I think the solution will involve some sort of ownership of space-time where owners of pieces of space in orbit possess the land at its current location and at all future times.
This requires solving the n-body problem, right? In practice in our solar system I assume we can do pretty well for… thousands of years in advance but not millions, at a guess? But like, if your proposed tax system can’t deal with possible ownership ambiguity in millions of years, is it even worth considering?
And that assumes no one deliberately moves a large mass somewhere unexpected.
Yeah I think a lot of it will have to be resolved at a more “local” level.
For example, for people in a star system, it might make more sense to define all land with respect to individual planets (“Bob owns 1 acre on Mars’ north pole”, “Alice owns all of L4″ etc.) and forbid people from owning stationary pieces of space. I don’t have the details of this fleshed out, but it seems like within a star system, its possible to come up with a sensible set of rules and have the edge cases hashed out by local courts.
For the specific problem of predicting planetary orbits, if we can predict 1000 years in the future, it seems like the time-path of land ownership could be updated automatically every 100 years or so, so I don’t expect there to be huge surprises there.
For taxation across star systems, I’m having trouble thinking of a case where there might be ownership ambiguity given how far apart they are. For example, even when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide, its unlikely that any stars will collide. Once again, this seems like something that can be solved by local agreements where owners of conflicting claims renegotiate them as needed.
100 years wouldn’t really work for claims without huge buffer zones, since the precision and accuracy of future predictions of the positions of n-body system decays exponentially the further ahead you go.
Even assuming that such a society will spend compute on plotting claims equivalent to our current fastest supercomputers multiple by several orders of magnitude. (Ignoring the likelihood that such a society with such resources would have found an even better local maxima of taxation system)
Maybe 100 hours between updates could work, depending on desired positioning accuracy and precision.
This requires solving the n-body problem, right? In practice in our solar system I assume we can do pretty well for… thousands of years in advance but not millions, at a guess? But like, if your proposed tax system can’t deal with possible ownership ambiguity in millions of years, is it even worth considering?
And that assumes no one deliberately moves a large mass somewhere unexpected.
Yeah I think a lot of it will have to be resolved at a more “local” level.
For example, for people in a star system, it might make more sense to define all land with respect to individual planets (“Bob owns 1 acre on Mars’ north pole”, “Alice owns all of L4″ etc.) and forbid people from owning stationary pieces of space. I don’t have the details of this fleshed out, but it seems like within a star system, its possible to come up with a sensible set of rules and have the edge cases hashed out by local courts.
For the specific problem of predicting planetary orbits, if we can predict 1000 years in the future, it seems like the time-path of land ownership could be updated automatically every 100 years or so, so I don’t expect there to be huge surprises there.
For taxation across star systems, I’m having trouble thinking of a case where there might be ownership ambiguity given how far apart they are. For example, even when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide, its unlikely that any stars will collide. Once again, this seems like something that can be solved by local agreements where owners of conflicting claims renegotiate them as needed.
100 years wouldn’t really work for claims without huge buffer zones, since the precision and accuracy of future predictions of the positions of n-body system decays exponentially the further ahead you go.
Even assuming that such a society will spend compute on plotting claims equivalent to our current fastest supercomputers multiple by several orders of magnitude. (Ignoring the likelihood that such a society with such resources would have found an even better local maxima of taxation system)
Maybe 100 hours between updates could work, depending on desired positioning accuracy and precision.