David Bowie once crooned about the man who sold the world, Genesis once sang about selling England by the pound, but to date, no-one’s considered making a quick buck off planet Mars before – until now.
It may sound like a bad science fiction story, but a British doctor had staked his claim as the legal owner of the red planet and is offering celestial punters the chance to buy ten acres of cosmically prime real estate for just ten acres a cent.
It’s a rather cheap deal, but then again it would appear to be a rather cheap trick to pick a planet and attempt to sell it off in a bid to become universally wealthy.
Yet the man who would be King Martian, Dr Phil Davies, 49, from Hampshire, claims that his “legally well constructed claim to land on planet Mars,” which he believes could even be ratified by the United Nations in 2017, is less about the dollar and more about the dream.
The dream in question being to safeguard the future of other planets in space and tighten up the rather slack Outer Space Treaty (OST), which in its current state allows any individual to lay claim to a celestial body and exploit it just to turn a buck.
Dr Davies told the Daily Express he is selling Mars to expose how the OST is nowhere near tight enough and to prevent a cosmic “land grab and gold rush”.
“This is purely to tighten up the loose laws around ownership of land in space, because at the moment we are allowed to do that, and we should not have been able to do that. Ultimately we will hand it over to the United Nations and that is in our code of conduct.
“We have created the first legally difficult to challenge claim on land in space.”
In the age of the internet, selling land on other planets, is nothing new, for every celestial body there’s an earthly capitalist with a website and an eye for some easy money.
Mars.com, moonestates.com and lunarland.com, all act as estate agents for tenants seeking to build prospective properties in the cosmos.
Previously, the Inquisitr reported on a woman who claimed she owned the Sun and was taking Ebay to court because they were refusing to let people bid on it.
Like Dr Davies, the woman in question claimed ownership of the great ball of fire as a result of a loophole in the Outer Space Treaty.
The good doctor, however, claims he is the only person with a reasonable shot at being rightfully recognized as the owner, lock, stock, and barrel, of another planet.
“Such things are normally shallow gimmicks with no associated importance – but not ours. This is a world first and will be huge in 2017.
“After genuine high-level negotiation with UN officials we are now just awaiting the agreement of a COPUOS member to propose to committee that our claim be appraised for Right to Due Process.
“So, why is our claim being treated so seriously? And how can we possibly have a legally valid claim to land on Mars?
“Well, the answer involves cosmology, laser science, morse code, public international law and space law.
“It has been assessed favorably by top legal and scientific academics.
“With a claim that is very consistent with the legal proof requirements for acquisition of difficult, distant or relatively barren terrain – on Earth… but applied also to Mars – and is not blocked by any elements of the OST, we can justify an international legal right to due process.
“While we would have a genuine chance of securing title ownership of celestial land, this is not an absolute requirement for us.
“With the 50th anniversary of OST being next year, we anticipate much media attention.
“This will enable us to focus on our campaign goal – shedding light on the need for the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) to update the OST before it is dangerously dropped by space faring nations – something that looks to be a very real risk.”
To date, 1,110 people have purchased their cent’s worth of the red planet. Which mean over 11,000 acres of Martian land have already been sold to colonial earthlings.
The mars.sale website reads, “Now that gets you a legal claim to land on Mars that is one thousand times cheaper than most of those novelty Moon/Mars deeds that are being sold out there! Please do make your own comparisons and read further into all this and you will see ours is the strongest and only truly legal claim to land on Mars.”
Well there’s a lot of little green men who may just disagree with you on that one fella!
[Photo by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Getty Images]