acquire valuable assets? The aim of this research is to argue that the first two articles of OST should be amended, to set up an international legal trust system which would guarantee different kinds of rights, dependently on the nature of the celestial body. E.g., property rights could be preferable to a lease over asteroids, as they could be exploited to their disappearance. This proposed system would be led by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), as the main trustee. The co-trustees would be the nations of the world. Prior to initiating any space activity, every entity would send a request to their national government. If all the legal parameters are respected, the nation would forward the operational request to the UNOOSA. In the case of acceptance, UNOOSA would record the permit on an international public registry. The country in which the company has been registered would investigate whether the activities of its national company are consistent with the permit. This would be the ordinary model. The extraordinary model would be when the applicant for the space activity is a state, then the trustee would be the UN. All lucrative activities would be subject to benefit-sharing. Finally, this research will demonstrate the valuable outcome of the International Legal Trust System and its advantages for all humankind. Private companies would rely on property rights, while the benefit-sharing could be used to finance the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2015, which address peace, climate change, inequalities and poverty.
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Tournament: Peninsula Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: YC | Judge: Dee, Blake Asteroid Mining DA New V The private sector is essential for asteroid mining – competition is key and government development is not effective, efficient, or cheap enough. Thiessen 21: Marc Thiessen, 6-1, 21, Washington Post, Opinion: SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/ It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism. Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. At a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel. If you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing — including docking — without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared “the Eagle has landed.” On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean — ready to be used again. That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 — a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion — making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years — far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle. The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies — including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so — for more than $1 billion less than its competitor. That spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk’s goal — the reason he founded SpaceX — is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints. Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth?
Space regulation scares investors away and spills over to other space activities. Freeland 05 Steven Freeland (BCom, LLB, LLM, University of New South Wales; Senior Lecturer in International Law, University of Western Sydney, Australia; and a member of the Paris-based International Institute of Space Law). “Up, Up and … Back: The Emergence of Space Tourism and Its Impact on the International Law of Outer Space.” Chicago Journal of International Law: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 4. 2005. JDN. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1269andcontext=cjil V. THE NEED FOR CELESTIAL PROPERTY RIGHTS? ¶ The fundamental principle of "non-appropriation" upon which the international law of outer space is based stems from the desire of the international community to ensure that outer space remains an area beyond the jurisdiction of any state(s). Similar ideals emerge from UNCLOS (in relation to the High Seas) as well as the Antarctic Treaty, 42 although in the case of the latter treaty, it was finalised after a number of claims of sovereignty had already been made by various States and therefore was structured to "postpone" rather than prejudice or renounce those previously asserted claims.43 In the case of outer space, its exploitation and use is expressed in Article I of the Outer Space Treaty to be "the province of all mankind," a term whose meaning is not entirely clear but has been interpreted by most commentators as evincing the desire to ensure that any State is free to engage in space activities without reference to any sovereign claims of other States. This freedom is reinforced by other parts of the same Article and is repeated in the Moon Agreement (which also applies to "other celestial bodies within the solar system, other than the earth")." Even though both the scope for space activities and the number of private participants have expanded significantly since these treaties were finalised, it has still been suggested that the nonappropriation principle constitutes "an absolute barrier in the realization of every kind of space activity., 4 ' The amount of capital expenditure required to research, scope, trial, and implement a new space activity is significant. To bring this activity to the point where it can represent a viable "stand alone" commercial venture takes many years and almost limitless funding. From the perspective of a private enterprise contemplating such an activity, it would quite obviously be an important element in its decision to devote resources to this activity that it is able to secure the highest degree of legal rights in order to protect its investment. Security of patent and other intellectual property rights, for example, are vital prerequisites for private enterprise research activity on the ISS, and these rights are specifically addressed by the ISS Agreement between the partners to the project and were applicable to the experiments undertaken by Mark Shuttleworth when he was onboard the ISS.46
Asteroid mining can happen with private sector innovation and is key to solve a laundry list of impacts--climate change, economic decline and asteroid collisions. Taylor 19 Chris Taylor journalist, 19 - ("How asteroid mining will save the Earth — and mint trillionaires," Mashable, 2019, accessed 12-13-2021, https://mashable.com/feature/asteroid-mining-space-economy)//ML How much, exactly? We’re only just beginning to guess. Asterank, a service that keeps track of some 6,000 asteroids in NASA’s database, prices out the estimated mineral content in each one in the current world market. More than 500 are listed as “$100 trillion.” The estimated profit on just the top 10 asteroids judged “most cost effective” — that is, the easiest to reach and to mine, subtracting rocket fuel and other operating costs, is around $1.5 trillion.¶ Is it ours for the taking? Well, here’s the thing — we’re taking it already, and have been doing so since we started mining metals thousands of years ago. Asteroid strikes are the only reason rare metals exist in the Earth’s crust; the native ones were all sucked into our planet’s merciless iron core millions of years ago. Why not go to the source?¶ As a side project, space mining can grab water from the rocks and comets — water which, with a little processing makes rocket fuel. Which in turn makes even more currently unimaginable space operations possible, including ones that could give the planet all the energy it needs to avert climate catastrophe. Cislunar space — the bit around us and the moon, the local neighborhood, basically — is about to get very interesting.¶ It’s hard, even for the most asteroid-minded visionaries, to truly believe the full scope of this future space economy right now. Just as hard as it would have been in 1945, when an engineer named Vannevar Bush first proposed a vast library of shared knowledge that people the world over would access via personal computers, to see that mushroom into a global network of streaming movies and grandmas posting photos and trolls and spies who move the needle on presidential elections. ¶ No technology’s pioneer can predict its second-order effects.¶ The space vision thing is particularly difficult in 2019. Not only do we have plenty of urgent problems with democracy and justice to keep us occupied, but the only two companies on the planet to have gone public with asteroid-mining business plans, startups that seemed to be going strong and had launched satellites already, were just bought by larger companies that are, shall we say, less comfortable executing on long-term visions.¶ Planetary Resources was founded in 2012 in a blaze of publicity. Its funding came from, among others, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot, and the country of Luxembourg. It had inked an orbital launch deal with Virgin Galactic. And it was sold last October to a blockchain software company. (To 21st century readers, this paragraph would look like I’m playing tech world mad libs.)¶ In January, the other company, Deep Space Industries, also partly funded by Luxembourg (way to get in the space race, Luxembourg!), was sold to Bradford Space, owned by a U.S. investment group called the American Industrial Acquisition Corporation. Maybe these new overlords plan on continuing their acquisitions' asteroid mining endeavors rather than stripping the companies for parts. Both companies have been notably silent on the subject. “The asteroid mining bubble has burst,” declared The Space Review, one of the few online publications to even pay attention.¶ That’s also to be expected. After all, anyone trying to build Google in 1945 would go bankrupt. Just as the internet needed a half-dozen major leaps forward in computing before it could even exist, space industry needs its launch infrastructure.¶ Currently, the world’s richest person and its most well-known entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, respectively, are working on the relatively cheap reusable rockets asteroid pioneers will need. (As I was writing this, Bezos announced in an email blast that one of his New Shepherd rockets had flown to space and back five times like it was nothing, delivering 38 payloads for various customers while remaining entirely intact.) ¶ Meanwhile, quietly, Earth’s scientists are laying the groundwork of research the space economy needs. Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has been in orbit around asteroid Ryugu for the last year and a half, learning everything it can. (Ryugu, worth $30 billion according to Asterank, is the website's #1 most cost-effective target.) The craft dropped tiny hopping robot rovers and a small bomb on its target; pictures of the small crater that resulted were released afterwards.¶ Officially, the mission is to help us figure out how the solar system formed. Unofficially, it will help us understand whether all those useful metals clump together at the heart of an asteroid, as some theorize. If so, it’s game on for asteroid prospectors. If not, we can still get at the metals with other techniques, such as optical mining (which basically involves sticking an asteroid in a bag and drilling with sunlight; sounds nuts to us, but NASA has proved it in the lab). It’ll just take more time.¶ Effectively, we’ve just made our first mark at the base of the first space mineshaft. And there’s more to come in 2020 when Hayabusa 2 returns to Earth bearing samples. If its buckets of sand contain a modicum of gold dust, tiny chunks of platinum or pebbles of compressed carbon — aka diamonds — then the Duchy of Luxembourg won’t be the only deep-pocketed investor to sit up and take notice.