Can Collective Ownership Save the Environment (and the Moon)?

Let’s not mince words — Earth is in serious trouble. Every day, our environment is suffering under the duress of sustaining an exponentially rising — and careless — human population. Every day we, as a species, make questionable decisions that favor short term — albeit unsustainable — gains rather than long term stewardship of the planet and its resources.

How did it come to be like this? Which system or set of practices is enabling us to eradicate, pollute, and irreparably harm the very place in which we live? While there are many and varied possible answers to our query, we aim to posit only one part of the equation. Private exploitation of resources that should belong to a public commons is a major contributing factor to the current devastation the Earth is slammed with.

When we refer to a public commons, what we mean is this: Natural areas of vast resource, beauty, and ecological diversity should be collectively owned by a diverse array of interests rather than by private and national ones. A diverse array of interests might look like a distributed consortium containing environmentalist groups, teacher’s unions, exploratory drilling committees, sports teams, corporations, non-profits, and private individuals.

A diverse collective of owners holding land in the Arctic might, for example, become deadlocked over whether to allow the exploratory drilling committee to go forward with plans to drill. Even if that land fell under a national territory, which in most circumstances would allow for the drilling to go forward, the collective’s impasse would stall the project. Such a collective, representing interests from so many angles, would form a sample of the population in general, and could be a better way to regulate the types of projects that have repercussions for the entire planet.

Why We Need to Save the Moon Now

As the situation currently stands, there isn’t an immediate path to collectively owning and regulating activities within places of great ecological importance like the Amazon, the forest of the America’s Pacific Northwest, and Taiwan’s mountainous forests. Looking out into the murky future, it’s possible to envision a time when the Earth’s treasures have been extracted, as a vampire might do, by the private interests given free rein to profit as they please.

A scenario like that, along with increased technological capability, might lead those same private interests to the lunar surface where there are untapped natural (and valuable) resources such as helium–3. You’ve surely seen enough dystopian sci-fi movies to imagine how this plotline goes.

1. Evil corporations set out into space

2. Said corporations discover vast troves of exploitable resources on moons, planets, and other celestial bodies

3. Back on Earth, humanity toils in an overpopulated, heavily polluted, and bleak global society

4. Evil corporations recruit desperate Earthlings to terraform distant colonies.

While such plots may seem like nothing but novel storytelling to some, their plausibility is all too real considering the list of companies lining up to make it to the moon. Private interests like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Scaled Composites, and others are chomping at the bit to be the first private companies to make it to the moon. Because their main motivation is profit, a company like Scaled Composites will help an exploratory lunar drilling outfit send their crew up, where they’ll strike lunar gold, sparking a cosmic gold rush.

To prevent such scenarios from occurring, we’re in a position now to lay public claim on the moon before private companies and individuals do.

Diana: A Platform for Collective Ownership of the Moon

The tools for registering collective ownership of the moon are not a distant developer’s dream in a galaxy far far away. No, the tools are already here, and they’ve been built by the dedicated team of Diana developers.

Diana is a platform for registering and creating collective ownership of the moon. We’ve divided the moon into billions of equally sized parcels. To own a piece of the moon, all one needs to do is register on the Diana.io platform. After doing so, you’ll be issued a DIA tokens which represent your ownership and give you the right to your lunar claim in the future.

Anyone can register their own piece of lunar land, creating the world’s first public registry of collective ownership using blockchain technology. In this way, lunar land registration is immutably recorded to a decentralized ledger which makes it impossible for the registration record ever to be tampered with, edited, or erased.

Can collective ownership save the environment? After testing the concept off-planet using the moon as a preliminary testing grounds, we might find inspiring success in the model and deploy it to save our precious lands.

To join the Diana movement, visit Diana.io.