A.C. G railing, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

You've written a book called Who Owns the Moon, which tracks some of the history of humanity's

attempts to claim ownership over lands like the Antarctic and the oceans and

also the scramble for Africa with a view towards suppose, essentially warning people about similar conflict being possible

as we begin to make travel to the moon a lot more easier and affordable.

The first question I have for you, which I know you've addressed in the book itself,

but for our audience, is why? Why choose to write about this? We have more than enough

conflicts already right here on planet Earth. Why should we be spending the time

thinking about what sounds a lot like a science fiction battle somewhere way off in the future in space?

Well it's a good question because you know the natural thing to think is that we should be devoting

our energies to trying to solve the problems that we're facing now.

But my point is that if we had fought ahead 20 years ago about some of the problems that we might be facing today,

then perhaps we could have either avoided or mitigated them.

And for that reason, now that we see that the scramble for the moon is really starting to take off,

it seems to me to be appropriate that we should try to put in place some sort of framework some set of

agreements about how things are going to happen out there because at the moment the

leading players in this scramble for the moon are agencies like on the one hand China and on the

other hand a lot of very wealthy individuals and private corporations who if they continue to operate pretty well as they're operating

now, are going to set the terms for how things develop, not just on the moon but in Mars and space in general.

And therefore if you look at the precedence and you mentioned there the Antarctic

and the oceans,

...