Antarctica. Home to the South Pole, Z, penguins, and about 5,000 people during the summers.

But less than 1,000 during the ever dark winter. No one lives on the continent permanently.

So who owns Antarctica? Most stuff outside national borders, the sea floor, the moon, really all of space, is the common heritage of mankind. It belongs to

none of us and all of us, held in trust for future generations. Which is nice, if perhaps

a bit presumptive, to say that the entire universe is ours, and maybe someone will have something

to say about that eventually, story for another time. But still, well done

humanity. Except it's never that simple, because the paperwork on Antarctica sort of says

common heritage of mankind, but it doesn't go all in. Here's why. Explorers started landing

in Antarctica in about the 1800s, planting flags and making claims, but these claims were a bit hollow because on the civilization tech tree, Antarctica wasn't colonizable.

Nonetheless, like monopoly, the optimal colonial strategy is claim everything you land on.

In the early 1900s, the UK toyed with claiming all of Antarctica before scaling back her ambitions to just the coastal part she had explored to the South Pole.

France also claimed coastal explorations to the Pole, followed by Norway, followed by the Nazis.

Mid-century, Argentina, and Chile claimed slices overlapping with the UK, who they figured was rather too busy at the time to care,

but later she and her now independent colonies totally did.

This left Antarctica a mess of competing claims at a bad time to have large territorial disputes.

Complicating things the United States and the Soviet Union gave themselves the right to make a claim onto Antarctica, not now, but maybe later.

Given this, quite remarkably in 1959, the US and USSR and 10 other countries, Argentina,

Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, and the UK,

made a treaty to ease the tensions, saying that on Antarctica, there would be no military,

no mining, and no nuclear exploding.

The Antarctic and paperwork is the first Cold War disarmament treaty and set aside

the continent for science and nature. By the way, because it's a nature preserve, there's a rule about

...