¶ The possibility of private missions to asteroids, with or without a human crew, is almost here. The next step in the process that takes us from here to where you are? Tell us an inspiring story about it, one that makes people believe, and start to imagine themselves mining in space. How would you explain the world-changing nature of the internet to 1945? How would you persuade them that there was gold to be mined in Vannevar Bush’s idea? You’d let the new economy and its benefits play out in the form of a novel.¶ As Hayabusa dropped a bomb on Ryugu, Daniel Suarez was making the exact same asteroid the target of his fiction. Suarez is a tech consultant and developer turned New York Times bestselling author. His novels thus far have been techno-thrillers: his debut, Daemon, a novel of Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare, AI run rampant, made more than a million dollars.¶ So it was a telling shift in cultural mood that Suarez’s latest thriller is also a very in-depth description of — and thinly-disguised advocacy for — asteroid mining. In Delta-v, published in April, a billionaire in the 2030s named Nathan Joyce recruits a team of adventurers who know nothing about space — a world-renowned cave-diver, a world-renowned mountaineer — for the first crewed asteroid mission.¶ Elon Musk fans might expect this to be Joyce’s tale, but he soon fades into the background. The asteroid-nauts are the true heroes of Delta-v. Not only are they offered a massive payday — $6 million each for four years’ work — they also have agency in key decisions in the distant enterprise. Suarez deliberately based them on present-day heroes. The mission is essential, Joyce declares, to save Earth from its major problems. First of all, the fictional billionaire wheels in a fictional Nobel economist to demonstrate the actual truth that the entire global economy is sitting on a mountain of debt. It has to keep growing or it will implode, so we might as well take the majority of the industrial growth off-world where it can’t do any more harm to the biosphere.¶ Secondly, there’s the climate change fix. Suarez sees asteroid mining as the only way we’re going to build solar power satellites. Which, as you probably know, is a form of uninterrupted solar power collection that is theoretically more effective, inch for inch, than any solar panels on Earth at high noon, but operating 24/7. (In space, basically, it’s always double high noon). ¶ The power collected is beamed back to large receptors on Earth with large, low-power microwaves, which researchers think will be harmless enough to let humans and animals pass through the beam. A space solar power array like the one China is said to be working on could reliably supply 2,000 gigawatts — or over 1,000 times more power than the largest solar farm currently in existence. ¶ “We're looking at a 20-year window to completely replace human civilization's power infrastructure,” Suarez told me, citing the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the coming catastrophe. Solar satellite technology “has existed since the 1970s. What we were missing is millions of tons of construction materials in orbit. Asteroid mining can place it there.”¶ The Earth-centric early 21st century can’t really wrap its brain around this, but the idea is not to bring all that building material and precious metals down into our gravity well. Far better to create a whole new commodities exchange in space. You mine the useful stuff of asteroids both near to Earth and far, thousands of them taking less energy to reach than the moon. That’s something else we’re still grasping, how relatively easy it is to ship stuff in zero-G environments. ¶ Robot craft can move 10-meter boulders like they’re nothing. You bring it all back to sell to companies that will refine and synthesize it in orbit for a myriad of purposes. Big pharma, to take one controversial industry, would benefit by taking its manufacturing off-world. The molecular structure of many chemicals grows better in microgravity.¶ The expectation is that a lot of these space businesses — and all the orbital infrastructure designed to support them — will be automated, controlled remotely via telepresence, and monitored by AI. But Suarez is adamant that thousands if not millions of actual human workers will thrive in the space economy, even as robots take their jobs in old industries back on Earth.¶ “Our initial expansion into space will most likely be unsettled and experimental. Human beings excel in such environments,” he says. “Humans can improvise and figure things out as we go. Robots must be purpose-built, and it's going to take time and experience for us to design and build them.”¶ Which is another way startups back on Earth will get rich in the new economy: designing and building those robots, the nearest thing to selling picks and shovels to prospectors in the space gold rush. Thousands of humans in space at any one time will also require the design and construction of stations that spin to create artificial gravity. Again, this isn’t a great stretch: Using centrifugal force to simulate gravity in space was first proposed by scientists in the 19th century. NASA has had workable designs for spinning cislunar habitats called O’Neill cylinders since the 1970s. We just haven’t funded them. ¶ But the trillionaires clearly will.¶ In short, Suarez has carefully laid out a vision of the orbital economy that offers something for everyone in our divided society. For Green New Deal Millennials, there’s the prospect of removing our reliance on fossil fuels at a stroke and literally lifting dirty industries off the face of the planet. For libertarians and other rugged individualists, there’s a whole new frontier to be developed, largely beyond the reach of government. ¶ For those who worry about asteroids that could wipe out civilization — though luckily, this isn't likely to happen any time soon — here is a way for humanity to get proficient in moving them out of the way, fast. Indeed, the National Space Society has offered a proposal to capture the asteroid Aphosis (which is set to miss Earth in the year 2029, but not by a very comfortable margin), keep it in orbit, and turn it into 150 small solar-power satellites, as a proof of concept. ¶ For the woke folks who care about the bloody history of diamond production, there’s the likelihood that space mining would wipe out Earth’s entire diamond industry. “They will be found in quantities unattainable on Earth,” claims Suarez, with good reason. We are starting to discover that there is more crystalized carbon in the cosmos than we ever suspected. Astronomers have identified one distant planet made entirely of diamond; there may be more, but they are, ironically, hard to see. ¶ We don’t have diamond planets in our solar system (and we can’t do interstellar missions), but we do have diamond-studded asteroids. Mine them for long enough and you will wear diamonds on the soles of your shoes.¶ For investors and entrepreneurs, there is the thrill of racing to be the first member of the four-comma club. (Neil deGrasse Tyson believes that the first trillionaire will be an asteroid mining mogul; Suarez isn’t sure whether they’ll be the first, but he suspects that asteroid mining “will mint more trillionaires than any industry in history.”) ¶ For the regular guy or gal with a 401K, there’ll be a fast-rising stock market — inflated not by financial shenanigans this time, but an actual increase in what the world counts as wealth.¶ For workers, there is the promise of sharing in the untold riches, both legally and otherwise. It would be hard to stop miners attaining mineral wealth beyond their paycheck, under the table, when your bosses are millions of miles away. Then there’s the likelihood of rapid advancement in this new economy, where the miners fast gain the knowledge necessary to become moguls.¶ “After several tours in space working for others, perhaps on six-month or year-long contracts, it's likely that some workers will partner to set up their own businesses there,” says Suarez. “Either serving the needs of increasing numbers of workers and businesses in space, marketing services to Earth, or launching asteroid mining startups themselves.” All in all, it’s starting to sound a damn sight more beneficial to the human race than the internet economy is. Not a moment too soon. I’ve written encouragingly about asteroid mining several times before, each time touting the massive potential wealth that seems likely to be made. And each time there’s been a sense of disquiet among my readers, a sense that we’re taking our rapacious capitalist ways and exploiting space.¶ Whereas the truth is, this is exactly the version of capitalism humanity has needed all along: the kind where there is no ecosystem to destroy, no marginalized group to make miserable. A safe, dead space where capitalism’s most enthusiastic pioneers can go nuts to their hearts’ content, so long as they clean up their space junk. ¶ (Space junk is a real problem in orbital space because it has thousands of vulnerable satellites clustered closely together around our little blue rock. The vast emptiness of cislunar space, not so much.)¶ And because they’re up there making all the wealth on their commodities market, we down here on Earth can certainly afford to focus less on growing our stock market. Maybe even, whisper it low, we can afford a fully functioning social safety net, plus free healthcare and free education for everyone on the planet.¶ It’s also clearly the area where we should have focused space exploration all along. If we settle on Mars, we may disturb as-yet-undiscovered native bacteria — and as the character Nathan Joyce shouts at a group of “Mars-obsessed” entrepreneurs in Delta-V, Mars is basically filled with toxic sand and is thus looking increasingly impossible to colonize. (Sorry, Mark Watney from The Martian, those potatoes would probably kill you.) Warming causes extinction. Bill McKibben 19, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities; Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. "This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out." Rolling Stone. 4-9-2019. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/ Oh, it could get very bad. In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.” Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that would “likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.” A year later, above the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that had been trapped in the permafrost. The exposed body released anthrax into nearby water and soil, infecting two thousand reindeer grazing nearby, and they in turn infected some humans; a twelve-year-old boy died. As it turns out, permafrost is a “very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark” — scientists have managed to revive an eight-million-year-old bacterium they found beneath the surface of a glacier. Researchers believe there are fragments of the Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and Alaska. Or consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust. “That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,” explained the director of University College London’s Hazard Centre. Such a landslide happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age retreated and a Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf gave way, “plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of titanic waves that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life from coastal Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high. There’s even this: if we keep raising carbon dioxide levels, we may not be able to think straight anymore. At a thousand parts per million (which is within the realm of possibility for 2100), human cognitive ability falls 21 percent. “The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy,” a Harvard study reported, which is too bad, as those skills are what we seem to need most. I could, in other words, do my best to scare you silly. I’m not opposed on principle — changing something as fundamental as the composition of the atmosphere, and hence the heat balance of the planet, is certain to trigger all manner of horror, and we shouldn’t shy away from it. The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all; the physical world is going from backdrop to foreground. (It’s like the contrast between politics in the old days, when you could forget about Washington for weeks at a time, and politics in the Trump era, when the president is always jumping out from behind a tree to yell at you.) But let’s try to occupy ourselves with the most likely scenarios, because they are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean. FOOD SUPPLY first. We’ve had an amazing run since the end of World War II, with crop yields growing fast enough to keep ahead of a fast-rising population. It’s come at great human cost — displaced peasant farmers fill many of the planet’s vast slums — but in terms of sheer volume, the Green Revolution’s fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery managed to push output sharply upward. That climb, however, now seems to be running into the brute facts of heat and drought. There are studies to demonstrate the dire effects of warming on coffee, cacao, chickpeas, and champagne, but it is cereals that we really need to worry about, given that they supply most of the planet’s calories: corn, wheat, and rice all evolved as crops in the climate of the last ten thousand years, and though plant breeders can change them, there are limits to those changes. You can move a person from Hanoi to Edmonton, and she might decide to open a Vietnamese restaurant. But if you move a rice plant, it will die. A 2017 study in Australia, home to some of the world’s highest-tech farming, found that “wheat productivity has flatlined as a direct result of climate change.” After tripling between 1900 and 1990, wheat yields had stagnated since, as temperatures increased a degree and rainfall declined by nearly a third. “The chance of that just being variable climate without the underlying factor of climate change is less than one in a hundred billion,” the researchers said, and it meant that despite all the expensive new technology farmers kept introducing, “they have succeeded only in standing still, not in moving forward.” Assuming the same trends continued, yields would actually start to decline inside of two decades, they reported. In June 2018, researchers found that a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature — which, recall, is what the Paris accords are now aiming for — could cut U.S. corn yields by 18 percent. A four-degree increase — which is where our current trajectory will take us — would cut the crop almost in half. The United States is the world’s largest producer of corn, which in turn is the planet’s most widely grown crop. Corn is vulnerable because even a week of high temperatures at the key moment can keep it from fertilizing. (“You only get one chance to pollinate a quadrillion kernels of corn,” the head of a commodity consulting firm explained.) But even the hardiest crops are susceptible. Sorghum, for instance, which is a staple for half a billion humans, is particularly hardy in dry conditions because it has big, fibrous roots that reach far down into the earth. Even it has limits, though, and they are being reached. Thirty years of data from the American Midwest show that heat waves affect the “vapor pressure deficit,” the difference between the water vapor in the sorghum leaf’s interior and that in the surrounding air. Hotter weather means the sorghum releases more moisture into the atmosphere. Warm the planet’s temperature by two degrees Celsius — which is, again, now the world’s goal — and sorghum yields drop 17 percent. Warm it five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit), and yields drop almost 60 percent. It’s hard to imagine a topic duller than sorghum yields. It’s the precise opposite of clickbait. But people have to eat; in the human game, the single most important question is probably “What’s for dinner?” And when the answer is “Not much,” things deteriorate fast. In 2010 a severe heat wave hit Russia, and it wrecked the grain harvest, which led the Kremlin to ban exports. The global price of wheat spiked, and that helped trigger the Arab Spring — Egypt at the time was the largest wheat importer on the planet. That experience set academics and insurers to work gaming out what the next food shock might look like. In 2017 one team imagined a vigorous El Niño, with the attendant floods and droughts — for a season, in their scenario, corn and soy yields declined by 10 percent, and wheat and rice by 7 percent. The result was chaos: “quadrupled commodity prices, civil unrest, significant negative humanitarian consequences . . . Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose ten percent.” At about the same time, a team of British researchers released a study demonstrating that even if you can grow plenty of food, the transportation system that distributes it runs through just fourteen major choke-points, and those are vulnerable to — you guessed it — massive disruption from climate change. For instance, U.S. rivers and canals carry a third of the world’s corn and soy, and they’ve been frequently shut down or crimped by flooding and drought in recent years. Brazil accounts for 17 percent of the world’s grain exports, but heavy rainfall in 2017 stranded three thousand trucks. “It’s the glide path to a perfect storm,” said one of the report’s authors. Five weeks after that, another report raised an even deeper question. What if you can figure out how to grow plenty of food, and you can figure out how to guarantee its distribution, but the food itself has lost much of its value? The paper, in the journal Environmental Research, said that rising carbon dioxide levels, by speeding plant growth, seem to have reduced the amount of protein in basic staple crops, a finding so startling that, for many years, agronomists had overlooked hints that it was happening. But it seems to be true: when researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by about the same amount. In the developing world, where people rely on plants for their protein, that means huge reductions in nutrition: India alone could lose 5 percent of the protein in its total diet, putting 53 million people at new risk for protein deficiency. The loss of zinc, essential for maternal and infant health, could endanger 138 million people around the world. In 2018, rice researchers found “significantly less protein” when they grew eighteen varieties of rice in high–carbon dioxide test plots. “The idea that food became less nutritious was a surprise,” said one researcher. “It’s not intuitive. But I think we should continue to expect surprises. We are completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system.” And not just ours. People don’t depend on goldenrod, for instance, but bees do. When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that dated back to 1842, they found that the protein content of its pollen had “declined by a third since the industrial revolution — and the change closely tracks with the rise in carbon dioxide.” Bees help crops, obviously, so that’s scary news. But in August 2018, a massive new study found something just as frightening: crop pests were thriving in the new heat. “It gets better and better for them,” said one University of Colorado researcher. Even if we hit the UN target of limiting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, pests should cut wheat yields by 46 percent, corn by 31 percent, and rice by 19 percent. “Warmer temperatures accelerate the metabolism of insect pests like aphids and corn borers at a predictable rate,” the researchers found. “That makes them hungrier, and warmer temperatures also speed up their reproduction.” Even fossilized plants from fifty million years ago make the point: “Plant damage from insects correlated with rising and falling temperatures, reaching a maximum during the warmest periods.” An asteroid collision would ensure extinction – would fundamentally alter the biosphere, don’t underestimate its risk. Hudson 19 Wesley Hudson ’19, news reporter for Express, “Asteroid alert: NASA warning as kilometre long space rock set to skim Earth at 25,000mph”, 8/28/19, Express, https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1170826/asteroid-news-NASA-latest-space-rock-asteroid-1998-HL1-earth-danger-apocalypse AN ASTEROID almost a kilometre wide is currently barreling through space at more than 25,000mph and is due to skim the earth towards the end of October. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) claim the space rock will shoot past the earth within a “close” proximity of the planet in the early hours of October 26. The asteroid, dubbed 1998 HL1, is a so-called Near-Earth Object (NEO) flying on a Close Approach Trajectory. NASA expects the 1998 HL1 to come flying by dangerously close around 1.21am BST (17.21pm PDT). The daunting moment will mark anther journey around the sun for the asteroid since it was discovered in 1998. The asteroid will be travelling at a staggering speed of over 25,000mph as it barrels past the Earth. The JPL predict the asteroid could be between 440m and 990m wide. At its largest an asteroid of this size is bigger than the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Even at it’s smallest, 1998 HL1 is still bigger than The Shard. Since it was discovered, 1998 HL1 has been seen up to 408 times. An NEO is an asteroid or comet which is on an orbital path intersecting that of the Earth's. This asteroid will miss the Earth by almost four million miles. If it were to strike the Earth, an asteroid of this size would cause catastrophic damage. The extinction of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Tertiary event 65million years ago is famously believed to have been caused by a massive asteroid impact. The Chicxulub Crater in Mexico is the most commonly accepted point of impact, with the responsible body thought to be around 10km in diameter. A car-sized asteroid is estimated to hit the Earth roughly once a year. The majority of asteroids on track for the planet are usually burnt up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has previously warned a potential asteroid collision is more likely then people realise. He said: "We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood, it's not about the movies. "This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life - and that is the planet Earth.” NASA is currently in the process of developing the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). DART will test if it is possible to redirect asteroids that are threatening to impact with Earth. SpaceX chief Elon Musk had previously tweeted fears of a deadly collision that Earth was not prepared for. Mr Musk tweeted: “A big rock will hit Earth eventually and we currently have no defence.”
