No More Lunar Land for Sale

dptalia writes "According to China Daily, Beijing authorities have shut down sales of lunar property. Apparently there's a "Lunar embassy" in China and they've sold 34 people deeds to land on the moon. Not too surprisingly, the government has declared this illegal. The Bejing office claims to be a satellite of the U.S. Lunar Embassy, run by Dennis Hope. Hope claims that while it is illegal for countries to stake a claim on the moon, it is legal for individuals and corporations to."

Legal according to...

[Hakubi_Washu]

The "Outer Space Treaty" [wikipedia.org] (Though the UN experts disagree slightly [wikipedia.org]), illegal according to the "Moon Treaty" [wikipedia.org], which wasn't much supported and probably would not be considered in case anyone challenged Hope on it. I'd assume these treaties are going to get revoked once anyone starts having serious interest in extraterrestrial property, but until then his claims are about the best you'll get, aside from the UNs opinion, which many here don't seem to care much about :-)

Re:Ahhhhh!

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Ahhh! You ended a sentence with a preposition!

Yeah, well this is English, not Latin.

Hurry! Only 8,940,583,419 acres remaining

[weighn]

OK, I got bored...surface area of the moon:
37.8 million square km [hawaii.edu]
or 9,340,583,419.46 acres [easysurf.cc]
subtract 400,000,000 acres which are pwned and you are left with...shitloads of infertile land, but what a view! B)

Re:Legal according to...

[SteveAyre]

The Moon Treaty wasn't signed by any of the space-faring countries though.

Re:What?

[MindStalker]

Well possibly they can, but it would still require proper claim rules. This means you actually have to go there to claim it.

Re:oldest dupe ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, the title is: "The Man Who Sold the Moon".

The fact that you got modded up is *very* sad.

This is nothing new ...

[PseudoQuant]

This man http://www.geocities.com/cjstender/McArdle.htm/ [geocities.com] has been selling plots of the moon for at about thirty years. I still have a certificate for the plot that I bought in the early eighties (just $1.00).

Free Minerva!

[JambisJubilee]

No joke:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Minerva [wikipedia.org]
http://www.minervanet.org/ [minervanet.org]