Reach for the stars

A few days ago, I got an interesting email:

DO YOU WANT YOUR NAME TO BE REMEMBERED FOREVER?

With the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Telescope discovering new stars and planets and galaxies every single day, the astronomers can't keep up with naming them.  So many of them end up with strings of numbers and letters that no one can ever remember.  How much better would it be to have a heavenly body named after YOU?  Or your loved one?  Or your favorite pet?

We are the STAR REGISTERY [sic] SERVICE, where you can choose from thousands of unnamed stars, and give it whatever name you choose.  You will receive a beautiful framable certificate of ownership with the location (what the astronomers call the Declination and Right Ascension) of your OWN PERSONAL STAR so you can go outside any clear night and find it.  

A lovely idea for a gift -- or a gift to yourself!

We then are told that the fee for this service is a paltry $40 U.S., and that they accept PayPal, Venmo, and major credit cards.  And it's accompanied by this enticing and irresistible photo:

Okay, there are a few problems with this.

First, I can think of a great many better uses for forty bucks, and that includes using it to start a campfire.  Part of this is that I'm a major skinflint, but still.

Second, the vast majority of the "new stars and planets and galaxies" catalogued by the Hubble and JWST are far too faint to see with the naked eye, so I wouldn't be able to go outside on a clear night and see "my own personal star" unless I happened to bring along the Palomar Telescope.  So the most I could do is to find the approximate location, and try to gain some sense of ownership by staring up into the dark.

Third, what on earth does it mean to claim that I "own a star?"  The nearest star (which, so far as I know, is not for sale) is about forty trillion kilometers away, so unless warp drive is invented soon (not looking likely), I'll never go to visit my star.  And doesn't selling something imply that the seller owned it to start with?  I doubt seriously whether the "Star Registery Service" could demonstrate legal ownership of any of the things out there in space that they're trying to sell.

So needless to say, I'm not going to pay forty dollars for a piece of paper, however "beautiful" and "framable" it is.  If I gave it as a present to my wife, she would roll her eyes enough to see the back of her own skull.  And I'm not naming a star after my puppy.  Jethro is a lovely little dog, but smart, he isn't.  He seems to spend his entire existence in a state of mild puzzlement.  Anything new is met with an expression that can be summed up as, "... wait, what?"  So appreciating the wonders of astrophysics is kind of outside his wheelhouse.  (Pretty much everything is outside his wheelhouse other than playing, snuggling, sleeping, and eating dinner.)

But I digress.

So anyway, I didn't respond to the email.  But because I live for investigating the weird corners of human behavior -- and also because I never met a rabbit-hole I didn't like -- I started poking around into other examples of people claiming to own astronomical objects.  And this, it turns out, has a long and storied history.  Here are just a few examples I found out about:

• In 1996, a German guy named Martin Juergens claimed that he owned the Moon.  On 15 July 1756, Juergens said, German emperor Frederick the Great deeded the Moon to his ancestor Aul Juergens, and it passed down through the family, always being inherited by the youngest son.  Needless to say, pretty much no one took him seriously, although apparently he believes it himself.
• Back in 1936 the Pittsburgh Notary Public received a banker's check and a deed for establishment of property filed by one A. Dean Lindsay, wherein he claimed the ownership of all extraterrestrial objects in the Solar System.  Lindsay had earlier submitted claims of ownership on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but these were both denied.  The extraterrestrial objects one, though, was apparently notarized and filed, with the Notary Public taking the attitude that if the dude wanted to spend money for something he couldn't ever get to, that was on him.  Lindsay got the last laugh, however, when he was approached multiple times by other even loonier people who wanted to buy specific extraterrestrial objects from him.  Lindsay was happy to sell.  At a profit, of course.
• When NASA landed the NEAR Shoemaker probe on the asteroid 433 Eros in 2001, they were promptly served with a bill for twenty dollars from Gregory Nemitz, who claimed he owned it and they owed him for parking.  NASA unsurprisingly refused to pay.
• Nemitz wasn't the only one to trouble NASA with claims of ownership.  In 1996 three Yemeni men, Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil, and Abdullah al-Umari, sued NASA for "invading Mars."  They said they had inherited the planet from their ancestors three thousand years ago.  Once again, NASA declined to make reparations.
• In 1980, an entrepreneur named Dennis Hope started a company called the Lunar Embassy Commission, which sells one-acre plots on the Moon for twenty dollars each.  (It'd be fun to put him and Martin Juergens in a locked room and let them duke it out over whose property the Moon actually is.)  Once he gets your money, he chooses your plot by randomly pointing to a lunar map with a stick, which seems kind of arbitrary; at least the "Star Registery Service" was gonna let me pick my own star.  Despite this, he claims that former presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were both customers.
• Lastly, in the Go Big Or Go Home department, we have noted eccentric James T. Mangan (1896–1970), who publicly claimed ownership of all of outer space in 1948.  He founded what he called the Nation of Celestial Space (also known as "Celestia") and registered it with the Cook County, Illinois, Recorder of Deeds and Titles on 1 January 1949.  At its height in 1960 the Nation of Celestial Space had almost twenty thousand, um, "residents," but since Mangan's death in 1970 it has more or less ceased to exist as an official entity.  Space itself, of course, is still out there, and seems unaffected by the whole affair.

Anyhow, I think I'll pass on star ownership.  (Or Moon, or Mars, or outer space, or whatnot.)  The whole thing strikes me as a little ridiculous.  Of course, if I think about it too hard, even our concept of owning land down here on Earth is pretty goofy; what does it mean to say I own this parcel of property, when it was here before I was born and will still be here long after I'm gone?  Okay, I can use it to live on; ownership gives me certain rights according to the laws of New York State.  I get that.  But honestly, even the concept of dividing up the Earth using (mostly) arbitrary and invisible lines, and saying stuff is legal on one side of the line and illegal on the other side, is weird, too.  (And don't even get me started about how to cross certain invisible lines, you need a special piece of paper, and if you don't have it and try to cross anyhow, mean people get to shoot you.)

