Granting Legal Rights to Extraterrestrials
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TThe successful film 1982 AND has made extraterrestrials easy to love. In the film, a crumpled extraterrestrial being with large expressive eyes – looking like the child in love with a turtle and a monkey – pulls a shelter in the house of a young boy named Elliott after having failed on earth. For the most part of the film, Elliott protects his friend from another world against government agents, who deal with and as a threat, in the same way that they could treat a deadly virus or an explosive device. And, which clearly displays the intelligence and a complex emotional life, has no rights.
While the popular film is entirely fictitious and scientists have not yet detected life outside the earth’s atmosphere, hunting has accelerated in recent years. With advanced telescopes, astronomers can now identify and image exoplanets and potentially habitable moons. They send autonomous probes to sample extraterrestrial atmospheres for signs of biological activity. And with Rovers like Perseverance, they are looking for biosignatures in Martian soil. These explorations and growing efforts to market space, give an emergency to ethical questions about extraterrestrial life. If living beings exist outside the earth and we face it with them, how to treat them? What types of rights should they have? And who decides?
Legal rights should be applied not only to earthly life, but to earth ecosystems.
Now a trio of UK scientists – an astrobiologist, an earth scientist and a legal scholar – has weighed on these issues. In a recently published Spatial policy Document, they suggest that a framework for the rights of extraterrestrial life should be inspired by the movement of “rights of nature”, which promotes a model of legal guardianship as a means of protecting forests, rivers, mountains, even individual ocean waves. Instead of obliging a person or a group to be proven before the court that it was injured by certain environmental disturbances, the framework of the rights of nature allows a person or a designated group to directly represent the forest or the river, which have their own rights. This supervisory model has been applied for a long time in cases where parties that cannot represent themselves, like children, must be protected.
The legal origins of the movement of the rights of nature date back to an article published in 1972 by the scientist Christopher Stone, entitled provocatively: “Should the trees have a legal position?” But it took a few decades at the idea of taking a momentum. Today, the rights of nature are a global phenomenon, consecrated in local and national governance and even in the constitutions of certain countries, such as the equator. The United Nations recently praised him as the fastest growth legal movement inst Century.
In their Spatial policy The document, the British academics account for the rights to the success of nature and suggest that the expansion of the “circle of rights beyond the earth” will oblige environmental conservation groups to unite their forces with groups that govern activities in space, such as the United Nations Office of External Space Affairs.
The legal position for extraterrestrial life could be obtained, they say, applying international environmental law, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, Spatial Missions and by creating a supervisory system that could represent ETS when missions are planned.
Legal rights should not only be granted to earthly life, but also to earthly ecosystems, write the authors. “This definition of and that we consider for standing position conforms to stone, the example of which most frequently used in” trees “was that of a river, an environment that hosts life while water is not itself alive.”
Of course, if smart extraterrestrials exist, they may well be able to speak for themselves, rather than require legal tutors to represent them. Thus, the authors are less worried about Spielbergian creatures and with an inner emotional life than the hidden microscopic ends which can hide under the ice on Europa, for example, and the vast liquid ocean which can nourish them. Be that as it may, the idea is to set up protections in advance and recognize the inherent law of all forms of life in the Cosmos to exist.
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Find out more about the rights of nature and extraterrestrials in the pages of NautilusDiscover these stories:
This ocean wave has rights: the true sense of legal protection for nature
This cloud forest should not exist: the story of an Ecuadorian forest that has fought annihilation and won
Who speaks for whales: the rights of cetaceans are not enough. They also deserve a representation.
If you meet and in space, kill it: if an extraterrestrial species resists, we will have discovered life
The chances that extraterrestrials exist have worsened: how geology resolves the paradox of Fermi
Image of lead: Galacticus / Shutterstock