Don’t write our impacts off as low probability – asteroid collision is complex and the existence of space keyholes exponentially increases the risk of collision. Vereš ’19 Peter Vereš ’19, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “Chapter 6 Vision of Perfect Observation Capabilities”, 2019, Planetary Defense, Space and Society, https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/634091/mod_resource/content/1/Planetary20Defence.pdf Often, uncertain orbits are a source of elevated impact risks of some NEOs with the Earth. The impact probability of an asteroid with Earth is a complex problem. First, the orbits of Earth and the asteroid should be close enough or even intersect; second, the Earth and asteroid should meet at the intersection at the same time. If these conditions are met, then one can assess how close the asteroid flies around the Earth at a given time, or whether it will hit the Earth. One must remember that each asteroid orbit comes with uncertainties and therefore, instead of a single accurate solution where the asteroid will hit the Earth or miss it, there is always a realm of possible solutions within the orbit uncertainties. The tangent plane to the asteroid’s trajectory at the time of impact, or close approach, is called a b-plane. At a given time of a predicted impact, all possible closest distances to the Earth of possible orbits create an area on the tangent plane. If the area contains the Earth, then the impact probability for that epoch is non-zero and in a simple approximation can be denoted as a ratio of an area of Earth cross section and the entire area with possible orbits going through the b-plane. It happens that a newly discovered NEO with a short arc that is coming very close to the Earth has a non-zero impact probability, because its orbit is highly uncertain and the area on the b-plane is very large. Typically, further observations improve the orbit, and the impact risk for a given epoch falls to zero. Some objects, however, have orbits with low orbital uncertainty, but still have non-zero impact probability, such as Bennu. The non-zero impact probability is computed for a given time in the future, but even if the orbit is known very well today, small perturbations from planets and non-gravitational forces increase the uncertainty for future impacts. That is why NASA’s Sentry is providing predictions only for the next 100 years. A close flyby of a spacecraft around an asteroid may improve the asteroid’s orbit significantly, however, it does not fully mitigate its impact in the future, due to the presence of keyholes (Chodas 1999)—small areas in space near Earth. Keyholes are specific for asteroids flying very close to the Earth and are rather small, from a few to hundreds of kilometers across. If the keyhole is hit during the NEO flyby, the orbit of the NEO becomes resonant with Earth and the NEO will return to Earth regularly, increasing its impact probability. Thus, in case of a very near Earth flyby, the orbit needs to be known with such precision (km) that keyhole avoidance is confirmed. NASA has even created the NEO Deflection App,1 where the public can try to change the orbit of a hypothesized NEO on direct impact trajectory. For Earth impact monitoring, the accuracy of orbits and orbital uncertainties is crucial and deserves more attention. The future of orbit determination and uncertainty mitigation will depend more and more on sophisticated software that will be able to handle orbital computation in detail; assess uncertainties and errors of measurements; coordinate a list of objects that are crucial for follow-up or orbit improvement, or even automatically point the telescopes in a network to observe those asteroids; measure their positions; and submit the data to MPC. This automated process is more or less implanted by several surveys (CSS, LCOGT) and agencies (ESA, MPC).
Considering the worsening climate change, in the future outer space might be our last Noah’s Ark. Now, humans must look to space as an opportunity to support growing resource requirements. Asteroids are rich in metals, which could be transported back to Earth. Unfortunately, the existing international legal framework discourages investments in the space economy. Once an enterprise invests billions of dollars in discovering and developing a mining site, it cannot claim any ownership because of the non-appropriation principle stipulated in Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty (OST). Thus, other entities could legally access and exploit the same resource without any participation in the initial financial investment, increasing the risk of potential conflict. Bearing this in mind, the question arises, which legal regime could ensure effective allocation of resources, avoiding a chaotic space race to acquire valuable assets? The aim of this research is to argue that the first two articles of OST should be amended, to set up an international legal trust system which would guarantee different kinds of rights, dependently on the nature of the celestial body. E.g., property rights could be preferable to a lease over asteroids, as they could be exploited to their disappearance. This proposed system would be led by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), as the main trustee. The co-trustees would be the nations of the world. Prior to initiating any space activity, every entity would send a request to their national government. If all the legal parameters are respected, the nation would forward the operational request to the UNOOSA. In the case of acceptance, UNOOSA would record the permit on an international public registry. The country in which the company has been registered would investigate whether the activities of its national company are consistent with the permit. This would be the ordinary model. The extraordinary model would be when the applicant for the space activity is a state, then the trustee would be the UN. All lucrative activities would be subject to benefit-sharing. Finally, this research will demonstrate the valuable outcome of the International Legal Trust System and its advantages for all humankind. Private companies would rely on property rights, while the benefit-sharing could be used to finance the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2015, which address peace, climate change, inequalities and poverty.
NC - Long TEXT: The Outer Space Treaty ought to be amended to establish an international legal trust system governing outer space. Finoa 21 Ivan Finoa (Department of Law University of Turin), “Building a New Legal Model for Settlements on Mars,” A. Froehlich (ed.), Assessing a Mars Agreement Including Human Settlements, Studies in Space Policy 30, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65013-1_7CT 7.5 A Proposal for an International Legal Trust System Since several legal and policy issues may arise from the actual legal framework, a new international legal regime for outer space shall: (a) Provide for property rights or a lease allocation system, both incentivising investments in the space sector. The system would be supervised and led by the United Nations (UN) through the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). (b) Establish the rule of law in outer space. A laissez faire system could turn into anarchy whereby countries and companies could race to grab as many resources as possible bringing considerable potential conflict. (c) Recognise outer space as common heritage of mankind, instead of res communis.24 (d) Provide a sustainable exploitation of celestial bodies, to avoid the uncontrolled production of space debris or to prevent the complete exhaustion of the celestial bodies’ masses or their natural orbits.25 The United Nations should manage the ordered and sustainable economic development in outer space for the present and future generations. (e) Prevent the militarisation of outer space and favours the international collaboration, which are the same aims of the Outer Space Treaty’ drafters. (f) Consider the weak points of the Moon Agreement which led to nations’ refusal to sign. Only a widely accepted agreement would have the power of law in the international context. The abovementioned requirements could be met by establishing an international Legal Trust System (ILTS). A trust is an arrangement that assigns assets to one or more trustees that will manage them in the interest of one or more beneficiaries. The latter may include the trustee or the settlor.26 Translated in the ILTS, mankind would assume the role of settlor and beneficiary of the outer space resources. The UNOOSA would act as main trustee of outer space resources and trading property rights and leases to companies and countries. The rights over the celestial bodies or over its resources would depend on the nature of the celestial body itself. For example, property rights are preferable to a lease over asteroids, as they could just disappear after the exploitation. Both leases and property rights can be provided over lands and mining sites on Mars. Leases or defeasible titles are preferable for some land mass on those celestial bodies which could hypothetically be used by humankind pending an Earth disaster. In the case of lucrative activities, such as mining, companies will choose whether to get the exclusive use over the resource through payment of the lease or through annual payment linked to net proceeds or to production charges. 7.6 The Functioning of the International Legal Trust System When a company is interested in leasing or buying an outer space resource, before starting any operations, it must send a plan of work to the United Nations. The plan of work shall include all the details of the activity that would be carried out; it shall be consistent with pre-established parameters of sustainability and shall not interfere with other space activities. If the UN approves the company plan of work, the country of the company assumes the role of co-trustee for the specific resource. Thus, as a cotrustee, countries must investigate whether all activities of their national companies are consistent with the plan of work authorised by the UN. These supervisory duties would be added to the responsibility of nations for all space objects that are launched within their territory.27 The UN, as main trustee, would oversee that countries are performing their duties. This model would be the ordinary one. There would be also an extraordinary model, in which the UN would be the only trustee. This model would be possible in two instances: when the country of the applicant for a private company is not technologically able to act as a trustee or when the applicant of the activity is a country itself. Furthermore, as stated previously, the beneficiaries of this trust are the countries of the world and their citizens; hence all mankind would take concrete profit from lease transactions and benefit sharing. The income from the sales, leases and benefit sharing can be distributed to mankind by financing international global goals, following a similar model of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015, which addressed poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and peace and justice. Finally, the International Legal Trust System would meet acceptance because every country would obtain benefit sharing to improve its living standard and space faring nations would rely on property rights.
