It's Ted talks daily, Amelie's Hugh, this is wild. We could see people living and working on the moon within the next decade. I had no idea. But huge questions loom about governance, about colonialism of outer space and the dangers of recreating the same social problems on the moon that exist on Earth. In her Ted 20-20 talk space policy researcher Jeffie Kate Shindler shares what she's learned about a new opportunity to do things better to use the moon as a canvas to solve our biggest challenges on Earth.

Right now, there's a lot happening with the move. China has announced plans for an inhabited South Pole station by the twenty thirties, and the United States has an official roadmap seeking an increasing number of people living and working in space. This will start with NASA's Artemis program, an international program to send the first woman and the next man to the moon this decade. Billionaires and the private sector are getting involved in unprecedented ways. There are over 100 launch companies around the world and roughly a dozen private lunar transportation companies readying robotic missions to the lunar surface.

We have reusable rockets for the first time in human history. This will enable the development of infrastructure and utilization of resources. While estimates vary, scientists think there could be up to a billion metric tons of water ice on the moon. That's greater than the size of Lake Erie and enough water to support perhaps hundreds of thousands of people living and working on the moon.

So although official plans are always evolving, there's real reason to think that we could see people starting to live and work on the moon in the next decade. However, the moon is roughly the size of the continent of Africa, and we're starting to see that the key resources may be concentrated in small areas near the poles, this raises important questions about coordinating access to scarce resources.

And there are also legitimate questions about going to the moon, colonialism, cultural heritage and reproducing the systemic inequalities of today's capitalism. And more to the point, don't we have enough big challenges here on Earth, Internet governance, pandemics, terrorism, and perhaps most importantly, climate crisis and biodiversity loss? In some senses, the idea of the moon is just a destination embodies these problematic qualities, it conjures a frontier attitude of conquest, big rockets and expensive projects, competition and winning.

But what's most interesting about the moon isn't the billionaires with their rockets or the same old power struggle between states. In fact, it's not the hardware at all. It's the software. It's the norms, customs and laws. It's our social technologies. And it's the opportunity to update our democratic institutions and the rule of law to respond to a new era of planetary scale challenges. I'm going to tell you about how the moon can be a canvas for solving some of our biggest challenges here on Earth.

I've been kind of obsessed with this topic since I was a teenager. I've spent the last two decades working on international space policy, but also on small community projects with bottom of governance design. When I was 17, I went to a U.N. conference on the peaceful uses of outer space and Vienna over two weeks. One hundred and sixty young people from over 60 countries were crammed into a big hotel next to the UN building. We were invited to make recommendations to member states about the role of space in humanity's future.

After the conference, some of us were so inspired that we actually decided to keep living together. Now living with 20 people might sound kind of crazy, but over the years, it enabled us to create a high trust group that allowed us to experiment with these social technologies.

We design governance systems ranging from assigning a CEO to using a jury process. And as we grew into our careers and we moved from DC think tanks to working for NASA to starting our own companies. These experiments enabled us to see how even small groups could be a petri dish for important societal questions such as representation, sustainability or opportunity. People often talk about the moon as a petri dish or even a blank slate. But because of the legal agreements that govern the moon, it actually has something very important in common with our global challenges here on Earth.

They both involve issues that require us to think beyond territory and borders, meaning the moon is actually more of a template than a blank slate. Signed in nineteen sixty seven, the outer space treaty is the defining treaty governing activities in outer space, including the. And it has two key ingredients that radically alter the basis on which laws can be constructed. The first is a requirement for free access to all areas of a celestial body. And the second is that the moon and other celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriation.

Now, this is crazy because the entire Earth international system, the United Nations, the system of treaties and international agreements is built on the idea of state sovereignty, on the appropriation of land and resources within borders, and the autonomy to control free access within those borders. By doing away with both of these, we create the conditions for what are called the commons based on the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom. Global Commons are those resources that we all share that require us to work together to manage and protect important aspects of our survival and well-being, like climate or the oceans.

Commons based approaches offer a green field for institution design that's only beginning to be explored at the global and interplanetary level. What do property rights look like and how do we manage resources when the traditional tools of external authority and private property don't apply that we don't have all the answers climate, internet governance, authoritarianism. These are all deeply existential threats that we have failed to address with our current ways of thinking. Successful path forward will require us to develop new tools.

So how do we incorporate Commons based logic into our global and space institutions? Well, here's one attempt that came from an unlikely source as a young activist in World War Two, Arvid Pado was arrested for anti fascist organizing and held under a death sentence by the Gestapo after the war. He worked his way into the diplomatic corps, eventually becoming the first permanent representative of Malta to the United Nations. Part of that international law did not have the tools to address management of shared global resources, such as the high seas.

He also saw an opportunity to advocate for equitable sharing between nations in nineteen sixty seven, Pado gave a famous speech to the United Nations, introducing the idea that the oceans and their resources were the, quote, common heritage of mankind. The phrase was eventually adopted as part of the Law of the Seas treaty, probably the most sophisticated Commons management regime on the planet today.

It was seen as a watershed moment, a constitution for the seas. But the language proved so controversial that it took over 12 years to gain enough signatures for the treaty to enter into force, and some states still refused to sign. The objection was not so much about sharing persay, but the obligation to share. States felt that the principle of equality undermined their autonomy and state sovereignty, the same autonomy and state sovereignty that underpins international law. So in many ways, the story of the common heritage principle is a tragedy, but it's powerful because it makes plain the ways in which the current world order will put up antibodies and defenses and resist attempts at structural reform.

But here's the thing, the outer space treaty has already made these structural reforms at the height of the Cold War, terrified that each would get to the moon first, the United States and the USSR made the Westphalian equivalent of a deal with the devil. By requiring free access and preventing territorial appropriation, we are required to redesign our most basic institutions. And perhaps in doing so, learn something new we can apply here on Earth. So although the moon might seem a little far away sometimes, how we answer basic questions now will set precedent for who has a seat at the table and what consent looks like.

And these are questions of social technology, not rockets and hardware. In fact, these conversations are starting to happen right now, the space community is discussing basic shared agreements such as how do we designate lunar areas as heritage sites and how do we get permission for where to land when traditional external authority doesn't apply? How do we enforce requirements for coordination when it's against the rules to tell people where to go? And how do we manage access to scarce resources such as water, minerals or even the peace of eternal light craters that sit at just the right latitude to receive near constant exposure to sunlight and therefore power?

Now, some people think that the lack of rules on the moon is terrifying and there are legitimately some terrifying elements of it. If there are no rules on the moon, then won't we end up on a first come, first serve situation? And we might if we dismiss this moment. But not if we're willing to be bold and to engage the challenge. As we learned in our communities of self governance, it's easier to create something new than trying to dismantle the old and where else but the moon.

Can we prototype new institutions at global scale in a self-contained environment with the exact design constraints needed for our biggest challenges here on Earth? Back in nineteen ninety nine, the United Nations taught a group of young space geeks that we could think bigger, that we could impact nations if we chose to. Today, the stage is set for the next step to envision what comes after territory and borders. Thank you. PR ex.