Asteroid Mining is now Legal in the United States. What About the Rest of the World?

Who owns asteroids in outer space? What about if you go up and take a chunk out of one, who owns that bit? According to a newly signed law, you own whatever asteroid resources you manage to obtain—but it only applies if you’re a US citizen.

President Obama signed the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act into law on 25 November 2015. Among other things, the Act essentially opens the prospect of asteroid mining up to commercial entities in the US. It states:

A United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.

The broader space community is, however, not completely enthusiastic about the US’s finders-keepers policy, with some experts claiming the new law may even be at odds with international space law.

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What Language Will the World Speak in 2215?

Thankfully, fears that English will become the world’s only language are premature. Few are so pessimistic as to suppose that there will not continue to be a multiplicity of nations and cultures on our planet and, along with them, various languages besides English. It is difficult, after all, to interrupt something as intimate and spontaneous as what language people speak to their children. Who truly imagines a Japan with no Japanese or a Greece with no Greek? The spread of English just means that earthlings will tend to use a local language in their own orbit and English for communication beyond.

But the days when English shared the planet with thousands of other languages are numbered. A traveler to the future, a century from now, is likely to notice two things about the language landscape of Earth. One, there will be vastly fewer languages. Two, languages will often be less complicated than they are today—especially in how they are spoken as opposed to how they are written.

Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world’s language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that’s unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons.

Also, the tones of Chinese are extremely difficult to learn beyond childhood, and truly mastering the writing system virtually requires having been born to it. In the past, of course, notoriously challenging languages such as Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Arabic, Russian and even Chinese have been embraced by vast numbers of people. But now that English has settled in, its approachability as compared with Chinese will discourage its replacement. Many a world power has ruled without spreading its language, and just as the Mongols and Manchus once ruled China while leaving Chinese intact, if the Chinese rule the world, they will likely do so in English.

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US Economy Grows While Many Developed Nations are Struggling

While the U.S. economy grew from July through September at the fastest pace in more than a decade, most other major economies have been struggling.

Europe is straining just to grow. So is Brazil. Japan has slid into recession. China is trying to manage a slowdown. Russia foresees a recession next year.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy accelerated at a robust 5 percent annual rate last quarter.

"The U.S. is easily top of the charts in the developed world and frankly not half-bad by (faster) emerging-market standards," said Eric Lascelles, chief economist for RBC Global Asset Management.

The United States has benefited from aggressive easy-money policies by the Federal Reserve, a banking system that rebounded from the 2008 financial crisis, solid consumer spending in areas like autos and a roaring stock market that has left many Americans feeling wealthier and more willing to spend.

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Is the US About to Enter a 1998 Style Boom?

THERE is a spring in America’s step these days. A revision released this week raised annualised economic growth in the third quarter to 3.9%; it has averaged more than 4% in the past two quarters. The irrepressible stockmarket keeps hitting new highs, the most recent on November 26th. Job growth is accelerating. This is all the more remarkable because the rest of the world has hit the buffers. Japan has slid into recession, Europe is flirting with deflation and China has cut interest rates as growth flags. On November 25th the OECD, a club mainly of rich countries, said its members’ economies will grow just 1.8% this year and 2.3% next, about half a point slower than projected in May. Risks, it said, are on the downside.

Why the divergence? In part, it is a statistical quirk. America’s economy shrank in the first quarter, so its recent strength is from a low base. Output in the third quarter was up an unspectacular 2.4% from a year earlier; the pace of growth in the current quarter will probably be similar. That is still much better than the rest of the world, though, for which there are two main reasons: trade remains a small part of America’s economy, and the rest of the world’s misfortunes actually help, by lowering interest rates and the oil price.


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Bruce Kasman of JPMorgan Chase says only three times in the past 25 years has the dollar risen and oil prices dropped as much as this year: in 2001 and 2008, when the world was entering recession, and in 1997-98, during the Asian financial crisis. The latter event was followed by a consumption boom in America, and he reckons it is the best parallel with the present. Global consumption, he notes, has been inversely related to headline inflation in recent years and this time will be no different. Lower inflation in America, he reckons, will boost purchasing power by 2% at an annualised rate over the current and coming quarters.

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IMF: China's Economy has Become the Largest in the World

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Have We Reached "Peak Farmland?" (DOOOOOOM)

The amount of land needed to grow crops worldwide is at a peak, and a geographical area more than twice the size of France will be able to return to its natural state by 2060 as a result of rising yields and slower population growth, a group of experts said on Monday.

Their report, conflicting with United Nations studies that say more cropland will be needed in coming decades to avert hunger and price spikes as the world population rises above 7 billion, said humanity had reached what it called "Peak Farmland".

More crops for use as biofuels and increased meat consumption in emerging economies such as China and India, demanding more cropland to feed livestock, would not offset a fall from the peak driven by improved yields, it calculated.

If the report is accurate, the land freed up from crop farming would be some 10 percent of what is currently in use - equivalent to 2.5 times the size of France, Europe's biggest country bar Russia, or more than all the arable land now utilized in China.

"We believe that humanity has reached Peak Farmland, and that a large net global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin," said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University in New York.

"Happily, the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers," he wrote in a speech about the study he led in the journal Population and Development Review.

The doom tag is just for James.