Separated by Physics: A Permanent Space Settlement Measured Against 1776
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Settlement advocates invoke the American frontier and the New World as precedents for a polity beyond Earth; the 1776 analogy is the strongest form of that claim, and it has not been tested against what it requires. This paper defines seven criteria for a governance rupture (C1-C7) with explicit thresholds, codes 1776, twenty-four comparison cases chosen by a stated rule and the prospective settlement against them from the cited literature, measures the structural preconditions of 1775 against the gate variables of a companion governance model, and traces three continuities: the corporate charter, the information revolution and the Roman legal grammar of property and authority. A permanent settlement beyond cislunar space would be the first polity whose separation from its founding States is set by physics and engineered survival: light time that rules out real-time government from Earth, together with survival dependence on engineered life support (C7). C7 is a definitional criterion chosen to capture that condition, which no terrestrial case can meet by construction; it is not a coding result. The testable claim is that the condition produces a distinct governance pathway, and §11 states the observations that would refute it. Measured against 1776, the reference rupture, such a settlement could reach the same magnitude only by meeting the four general criteria C1-C4 after it exists. On those criteria 1776 is not unique: with every defensible reading recorded for 1776 as for its rivals, no coded case meets all four on every reading, and of the twenty-five coded cases only 1776, the Soviet model and the European Union meet all four on at least one reading, while France, Haiti, Latin American independence and decolonization each fall short on one criterion. The claim is prospective, and delay alone does not discriminate, because the documented 1775 round trip of 119 d was about 3,800 times the 44.6 min maximum Earth-Mars round trip; the legal gap described below is a consequence of separation, not a further ground. A settlement at the companion model's Phase 4 date (Year 83.7, 13,996 residents) would hold about 1/153 of the 1770 colonial population, so autonomy and life-support closure would have to substitute for population, a substitution that no source located for this paper quantifies. Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty keeps settlers under registry-state jurisdiction, so a legal break would also be required. If Article II binds the resulting polity, a separated surface settlement would hold no territory and no category of Montevideo statehood would fit it, although the Sovereign Order of Malta and the Holy See show that international standing without territory is not unknown; for a floating habitat such as the companion model's Venus platform the legal category is open. Given life-support loop closure at the companion model's values, local power generation and local fabrication of control electronics would decide independence. A consumer contract already recognises "Mars as a free planet", a declaration of intent that binds no State. The rupture need not continue the 1776 trajectory of expanding liberty. --- Companion to: Kilgore, B.P., Governance Frameworks for Multigenerational Space Programs (Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20534772; version 2 in preparation). Files: manuscript PDF and Markdown source; s05_numbers.py (reproduces derived numbers; run with --check against the Markdown); recode.py (criteria codebook and Table 1 coding; requires the Comparative Constitutions Project chronology v6, see script); figures.py and figure PNGs.
Author: Kilgore, Brian P.
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222904569