It's a solid angle basically, right ? That's a coordinate

It's a coordinate on the celestial sphere, which is just as good a coordinate as anything else. Now, if the title had said something like "place" you might have a case that the expectation is that a specific spacetime point is being defined.

Thank you for the clarification. My brain read the headline and imagined a combination of what3words and the stargate address system!

This is a complete tangent, but how would you identify which cubic volume you own?

Would it:

1. Somehow remain static as stars and planets moved through it?

2. Be relative to some coordinate system that we define?

3. Follow some object like an asteroid or planet?

Option (1) is literally impossible. We tend to think of space on Earth as something you can reliably divide up statically, e.g. you can divide the space inside a box up into cubic segments, and that works fine. But in that case, you've defined a coordinate system relative to the box, which is of course moving through space relative to everything else. You eliminate the motion issue by making everything relative to the box.

We can't meaningfully do anything similar for the space between astronomical objects. Everything is moving relative to everything else, and there's no way to "stick a pin" in space. In a very real sense, there is no such thing as a fixed, static volume of space - space is relational, it's what exists between separated objects, it's not an object that can be divided up statically. All the relevant physical theories - special and general relativity, and quantum physics - confirm this.

For option (2), we can try to define a box - a coordinate system relative to Earth, or the Sun, or the Milky Way galaxy, or the Local Group of galaxies, or the Laniekea supercluster, etc. But those are all moving relative to everything else, so any location we identify with coordinates based on that will similarly be moving. One day you might own a piece of space on one side of the Andromeda galaxy, the next day it would be out in intergalactic space (because at those distances, radial coordinates move fast!)

You might think that perhaps we can define coordinates relative to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) rest frame - the reference frame in which the CMB radiation looks uniform and identical in every direction, i.e. not redshifted or blueshifted. In a certain cosmological sense, this is a good candidate for the rest frame of the universe. But the problem is, how do you assign coordinate values to that? You're left with the same basic problem - any point you pick either can't be reliably identified, or is moving along with some chosen object.

Option (3) ends up being the most sensible, for the relational reason I mentioned: we can, in many cases, reliably identify a particular object in space. Now we're back to the "star registry" kinds of scenarios, where you "own" a star. Owning a piece of space can't really work.

This reminds me of xkcd/865.

Not any more. The governor of Wisconsin just renamed it.

They do this reachout all the time. I've got my (and family members) names on a usb stick held inside it and Mars lander (the non-mobile seismograph, whose name escapes me)

Just use a temp email (if they allow it) and screenshot the email you'll receive?

It's much like their previous stuff - e.g. send your name to the Moon.

And there's definitely cheaper approaches than sending a $2.7b telescope to L2.

Please see:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton

It’s something of a pity NASA doesn’t offer that chance to crush 1,000 independent peace loving democratic galaxies in my brutal rise to power as my soldier fanatics sweep the universe.

I’d pay for that. More exciting than owning a pixel.

Imagine the headlines NASA To Sell the Universe.

Later on you can hover over the image, and the tooltip will pop up the address. It will be a great resource for contacting interesting people! /s

The idea of personalised pixels goes back way before NFTs, such as The Million Dollar Homepage[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

So, simply a *centralized* database?

Like a plain old database ?

"NFT without the Blockchain" is a weird thing to say