how deep does sovereignty go?

[Aloysius]

soo.... how deep into the ground do you have to go before you're out of a country? lol... do we have 3-D claims to land? what if you were to take like 600 ft deep worth of land and move it somewhere else? would that land still belong to the other country? or would only the big hole in the ground still belong to that country? and what about the person that owned the property... like, say I owned 1 acre of land... but I took that 1 acre and transplanted the whole thing out of the country... do I only pay property tax on the big hole in the ground? or am I still paying property tax for that big hunk of dirt? is property considered then just a place, or actually a peice of land?


just my little musings... don't mind me. so what's the law say? anyone know?

[iggy]

Hmmm, my guess would be paying taxes on the hole

[Aloysius]

cool... so you could then just buy a peice of property, dig it all out and have it shipped out into international waters to make an island... then declare bankrupcy in the US and move out of the US and live on your island... and you'd be your own country? lol

or perhaps this is all sounding very insane! mwahahahaha

[iggy]

[Aloysius]

okay okay, so you'd have to have a ton of hellicopters or something to be able to move that much land... but it's theoretically possible!

[SarahB]

[quote name='iggy' date='Jun 1 2005, 11:39 AM'] Hmmm, my guess would be paying taxes on the hole [/quote]
And your property assesment would probably go up.

[1337 k4th0l1x0r]

You need to research real vs. personal property and how mineral rights work. You only have mineral rights to your property down to a certain depth, depending on where you live. Real property is land that you live on and anything affixed to the land, such as a house or a tree. You can make real property personal property by, for example, cutting down the tree or digging it out of the ground. If you have mineral rights to your land you could conceivably move it out of the ground into international waters and form your own country. There are great geological issues with doing this. For example, unless the land is made out of certain types of rock it would erode quickly in the ocean. Also the sheer volume of rock to be displaced would require at least a good fraction of the total energy production of the Earth in a year. For example, if you wanted a 1 mi^2 island in 5 mi deep of ocean, you'd need to displace 5 cubic miles of rock first. The explosive Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980 displaced about 1 mi^3. Most of this was on the surface. Just moving 5 mi^3 in a 1 mi^2 cross-sectional area to the surface would require... 4.1x10^18 J, which is about 1% of the world's energy consumption in a year. This doesn't even account for packaging the rock for transport, transporting it, or putting it down into the ocean.

[iggy]

[quote name='1337 k4th0l1x0r' date='Jun 1 2005, 12:59 PM'] You need to research real vs. personal property and how mineral rights work. You only have mineral rights to your property down to a certain depth, depending on where you live. Real property is land that you live on and anything affixed to the land, such as a house or a tree. You can make real property personal property by, for example, cutting down the tree or digging it out of the ground. If you have mineral rights to your land you could conceivably move it out of the ground into international waters and form your own country. There are great geological issues with doing this. For example, unless the land is made out of certain types of rock it would erode quickly in the ocean. Also the sheer volume of rock to be displaced would require at least a good fraction of the total energy production of the Earth in a year. For example, if you wanted a 1 mi^2 island in 5 mi deep of ocean, you'd need to displace 5 cubic miles of rock first. The explosive Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980 displaced about 1 mi^3. Most of this was on the surface. Just moving 5 mi^3 in a 1 mi^2 cross-sectional area to the surface would require... 4.1x10^18 J, which is about 1% of the world's energy consumption in a year. This doesn't even account for packaging the rock for transport, transporting it, or putting it down into the ocean. [/quote]
If only more men talked like that :wub:

[KizlarAgha]

On the bright side, if you lived underground you could tap into geothermal forms of energy more readily.

[Aloysius]

lol I'm not really serious here... though I would be interested in taking a peice of land and putting it AFLOAT on a barge of some sort

so how deep underground would I have to live to escape the jurisdiction of the state? lol

[KizlarAgha]

[quote name='Aloysius' date='Jun 1 2005, 01:21 PM'] lol I'm not really serious here... though I would be interested in taking a peice of land and putting it AFLOAT on a barge of some sort

so how deep underground would I have to live to escape the jurisdiction of the state? lol [/quote]
I don't think you could. I think sovereignity goes down as far as the earth's crust. Otherwise people would be drilling oil in other people's countries with long pipes and wells.

[KizlarAgha]

You know, I'm surprised you haven't thought of the obvious solution:

Space, the final frontier, these are the voyages of the starship Luxmaria. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds, bring the gospel to new life and new civilizations, to boldy go where no Catholic has gone before.

[Aloysius]

lol... now THAT would be something. so who's gonna get started on the starship designs?

they say (and by they I mean the other crazy people on the internet I've found) that colonization of the ocean by seasteads is the first step towards colonizing space. many of the same problems would be posed and solved et cetera et cetera.

[1337 k4th0l1x0r]

[quote name='Aloysius' date='Jun 1 2005, 01:21 PM'] lol I'm not really serious here... though I would be interested in taking a peice of land and putting it AFLOAT on a barge of some sort

so how deep underground would I have to live to escape the jurisdiction of the state? lol [/quote]
Once you extract anything from the ground it's yours. For example, if you buy topsoil from a farmer in France and sprinkle it on your front lawn in America, it doesn't change the status of your lawn. Nor are you carrying something that is the sovereign property of France while you're on the plane ride home. The tricky thing would be going too far down and taking rock that someone else has the mineral rights to.

[KizlarAgha]

[quote name='1337 k4th0l1x0r' date='Jun 1 2005, 01:29 PM'] Once you extract anything from the ground it's yours. For example, if you buy topsoil from a farmer in France and sprinkle it on your front lawn in America, it doesn't change the status of your lawn. Nor are you carrying something that is the sovereign property of France while you're on the plane ride home. The tricky thing would be going too far down and taking rock that someone else has the mineral rights to. [/quote]
In my estimation, the real tricky thing would be getting enough good quality soil to farm at sea. The world is filled with unarable lands and the arable land is rapidly being used up by advanced farming techniques. Maybe you could have a miracle grow barge??

The other problem is that the nutrients in the soil would be gone after one season. Without an ecosystem to support it you'd go broke on the fertilizer costs alone.