You have to wonder what would happen if the intelligent creatures out there who come from those far distant star systems traveled here, and I tried to tell them, "See, your star, I bought that for forty dollars from some guy on the internet."  My guess is they'd vaporize me with their laser pistol and head back out into space after stamping their map of the Solar System with the words "No Intelligent Life Present."

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The disappearing island

Sometimes I don't understand my fellow humans at all.

Take, for example, our habit of drawing imaginary lines all over the place and then pretending those lines should have an impact on what can do.  Over here, you have to follow one set of rules; walk ten meters to the west and cross an invisible line some random person made up, and you have to follow a completely different set of rules.  You want to purchase liquor, own a gun, marry someone of the same sex, gamble, get decent health care or a good education?  Whoa, you first better figure out where the lines are and make sure you're on the right side!  In order to cross some lines (legally, at least) you have to have a specific little booklet and let a grim and humorless person stamp it first.  Try to get across without a booklet and stamp, and boy, are you in trouble.  In fact, some people take these invisible lines so seriously they'll kill anyone who tries to cross.

This kind of behavior may well explain why the aliens take one look at Earth and then warp right the fuck out of the quadrant.

One of the weirdest examples of this phenomenon has to do with an on-again, off-again island in the central Mediterranean, about halfway between Tunisia and the island of Sicily.  You probably know this is a tectonically-active region -- Sicily is the home of Mount Etna -- so there are a number of small volcanic islands and seamounts dotted around the place.  One of these is called (depending on whom you ask) Empedocles Seamount or Graham Island or Île Julia or Isola Ferdinandea.

The reason for the multiple names is that prior to 1831 it had been a submarine volcano, on the order of six meters below sea level at lowest tide.  But then it erupted (as volcanoes are wont to do) and suddenly the peak of the seamount was above sea level.

That's when the fun began.

In August of that year, British sea captain Humphrey Fleming Senhouse saw the newly-formed island (at that point pretty much just a bunch of hot rocks barely poking up out of the water), and in the fine old British tradition of spotting a place and saying "Mine!", claimed it for the British crown.  He named it Graham Island after Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty.  The problem was, French geologist Constant Prévost was also nearby studying the volcanoes in the region, and when the island appeared he thought King Louis Philippe I of France might fancy having a bunch of rocks, so he claimed it for France (and named it Île Julia, supposedly because it appeared in July).  But it wasn't long before the Sicilians, who after all were nearest to the place, said, "The hell you say" and claimed it for their own, renaming it for a third time Isola Ferdinandea (after King Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies).

As far as I know, the Tunisians decided to leave well enough alone and didn't get involved.

A page out of Constant Prévost's field journal, showing the eruption of whatever-its-name-is [Image is in the Public Domain]

Diplomatic wrangling ensued.  One of of the concerns surrounded whether this was a sign of increasing volcanism, and if it might ultimately link up Sicily with Tunisia, and where would they draw the invisible lines if that happened?  The British were adamant that they wanted it for its strategic location, and drew up plans for building a naval base there.  The French, more luxury-minded, started thinking about a holiday resort.  The Sicilians mostly just said the Italian equivalent of "But... but it's ours," to no particular effect.

It's uncertain what the ultimate outcome of the dispute would have been, because within a few months it became obvious that Graham/Julia/Ferdinandea Island was shrinking.  It turned out that the eruption had mostly produced tephra -- a loose, porous, crumbly rock that doesn't withstand erosion.  Like, at all.  In January 1832 it was reported as barely visible, and by that summer the island had disappeared entirely.  The French, British, and Sicilians all sort of kicked at the dirt and said, "Awww, rats" in an embarrassed sort of way, and then toddled off to look around for other arbitrary and pointless things to fight about.

So at the moment it's back to being Empedocles Seamount, with its peak about eight meters below water level.  Amazingly, though, the dispute is still bugging people.  In November of 2000, some Sicilian divers went down and planted a marble plaque with a Sicilian flag on the top of the seamount, with the idea being if it ever surfaces again the Sicilians will already have laid claim to it.  The plaque has an inscription that reads, "This piece of land, once Ferdinandea, belonged to and shall always belong to the Sicilian people."

Within six months, the combination of waves and tectonic activity fractured the plaque into twelve pieces.  

The whole affair made me think about the quote from Voltaire: "God is a comedian playing to an audience which is afraid to laugh."

But more to the point: is it just me, or is this kind of behavior seriously weird?

I think we accept it just because it's so common, but really, I find myself much more in sympathy with a lot of the Indigenous peoples, who when they first ran into Europeans (whose capacity for invisible line-drawing is second to none) couldn't even understand what the invaders meant when they said "this land is mine now."  The land was here long before you were born, and will still be here long after you're dead.  What does it mean to say it's "yours"?  And it's more bizarre than that when you start factoring in things like mineral rights.  Okay, legally I own 3.5 acres of land.  Do I own what's underneath it?  If so, how far underneath?  Do I own a gradually narrowing conical chunk of material extending all the way to the Earth's center?

What the fuck would that even mean, that I "own" something that I'll never see, never touch, and is in fact physically impossible to reach?

I dunno.  Apparently it makes sense to other people, so maybe I'm the weird one.  All I know is when I think about things like this, and other stuff we argue incessantly about -- like what comprises ninety percent of politics -- I'm hoping the aliens will at least slow down their passage by Earth long enough to pick up a passenger.

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