Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 137: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION has disappeared it is hardly likely that common sense will be the keynote of interplanet- ary law. | Meantime, we must assume that whoever gets to, say, the Moon first will consider them- selves to own it. Conceivably, they will lease out parts of it to other States under certain conditions. Conceivably, too, other States might go to war with the first one in order to gain control of our satellite. It is probably too much to expect for States to stake out an area around their landing ground, leaving the rest for anyone else who can make the journey. Even then there would probably be conflict over the extent of staking out. Perhaps the one consolation about conflicts on the Moon is that man, with even his vilest weapons, cannot make the Moon any deader than it is! But it is just possible that something like world peace and friendship will be in vogue when the first landings are about to be made. Under those conditions it may well be that international bodies will reach equitable agreement 136 about rights of ownership in the land of other planets. If the launching of the spaceships is also an international ven- ture, as it may well have to be for reasons of economics, then the other planets may be owned and administered by an international body, which would execute its duties with the emphasis of making the other planets serve Earth in the best possible way. If only the heads of States could be made to see this, then the launching of the first spaceship could herald the beginning of a new era in which the peoples of Earth live together as members of one species, rather than oper- ating under the law of inter- specific elimination, as in the jungle. There can be little doubt in the minds of serious thinkers that, however strong one is for individual freedom and lack of State control, public, rather than private, ownership is the only method that will really work when man extends his domains beyond this Earth. The application of State con- trol to terrestrial matters is still a subject for hot and comiclbooks.corn