When a friend recently directed me to LunarLand.com, a website that supposedly attempts to sell real estate on Earth's moon to terrestrial people in exchange for actual legal tender, I went through a few different stages of analysis and acceptance. At first I was a little offended that something so obviously absurd exists on the Internet and probably profits, then I registered some surprise at how clean and professional the site actually is. I mean, I expect something as silly as Lunar Land to be wrought with misspellings, all-caps text and many a broken table. The fact that it looks like a respectable website is actually a bit startling. At the next stage I came to my senses and assumed that the whole thing is an elaborate joke, a satire of Internet scams and corporate greed. Then I decided to read a little deeper, even into the often overlooked Terms of Service and I came to a bizarre, worrying conclusion: Lunar Land is not only real, it's actually legitimate and kind of ingenious.

In the Frequently Asked Questions section of Lunar Land it goes into the 40-year history of the celestial body real estate market in a narrative that sounds like an excellent deadpan of a very smart prank. It references such things as The United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the quixotic quest of a man named Dennis Hope who, as far back as 1980, supposedly filed an official claim to land speculation with the United States government with the express purpose of selling parcels of real estate on the moon. As much as it sounds like a joke, I did a little research and discovered that there is indeed a recognized, signed document known as The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies created by the United Nations. The document was first signed by the United States, the USSR and the United Kingdom in the winter of 1967 and has been in effect since the following autumn. Now every country in the world except for a few nations in Africa and South America has signed and officially recognized the treaty.

What's more, there are no current laws on the books in any country that expressly prohibit private ownership of land outside of Earth. Sure, there are laws against keeping weapons of mass destruction (but not conventional weapons) in orbit and doing military exercises in space, but no government has made it illegal to prospect on extraterrestrial land that currently can't legally belong to an existing government. None of these countries have gone so far as to recognize the many deeds sold for land on the moon, Mars and other non-Earth locales, but they'd have a bit of a problem contesting any of this stuff down the line.

Now, I don't actually believe that Lunar Land or any of its contemporaries will ever be capable of staking their claims and it's currently not even possible to homestead places like the Sea of Tranquility, but the existence of funny laws has a way of resulting in some strange, even revolutionary events. When multi-billion dollar corporations decide to start the off-world land grab, they're going to have legal precedent to do so. Thanks to Cold War paranoia, we can look forward to Virgin Moon and the Capitol Records Mars Hydroponics Lab.

Hell, maybe it won't work out this way, but it's still worth thinking about. Lunar Land is one of many things on the Internet that seem like indications, even warning signs, of a very weird future. That, or it's the most complicated, glorious bid to use the Internet to make a lot of money selling absolutely nothing to gullible strangers. Beats the hell out of $5 prayer medicine, anyway.