The legal trust would incentivize investment in space while preventing conflict and ensuring sustainable development and the equitable distributions of resources. Finoa ’20 – Ivan Finoa Department of Law, University of Turin, “An international legal trust system to deal with the new space era,” 71st International Astronautical Congress (IAC) – The CyberSpace Edition, (12-14 October 2020). https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/66728932/_IAC_20_E7.VP.8.x58518_An_international_legal_trust_system_to_deal_with_the_new_space_era_BY_IVAN_FINO-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1642044926andSignature=asvt6StaK5n9UnpXuJIlo4ziI839WzFYjDZy37bm70ObGy3vFJyHwWNGxhn2beze4QzYDPPX0pVEXAwYvDaINVNxN01Ify8YwG5loNRddlat-grf3iawic7KvwqPowxFe2GuemVvbB-KW8ZVBxigwS-gelSKIVy4KYR9UgiDrM6e6deEBnUTcULSwmsH-JdHNg13ytZ3vNVMMlxZW2MPOCRuB2WlOHdCLoC86VqafSoMwuec-d~Aisbgyt5F2vO-GjvI60bR7h2MSp0iT6P7apIDUUpHUsDGbvcdxp22HSxXdlvr7lSqtLnL5rKxujGDYq~R9B~WuGiorVL2hn74UQ__andKey-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZACT Considering the worsening climate change, in the future outer space might be our last Noah’s Ark. Now, humans must look to space as an opportunity to support growing resource requirements. Asteroids are rich in metals, which could be transported back to Earth. Unfortunately, the existing international legal framework discourages investments in the space economy. Once an enterprise invests billions of dollars in discovering and developing a mining site, it cannot claim any ownership because of the non-appropriation principle stipulated in Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty (OST). Thus, other entities could legally access and exploit the same resource without any participation in the initial financial investment, increasing the risk of potential conflict. Bearing this in mind, the question arises, which legal regime could ensure effective allocation of resources, avoiding a chaotic space race to acquire valuable assets? The aim of this research is to argue that the first two articles of OST should be amended, to set up an international legal trust system which would guarantee different kinds of rights, dependently on the nature of the celestial body. E.g., property rights could be preferable to a lease over asteroids, as they could be exploited to their disappearance. This proposed system would be led by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), as the main trustee. The co-trustees would be the nations of the world. Prior to initiating any space activity, every entity would send a request to their national government. If all the legal parameters are respected, the nation would forward the operational request to the UNOOSA. In the case of acceptance, UNOOSA would record the permit on an international public registry. The country in which the company has been registered would investigate whether the activities of its national company are consistent with the permit. This would be the ordinary model. The extraordinary model would be when the applicant for the space activity is a state, then the trustee would be the UN. All lucrative activities would be subject to benefit-sharing. Finally, this research will demonstrate the valuable outcome of the International Legal Trust System and its advantages for all humankind. Private companies would rely on property rights, while the benefit-sharing could be used to finance the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2015, which address peace, climate change, inequalities and poverty.
Case answers Collisions Probability – 0.1 chance of a collision. Alexander William Salter, Economics Professor at Texas Tech, ’16, “SPACE DEBRIS: A LAW AND ECONOMICS ANALYSIS OF THE ORBITAL COMMONS” 19 STAN. TECH. L. REV. 221 *numbers replaced with English words The probability of a collision is currently low. Bradley and Wein estimate that the maximum probability in LEO of a collision over the lifetime of a spacecraft remains below one in one thousand, conditional on continued compliance with NASA’s deorbiting guidelines.3 However, the possibility of a future “snowballing” effect, whereby debris collides with other objects, further congesting orbit space, remains a significant concern.4 Levin and Carroll estimate the average immediate destruction of wealth created by a collision to be approximately $30 million, with an additional $200 million in damages to all currently existing space assets from the debris created by the initial collision.5 The expected value of destroyed wealth because of collisions, currently small because of the low probability of a collision, can quickly become significant if future collisions result in runaway debris growth. Space debris is hype---there are thousands of satellites and only 15 debris collisions ever Mark Albrecht 16, Chairman of the board of USSpace LLC and fmr. head of the National Space Council, “Congested space is a serious problem solved by hard work, not hysteria, 5/9/16, https://spacenews.com/op-ed-congested-space-is-a-serious-problem-solved-by-hard-work-not-hysteria/ There are over a half million pieces of human-made material in orbit around our planet. Some are the size of school buses, some the size of BB gun pellets. They all had a function at some point, but now most are simply space debris littered from 100 to 22,000 miles above the Earth. Yet, all behave perfectly according to the laws of physics. Many in the space community have called the collision hazard caused by space debris a crisis. Popular culture has embraced the risks of collisions in space in films like Gravity. Some participants have dramatized the issue by producing graphics of Earth and its satellites, which make our planet look like a fuzzy marble, almost obscured by a dense cloud of white pellets meant to conceptualize space congestion. Unfortunately, for the sake of a good visual, satellites are depicted as if they were hundreds of miles wide, like the state of Pennsylvania (for the record, there are no space objects the size of Pennsylvania in orbit). Unfortunately, this is the rule, not the exception, and almost all of these articles, movies, graphics, and simulations are exaggerated and misleading. Space debris and collision risk is real, but it certainly is not a crisis. So what are the facts? On the positive side, space is empty and it is vast. At the altitude of the International Space Station, one half a degree of Earth longitude is almost 40 miles long. That same one half a degree at geostationary orbit, some 22,000 miles up is over 230 miles long. Generally, we don’t intentionally put satellites closer together than one-half degree. That means at geostationary orbit, they are no closer than 11 times as far as the eye can see on flat ground or on the sea: That’s the horizon over the horizon 10 times over. In addition, other than minute forces like solar winds and sparse bits of atmosphere that still exist 500 miles up, nothing gets in the way of orbiting objects and they behave quite predictably. The location of the smallest spacecraft can be predicated within a 1,000 feet, 24 hours in advance. Since we first started placing objects into space there have been 11 known low Earth orbit collisions, and three known collisions at geostationary orbit. Think of it: 135 space shuttle flights, all of the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury flights, hundreds of telecommunications satellites, 1,300 functioning satellites on orbit today, half a million total objects in space larger than a marble, and fewer than 15 known collisions. Why do people worry?
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ND- Unions Neg
Tournament: Novice Circuit Tournament | Round: 2 | Opponent: Gustavson, Sam | Judge: LA Strikes hurt critical core industries that is necessary for economic growth John McElroy, 2019, Strikes Hurt Everybody.Wards Auto Industry News, October 25, https://www.wardsauto.com/ideaxchange/strikes-hurt-everybody This creates a poisonous relationship between the company and its workforce. Many GM hourly workers don’t identify as GM employees. They identify as UAW members. And they see the union as the source of their jobs, not the company. It’s an unhealthy dynamic that puts GM at a disadvantage to non-union automakers in the U.S. like Honda and Toyota, where workers take pride in the company they work for and the products they make. Attacking the company in the media also drives away customers. Who wants to buy a shiny new car from a company that’s accused of underpaying its workers and treating them unfairly? Data from the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor, MI, show that GM loses market share during strikes and never gets it back. GM lost two percentage points during the 1998 strike, which in today’s market would represent a loss of 340,000 sales. Because GM reports sales on a quarterly basis we’ll only find out at the end of December if it lost market share from this strike. UAW members say one of their greatest concerns is job security. But causing a company to lose market share is a sure-fire path to more plant closings and layoffs. Even so, unions are incredibly important for boosting wages and benefits for working-class people. GM’s UAW-represented workers earn considerably more than their non-union counterparts, about $26,000 more per worker, per year, in total compensation. Without a union they never would have achieved that. Strikes are a powerful weapon for unions. They usually are the only way they can get management to accede to their demands. If not for the power of collective bargaining and the threat of a strike, management would largely ignore union demands. If you took away that threat, management would pay its workers peanuts. Just ask the Mexican line workers who are paid $1.50 an hour to make $50,000 BMWs. But strikes don’t just hurt the people walking the picket lines or the company they’re striking against. They hurt suppliers, car dealers and the communities located near the plants. The Anderson Economic Group estimates that 75,000 workers at supplier companies were temporarily laid off because of the GM strike. Unlike UAW picketers, those supplier workers won’t get any strike pay or an $11,000 contract signing bonus. No, most of them lost close to a month’s worth of wages, which must be financially devastating for them. GM’s suppliers also lost a lot of money. So now they’re cutting budgets and delaying capital investments to make up for the lost revenue, which is a further drag on the economy. According to CAR, the communities and states where GM’s plants are located collectively lost a couple of hundred million dollars in payroll and tax revenue. Some economists warn that if the strike were prolonged it could knock the state of Michigan – home to GM and the UAW – into a recession. That prompted the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, to call GM CEO Mary Barra and UAW leaders and urge them to settle as fast as possible. So, while the UAW managed to get a nice raise for its members, the strike left a path of destruction in its wake. That’s not fair to the innocent bystanders who will never regain what they lost. John McElroyI’m not sure how this will ever be resolved. I understand the need for collective bargaining and the threat of a strike. But there’s got to be a better way to get workers a raise without torching the countryside. Strikes create a stigmatization effect over labor and consumption that devastates the economy Tenza 20, Mlungisi. "The effects of violent strikes on the economy of a developing country: a case of South Africa." Obiter 41.3 (2020): 519-537. (Senior Lecturer, University of KwaZulu-Natal) When South Africa obtained democracy in 1994, there was a dream of a better country with a new vision for industrial relations.5 However, the number of violent strikes that have bedevilled this country in recent years seems to have shattered-down the aspirations of a better South Africa. South Africa recorded 114 strikes in 2013 and 88 strikes in 2014, which cost the country about R6.1 billion according to the Department of Labour.6 The impact of these strikes has been hugely felt by the mining sector, particularly the platinum industry. The biggest strike took place in the platinum sector where about 70 000 mineworkers’ downed tools for better wages. Three major platinum producers (Impala, Anglo American and Lonmin Platinum Mines) were affected. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 25 June 2014. Business Day reported that “the five-month-long strike in the platinum sector pushed the economy to the brink of recession”. 7 This strike was closely followed by a four-week strike in the metal and engineering sector. All these strikes (and those not mentioned here) were characterised with violence accompanied by damage to property, intimidation, assault and sometimes the killing of people. Statistics from the metal and engineering sector showed that about 246 cases of intimidation were reported, 50 violent incidents occurred, and 85 cases of vandalism were recorded.8 Large-scale unemployment, soaring poverty levels and the dramatic income inequality that characterise the South African labour market provide a broad explanation for strike violence.9 While participating in a strike, workers’ stress levels leave them feeling frustrated at their seeming powerlessness, which in turn provokes further violent behaviour.10 These strikes are not only violent but take long to resolve. Generally, a lengthy strike has a negative effect on employment, reduces business confidence and increases the risk of economic stagflation. In addition, such strikes have a major setback on the growth of the economy and investment opportunities. It is common knowledge that consumer spending is directly linked to economic growth. At the same time, if the economy is not showing signs of growth, employment opportunities are shed, and poverty becomes the end result. The economy of South Africa is in need of rapid growth to enable it to deal with the high levels of unemployment and resultant poverty. One of the measures that may boost the country’s economic growth is by attracting potential investors to invest in the country. However, this might be difficult as investors would want to invest in a country where there is a likelihood of getting returns for their investments. The wish of getting returns for investment may not materialise if the labour environment is not fertile for such investments as a result of, for example, unstable labour relations. Therefore, investors may be reluctant to invest where there is an unstable or fragile labour relations environment. 3 THE COMMISSION OF VIOLENCE DURING A STRIKE AND CONSEQUENCES The Constitution guarantees every worker the right to join a trade union, participate in the activities and programmes of a trade union, and to strike. 11 The Constitution grants these rights to a “worker” as an individual.12 However, the right to strike and any other conduct in contemplation or furtherance of a strike such as a picket13 can only be exercised by workers acting collectively.14 The right to strike and participation in the activities of a trade union were given more effect through the enactment of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 199515 (LRA). The main purpose of the LRA is to “advance economic development, social justice, labour peace and the democratisation of the workplace”. 16 The advancement of social justice means that the exercise of the right to strike must advance the interests of workers and at the same time workers must refrain from any conduct that can affect those who are not on strike as well members of society. Even though the right to strike and the right to participate in the activities of a trade union that often flow from a strike17 are guaranteed in the Constitution and specifically regulated by the LRA, it sometimes happens that the right to strike is exercised for purposes not intended by the Constitution and the LRA, generally. 18 For example, it was not the intention of the Constitutional Assembly and the legislature that violence should be used during strikes or pickets. As the Constitution provides, pickets are meant to be peaceful. 19 Contrary to section 17 of the Constitution, the conduct of workers participating in a strike or picket has changed in recent years with workers trying to emphasise their grievances by causing disharmony and chaos in public. A media report by the South African Institute of Race Relations pointed out that between the years 1999 and 2012 there were 181 strike-related deaths, 313 injuries and 3,058 people were arrested for public violence associated with strikes.20 The question is whether employers succumb easily to workers’ demands if a strike is accompanied by violence? In response to this question, one worker remarked as follows: “There is no sweet strike, there is no Christian strike … A strike is a strike. You want to get back what belongs to you ... you won’t win a strike with a Bible. You do not wear high heels and carry an umbrella and say ‘1992 was under apartheid, 2007 is under ANC’. You won’t win a strike like that.” 21 The use of violence during industrial action affects not only the strikers or picketers, the employer and his or her business but it also affects innocent members of the public, non-striking employees, the environment and the economy at large. In addition, striking workers visit non-striking workers’ homes, often at night, threaten them and in some cases, assault or even murder workers who are acting as replacement labour. 22 This points to the fact that for many workers and their families’ living conditions remain unsafe and vulnerable to damage due to violence. In Security Services Employers Organisation v SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU),23 it was reported that about 20 people were thrown out of moving trains in the Gauteng province; most of them were security guards who were not on strike and who were believed to be targeted by their striking colleagues. Two of them died, while others were admitted to hospitals with serious injuries.24 In SA Chemical Catering and Allied Workers Union v Check One (Pty) Ltd,25 striking employees were carrying various weapons ranging from sticks, pipes, planks and bottles. One of the strikers Mr Nqoko was alleged to have threatened to cut the throats of those employees who had been brought from other branches of the employer’s business to help in the branch where employees were on strike. Such conduct was held not to be in line with good conduct of striking.26 These examples from case law show that South Africa is facing a problem that is affecting not only the industrial relations’ sector but also the economy at large. For example, in 2012, during a strike by workers employed by Lonmin in Marikana, the then-new union Association of Mine and Construction Workers Union (AMCU) wanted to exert its presence after it appeared that many workers were not happy with the way the majority union, National Union of Mine Workers (NUM), handled negotiations with the employer (Lonmin Mine). AMCU went on an unprotected strike which was violent and resulted in the loss of lives, damage to property and negative economic consequences including a weakened currency, reduced global investment, declining productivity, and increase unemployment in the affected sectors.27 Further, the unreasonably long time it takes for strikes to get resolved in the Republic has a negative effect on the business of the employer, the economy and employment. 3 1 Effects of violent and long strikes on the economy Generally, South Africa’s economy is on a downward scale. First, it fails to create employment opportunities for its people. The recent statistics on unemployment levels indicate that unemployment has increased from 26.5 to 27.2. 28 The most prominent strike which nearly brought the platinum industries to its knees was the strike convened by AMCU in 2014. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 24 June 2014. It affected the three big platinum producers in the Republic, which are the Anglo American Platinum, Lonmin Plc and Impala Platinum. It was the longest strike since the dawn of democracy in 1994. As a result of this strike, the platinum industries lost billions of rands.29 According to the report by Economic Research Southern Africa, the platinum group metals industry is South Africa’s second-largest export earner behind gold and contributes just over 2 of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).30 The overall metal ores in the mining industry which include platinum sells about 70 of its output to the export market while sales to local manufacturers of basic metals, fabricated metal products and various other metal equipment and machinery make up to 20. 31 The research indicates that the overall impact of the strike in 2014 was driven by a reduction in productive capital in the mining sector, accompanied by a decrease in labour available to the economy. This resulted in a sharp increase in the price of the output by 5.8 with a GDP declined by 0.72 and 0.78.32 Economic decline causes nuclear war – collapses faith in deterrence Tønnesson, 15—Research Professor, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Leader of East Asia Peace program, Uppsala University (Stein, “Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace,” International Area Studies Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 297-311, dml) Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party.Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene. The best way to enhance global peace is no doubt to multiply the factors protecting it: build a Pacific security community by topping up economic interdependence with political rapprochement and trust, institutionalized cooperation, and shared international norms. Yet even without such accomplishments, the combination of deterrence and economic interdependence may be enough to prevent war among the major powers. Because the leaders of nuclear armed nations are fearful of getting into a situation where peace relies uniquely on nuclear deterrence, and because they know that their adversaries have the same fear, they may accept the risks entailed by depending economically on others. And then there will be neither trade wars nor shooting wars, just disputes and diplomacy.
11/16/21
ND- Unions Neg
Tournament: Novice Circuit Tournament | Round: 4 | Opponent: MB | Judge: Clark-Villanueva, Leah PRO Act CP CP text: the US ought to pass the PRO act. The problem with worker organization isn’t the right to strike- it’s companies taking deliberate anti-union action. Means the aff can never solve. Heidi Shierholz, 20 Celine McNicholas and Lynn Rhinehart, 19 -
Novice Econ Da
The economy is steadily recovering now, but is fragile. Rugaber 11/8
No Solvency (US) 10 solvency at best, the vast majority of workers aren’t unionized. BLS 1/22 - Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Economic News Release: Unions Members Summary,” January 22, 2021.
Non-Unique – Strikes are already high. Greenhouse 11/5
11/16/21
SO - Novice NC
Tournament: Medows Novice Scrimmage | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake, EB | Judge: Dee, Blake AT evergreening/secondary patents 1.Turn—secondary patents are key to generating new treatments to medicines based on existing medicines. Evergreening does not stop production of generic versions of the orginial formulation Christopher M. Holman, senior scholar C-IP2 18 - ("Why Follow-On Pharmaceutical Innovations Should Be Eligible For Patent Protection," Intellectual Property Watch, 9-21-2018, accessed 9-18-2021, https://www.ip-watch.org/2018/09/21/follow-pharmaceutical-innovations-eligible-patent-protection/)//ML Why Protect Follow-On Innovation?¶ The attack on secondary pharmaceutical patents is based in part on the flawed premise that follow-on innovation is of marginal value at best, and thus less deserving of protection than the primary inventive act of identifying and validating a new drug active ingredient. In fact, follow-on innovation can play a critical role in transforming an interesting drug candidate into a safe and effective treatment option for patients. A good example can be seen in the case of AZT (zidovudine), a drug ironically described in the Guidelines as the “first breakthrough in AIDS therapy.” AZT began its life as a failed attempt at a cancer drug, and it was only years later that its potential application in the fight against AIDS was realized. Follow-on research resulted in a method-of-use patent directed towards the use of AZT in the treatment of AIDS, and it was this patent that incentivized the investment necessary to bridge the gap between a promising drug candidate and a safe, effective, and FDA-approved pharmaceutical. Significantly, because of the long lag time between the first public disclosure of AZT and the discovery of its use in the treatment of AIDS, patent protection for the molecule per se was unavailable. In a world where follow-on innovation is unpatentable, there would have been no patent incentive to invest in the development of the drug, and without that incentive AZT might have languished on the shelf as simply one more failed drug candidate.¶ Other examples of important drugs that likely never would have been made available to patients without the availability of a “secondary” patent include Evista (raloxifene, used in the treatment of osteoporosis and to reduce the risk of invasive breast cancer), Zyprexa (olanzapine, used in the treatment of schizophrenia), and an orally-administrable formulation of the antibiotic cefuroxime.¶ Pharmaceutical development is prolonged and unpredictable, and frequently a safe and effective drug occurs only as a result of follow-on innovation occurring long after the initial synthesis and characterization of a pharmaceutically interesting chemical compound. The inventions protected by secondary patents can be just as critical to the development of drugs as a patent on the active ingredient itself.¶ The Benefits of Follow-On Innovation The criticism of patents on follow-on pharmaceutical innovation rests on an assumption that follow-on innovation provides little if any benefit to patients, and merely serves as a pretense for extending patent protection on an existing drug. In fact, there are many examples of follow-on products that represent significant improvements in the safety-efficacy profile. For example, the original formulation of Lumigan (used to treat glaucoma) had an unfortunate tendency to cause severe hyperemia (i.e., redeye), and this adverse event often lead patients to stop using the drug, at times resulting in blindness. Subsequent research led to a new formulation which largely alleviated the problem of hyperemia, an example of the type of follow-on innovation that significantly benefits patients but that which would be discouraged by a patent regime that does not reward follow-on innovation.¶ Follow-on pharmaceutical innovation can come in the form of an extended-release formulation that permits the drug to be administered at less frequent intervals than the original formulation. Critics of secondary patents downplay the significance of extended-release formulations, claiming that they represent nothing more than a ploy to extend patent protection without providing any real benefit to patients. In fact, the availability of a drug that can be taken once a day has been shown to improve patient compliance, a significant issue with many drugs, particularly in the case of drugs taken by patients with dementia or other cognitive impairments. Extended-release formulations can also provide a more consistent dosing throughout the day, avoiding the peaks and valleys in blood levels experienced by patients forced to take an immediate-release drug multiple times a day.¶ Other examples of improved formulations that provide real benefits to patients are orally administrable formulations of drugs that could previously only be administered by more invasive intravenous or intramuscular injection, combination products that combine two or more active pharmaceutical agents in a single formulation (resulting in improved patient compliance), and a heat-stable formulation of a lifesaving drug used to treat HIV infection and AIDS (an important characteristic for use in developing countries with a hot climate).¶ “Evergreening” – an Incoherent Concept¶ Drug innovators are often accused of using secondary patents to “evergreen” the patent protection of existing drugs, based on an assumption that a secondary patent somehow extends the patent protection of a drug after the primary patent on the active ingredient is expired. As a general matter, this is a false assumption — a patent on an improved formulation, for example, is limited to that improvement and does not extend patent protection for the original formulation.¶ Once the patents covering the original formulation have expired, generic companies are free to market a generic version of the original product, and patients willing to forgo the benefits of the improved formulation can choose to purchase the generic product, free of any constraints imposed by the patent on the improvement. Of course, drug innovators hope that doctors and their patients will see the benefits of the improved formulation and be willing to pay a premium for it, but it is important to bear in mind that ultimately it is patients, doctors, and third-party payers who determine whether the value of the improvement justifies the costs.¶ Of course, this assumes a reasonably well-functioning pharmaceutical market. If that market breaks down in a manner that forces patients to pay higher prices for a patented new version of a drug that provides little real improvement over the original formulation, then it is the deficiency in the market which should be addressed, rather than the patent system itself.¶ For example, if a drug company is found to have engaged in some anticompetitive activity to block generic competition in the market for the original product once it has gone off patent, then antitrust and competition laws should be invoked to address that problem. If doctors are prescribing an expensive new formulation of a drug that provides little benefit compared to a cheaper, unpatented original product, then that is a deficiency in the market that should be addressed directly, rather than through a broadside attack on follow-on innovation. In short, if is found that secondary patents are being used in a manner that creates an unwarranted extension of patent protection, it is that misuse of the patent system which should be addressed directly, rather than through what amounts to an attack on the patent system itself.¶
AT COVID aff
No inherency – governments and the WTO are already reducing IP protections for medicines related to COVID-19. WTO No Date WTO, no date, "TRIPS, the intellectual property system and COVID-19," No Publication, https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/trips_and_covid19_e.htm accessed 8/10/2021JH TRIPS, the intellectual property system and COVID-19 ¶The way in which an intellectual property (IP) system is designed at national or regional levels – and how effectively it is put to work - can be a significant factor in facilitating access to existing technologies and in supporting the creation, manufacturing and dissemination of new technologies, such as medicines, vaccines and medical devices, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This question – the relationship of IP to the pandemic response – has sparked a vigorous debate within and beyond the WTO, and is a high priority for technical assistance and policy support for WTO members. This page gives access to background information and current WTO documents (including members’ proposals) on this urgent question. ¶Introduction ¶From the beginning of the pandemic, the pressing need was clear for both the development of new vaccines and treatments, and access to these medicines for all – a global challenge unprecedented in both scope and urgency. ¶Governments and other stakeholders have therefore focused on how innovation mechanisms and tools for enhancing access to medical technologies can contribute to the pandemic response, well beyond a reliance on “business as usual”. This has led to a range of initiatives by international organizations, governments and private actors for the voluntary sharing, pooling or non-assertion of IP rights (IPRs), responding to the spirit of collaboration that dominates the global effort to tackle the pandemic. ¶A range of pro-health policy options and interventions are also available for WTO members under the TRIPS Agreement, as implemented in domestic law. ¶Transparency and the availability of up-to-date information on IP and COVID-19 respond to an immediate and critical need. They contribute to the empirical basis that is essential for policy-making in a rapidly evolving trade landscape in the mutual interest of all stakeholders, including governments and economic operators. ¶In furtherance of this objective, the following sections provide access to useful WTO and other resources that specifically address the interface between IPRs and COVID-19, as well as to the work of the TRIPS Council ¶Work of the TRIPS Council ¶Members have exchanged information and experiences relating to IP measures taken in the context of COVID-19 at the TRIPS Council, and have considered members’ proposals. The interface between IPRs and COVID-19 has been considered in TRIPS Council meetings since July 2020, supported by communications to the TRIPS Council. ¶WTO resources ¶Members have exchanged information and experiences relating to IP measures taken in the context of COVID-19 at the TRIPS Council, and have considered members’ proposals. The interface between IPRs and COVID-19 has been considered in TRIPS Council meetings since July 2020, supported by communications to the TRIPS Council. ¶COVID-19 and world trade ¶COVID-19: Measures regarding trade-related intellectual property rights ¶A non-exhaustive list has been compiled by the WTO Secretariat from official sources and confirmed with WTO members concerned. It represents an informal situation report and an attempt to provide transparency with respect to measures regarding trade-related IPRs taken by WTO members in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. The list is regularly updated. ¶Information Note: The TRIPS Agreement and COVID-19¶This note discusses the role and some of the key contributions that the global IP system, including its policy options and flexibilities as implemented in domestic law, can make to address COVID-19. It also provides an overview of measures taken by members. ¶Information Note: How WTO members have used trade measures to expedite access to COVID-19 critical medical goods and services ¶This note on access to COVID-19 critical medical goods and services includes information on using IPRs and policy tools to facilitate innovation in and access to COVID-19-related technologies. ¶Information Note: Developing and delivering COVID-19 vaccines around the world ¶This note looks at issues with trade impact and discusses trade policy choices, including in the area of intellectual property rights, that may be considered along the vaccine value chain to support access to COVID-19 vaccines. ¶An integrated health, trade and IP approach to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic ¶A standalone section on COVID-19 in the 2020 study jointly published by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and WTO, Promoting Access to Medical Technologies and Innovation: Intersections between public health, intellectual property and trade (second edition), maps the multiple challenges posed by the pandemic in relation to the integrated health, trade and IP policy frameworks set out in the study. ¶Working Paper: Patent-related actions taken in WTO members in response to the COVID-19 pandemic¶This working paper provides an overview of the patent landscape of medical treatments and technologies related to COVID-19, and of the patent status of two investigational medical treatments: remdesivir and lopinavir/ritonavir. It presents various patent-related actions taken by legislators, policymakers, industry sectors and civil society organizations in members since the outbreak. Furthermore, it elaborates on patent-related policy options provided by the TRIPS Agreement, and members' national implementation and utilization of these options in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 2. No inherency - The Covid vaccine waiver will pass in the status quo—many countries are switching their positions now . Meyer 6/10 David Meyer senior writer for fortune, 6/10 - ("COVID-19 vaccine-patent pressure grows in Europe as lawmakers back temporary waiver," Fortune, 6-10-2021, accessed 7-5-2021, https://fortune.com/2021/06/10/covid-vaccine-patent-waiver-european-parliament-commission-wto/)//ML The temporary suspension of COVID vaccine patents—a move that's intended to help expand manufacturing and speed up the global vaccination drive, thus shortening the pandemic—was originally proposed by South Africa and India last year. Over recent months, it has gained new supporters like the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pope, and, crucially, the Biden administration.¶ However, Europe—home to major players such as BioNTech and AstraZeneca—has resisted the waiver. Just last week, the European Commission submitted an alternative plan to the World Trade Organization (WTO), proposing other measures such as limits on export restrictions, and the compulsory licensing of the patents in some circumstances.¶ That doesn't go far enough, said members of the European Parliament on Thursday, as it passed an amendment calling for a temporary waiver of the WTO's TRIPS Agreement, the global intellectual-property rulebook, in relation to COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and equipment.¶ The amendment passed by 355 votes to 263, with 71 abstentions. The European Parliament cannot tell the Commission to change its influential tune on the issue, but the vote sent a strong political message nonetheless: Europe, with its many national votes at the WTO, is gradually shifting to the pro-waiver camp.¶ Within the Parliament—the only EU lawmaking institution whose members are directly elected by citizens—the split over the issue has largely followed left-right lines, with leftists such as the Socialists and Democrats (SandD, Parliament's second-biggest voting bloc) backing the waiver and those on the right, such as the European People's Party (EPP, the biggest bloc), opposing it.¶ "With today’s vote, the European Parliament calls on the Commission to finally do the right thing and save lives by supporting the lifting of patents for COVID-19 vaccines and medical equipment," said Kathleen Van Brempt, the SandD's lead negotiator on the subject, in a statement after the vote. "The TRIPS waiver may not prove to be a miracle solution, but it is one of the essential building blocks of a strong global vaccination campaign. Exceptional situations call for exceptional measures.¶ "The alternative proposal submitted by the European Commission to the WTO falls short in the face of the epochal challenge we are facing," she added.¶ But it is not just the European Commission that is becoming more isolated on the issue. Germany, too, is increasingly lonely in its opposition to the waiver.¶ French President Emmanuel Macron, who has previously sided with Germany, traveled to South Africa a couple of weeks ago to discuss the waiver with President Cyril Ramaphosa. On Wednesday, just ahead of the G7 summit, he flipped and joined the patent-suspension camp. That means at least two G7 leaders (also including U.S. President Joe Biden) now favor the waiver.¶ Add to that the fact that the WTO agreed on Wednesday to fully debate the waiver—a step that the EU and some other countries had previously resisted—and it seems the tide may be turning.¶ There is still a way to go, though. World Bank President David Malpass slammed the waiver idea on Wednesday, saying “it would run the risk of reducing the innovation and the RandD” in the pharmaceutical sector. (Malpass, a Trump appointee, is therefore now in opposition to the current White House.)¶ AT Innovation Patents are good---key to innovation Laxminarayan 1, Ramanan Laxminarayan directs the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy. He is also a Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University. - See more at: http://www.cddep.org/profile/ramanan_laxminarayan#sthash.YqaghohJ.dpuf Spring 2001 http://www.rff.org/files/sharepoint/WorkImages/Download/RFF-Resources-143-antibiotic.pdf The Role of Patents Firms that manufacture antibiotics face conflicting incentives with respect to resistance. On the one hand, bacterial resistance to a product can reduce the demand for that product. On the other hand, the resistance makes old drugs obsolete and can therefore encourage investment in new antibiotics. Pharmaceutical firms are driven to maximize profits during the course of the drug’s effective patent life—the period of time between obtaining regulatory approval for the antibiotic and the expiration of product and process patents to manufacture the drug. Given the paucity of tools at the policymaker’s disposal, the use of patents to influence antibiotic use may be worth considering. A longer effective patent life could increase incentives for a company to minimize resistance, since the company would enjoy a longer period of monopoly benefits from its antibiotic’s effectiveness. Patent breadth is another critical consideration. When resistance is significant, other things being equal, it may be prudent to assign broad patents that cover an entire class of antibiotics rather than a single antibiotic. In such a situation, the benefits of preserving effectiveness could outweigh the cost to society of greater monopoly power associated with broader patents. Broad patents may prevent many firms from competing inefficiently for the same pool of effectiveness embodied in a class of antibiotics, while providing an incentive to develop new antibiotics. TRIPs encourages innovation Margaret Kyle and Yi Qian 14, Kyle is Professor of Economics. Center for Industrial Economics, “INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND ACCESS TO INNOVATION: EVIDENCE FROM TRIPS,” https://www.nber.org/papers/w20799 The TRIPS Agreement, which generally strengthened and harmonized IPRs across countries, does appear to have changed market outcomes. On average, access to new pharmaceuticals has at least not decreased following TRIPS. Point estimates show an increase in the probability of new product launch and quantities sold, although differences are not always statistically significant. While patents are also associated with higher prices, there is some evidence that prices in poorer countries have fallen, though not to the level of off-patent products. However, the effect of IPRs may be confounded by other policy changes. It is certainly possible that in the absence of countervailing policies, stronger IPRs would have resulted in a larger increase in prices. It is also likely that IPRs have very different implications for countries with a large generic sector (e.g., India) than for most of the developing countries we examine. Nevertheless, we believe the results should be considered relatively good news about the relationship between IPRs and access to innovative medicines, although considerable work remains to improve the latter. Longer patents are net-good, downsides aren’t outweighed by the benefits David Abrams 9, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School, “Did TRIPS Spur Innovation? An Empirical Analysis of Patent Duration and Incentives to Innovate,” https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/274/ Let us consider the increase in value of innovation due to a one– standard-deviation increase in patent-term extension. The standard deviation of the term extension (by class) is 114 days (see Figure 6 for the full distribution). Multiplying this by the coefficient above, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in patent term extension is associated with an increase of about seven monthly patents. From a mean of approximately thirty-four, in percentage terms, this comes to a twenty-one percent increase in value of innovation—a very substantial increase. It seems unlikely that the deadweight loss due to exclusive rights would be enough to offset this considerable gain, suggesting that an increase in patent terms could lead to greater welfare. AT Global Health inequality 1NC---TRIPS=/=GHI
TRIPS reduces global health inequality Samir Raheem Alsoodani 15, “"The WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) may offered an access to essential pharmaceutical drugs for developing countries,” Journal Of the College of law /Al-Nahrain University 2015, Volume 17, Issue 2, Pages 393-410, https://www.iasj.net/iasj/article/109180 To conclude, it is beyond doubt that the TRIPS Agreement and its later, permanent amendment of 2005 attempted in good faith to address an urgent issue faced by many developing countries with regards to accessing essential medicine. To a certain extent in its basic tenets, it has had a profound and positive effect on the system, as it has made permanently possible the opportunity for the poorest countries to obtain medications more cheaply through manufacture in developing countries under a compulsory licensing system. Certain positive outcomes arguably include the fact that disputes have been brought under the jurisdiction of one regulatory body, and the least developed Members have found some redress in the power balance regarding costs paid to the pharmaceutical industries based in the wealthier, developed countries (even if this redress has only been to the extent of facilitating increased bargaining capability). This can be considered a triumph from the perspective of universal human rights. Backlines---TRIPS=/=GHI
TRIPS enhances human rights Samir Raheem Alsoodani 15, “"The WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) may offered an access to essential pharmaceutical drugs for developing countries,” Journal Of the College of law /Al-Nahrain University 2015, Volume 17, Issue 2, Pages 393-410, https://www.iasj.net/iasj/article/109180 In contrast, Anderson and Wager (2006) believe that the TRIPS Agreement provisions enhanced human rights principles, because of the many features throughout the TRIPS Agreement, such as the emphasis on the need for a balance between the advantages, the commitments, and the rights for both the users and the producers of the invention. Other examples include nondiscrimination treatment, and the stipulation that all disputes must be settled under the WTO system, which secures the rule of law governing international trade. The TRIPS Agreement has favoured the least developed countries with distinctive and more lenient treatment, as these countries have until 2016 to enforce protection of patent rights with regards to undisclosed data relating to pharmaceutical products.