With the issue of galactic ownership in disarray, and different countries signed up to varying codes of practice, Davies soon concluded that there is an increasing risk, if not of interstellar war, then at least of the gradual militarization of space. Something, he decided, needed to be done.

“I remember thinking that the celestial deeds salesmen had been pretty lazy,” said Davies. “Sure, they were making buckets of cash from selling these deeds, which are pretty much the equivalent of ‘World’s Best Dad’ certificates, but they hadn’t tried very hard to legally define their business.”

The legal criticism of Hope and his various franchisees around the world (the U.K. wing of The Lunar Embassy is MoonEstates.com; Angela Young, who runs the site from her home in Cornwall, told me the company has sold more than a million plots of lunar land in the United Kingdom and Ireland) is that nobody can make a statement of ownership without so-called “actions-of-ownership.” For example, when, in 1965, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management received a homestead claim for a lunar plot close to the Sea of Tranquility, a representative told the applicants that they would need to establish residence for at least six months in order to claim the site.

“I wondered if it was indeed possible to get closer to a legally entitled position for ownership of a celestial body,” Davies said. “At this point I didn’t think about where this was all taking me … I just followed my nose.”

As Davies continued to research property law, a plan began to form in his mind. “I’d read Brownlie’s Principles of Public International Law, which equates Effective Occupation to factual possession.” In other words, Davies surmised, if he could find a way to squat Mars, he might be able to claim squatter’s rights.

At first Davies worried that he’d need to find a way to get to Mars to prove occupation. Then he read a provision that stated, when it comes to hard-to-reach areas of land on Earth, the Arctic, Antarctic, and so on, there is no requirement for a claimant to have actually visited the place. All one has to do is carry out exclusive and obvious governance activities or initiate early measures to make the land ready for future use.

That’s when Davies ordered his first laser.

A few months earlier, he had read an article in National Geographic titled “Making Mars the New Earth.” The piece argued that, if humans were able to cause a three-degree rise in the average temperature on the planet, they would trigger a greenhouse reaction that could make life on the planet viable. “All the planet needs to recapture its salad days is a gardener with a big budget,” wrote the article’s author.

“Using a bit of simple physics, taking into account laser specs, air mass, and our distance to Mars, I realized that, with a good aim, I could definitely smash laser photons into Mars. If these were focused on a patch of ground, they would cause bio-chemical reactions.”

Davies ordered four handheld lasers, a model that had been awarded a Guinness World Record for their unusual strength, from Hong Kong. When they arrived in March 2010, Davies fastened them to the telescope, found Mars in its viewfinder, and switched on the lasers.

On a tiny patch of ground, nearly 140 million miles from his home in Hampshire, a doctor had begun the work of terraforming Mars.

As the weeks went by, Davies added new features to his array of lasers. Using a sheet of cardboard and a metronome, he built a system to send a Morse Code message. It read: “I, Philip Davies, peacefully lay claim to possession of Planet Mars.”

He bought a new automatic telescope to track the planet so he wouldn’t have to follow it manually, and upgraded to 3,500 milliwatt Class 4 blue lasers (he now also uses an Android app to regulate the Morse Code messages).

While the lasers have a tight beam, over the huge distance from Earth to Mars the laser diverges such that its diameter is at least 30 times the diameter of Mars when it arrives. Even so, when Mars is at its closest to Earth (which happens once every two years) Davies has calculated that 122 photons per square meter reach the planet’s surface.

With the setup, he’s ensured that as long as Mars is visible from his house and is outside the operating hours of a local airport, the planet is being hit by one of his beams.

“I have been lasering Mars for six years now,” he said.

For the past 12 months, however, the focus of Davies’s work has moved into his legal claim, which a university professor of international law who wishes to remain anonymous believes is “industrious” and “genuinely competitive.”

Davies has been open about his scheme, registering the Twitter accounts @IClaimMars (sample tweet: “May was fab for Mars. Clear skies meant many nights using powerful lasers”) and @TrustMars, to tell the world about his project.

In early June, he wrote to a UN ambassador to explain his plan. He was passed on to Helen Mulvein, a UN senior legal counselor. Mulvein is pragmatic about Davies’s scheme. While the UN is trying hard to ensure a peaceful space, she said, the concept of celestial trusteeship by the UN was not something that was likely to be considered.

This polite, firm rejection has not dampened the doctor’s determination. (“I appreciate her straight and limited answers,” he said). Later this year Davies plans to go back to Mulvein with a few thousand co-claimants and a formal Application for First Registration to Land on Mars. “I will insist that she does a quick assessment of the legal merit of our case and forward it to the appropriate department,” he said. Six years is, he believes, a sufficient period of “exclusive possession” to bolster his claim.

Indeed, Davies’s solution technically satisfies the usual legal criteria for possession of remote land on Earth, but he remains uncertain as to whether or not the claim will be upheld. It may not matter. For Davies, unlike many of those who came before him, the goal has not been to profit from the stars, but rather to agitate a change in legislation. “The most likely positive outcome would be that our campaign irritates the Space Faring Nations into composing a new treaty which deals with space business, limits weapons, and prevents the sort of celestial land appropriation that we are attempting,” he said.

The difficulty will be in getting the UN to hear him out. Numbers matter. As such, he’s set up a website selling plots of Mars, a copy of Hope’s dubious lunar scheme. Why would someone want a piece of Mars over the Moon? Simple: Davies is drastically undercutting the competition. Ten acres of Mars costs just one cent.

“Look, my goal in all of this is not really the future ownership of Mars,” he said. “Rather, I want the UN to put Mars land in trust with UN Trusteeship. The reason for the website? I will have greater lobbying power with more fellow land-claimants.”

It’s an investment opportunity, too. All land claimants will become contingent beneficiaries of the Mars Trust. Should the OST be redrafted, the UN will have the preferential right to acquire all claims for a nominal fee of $1,000.

“OK,” said Davies, “the chance of the UN paying money to our land claimants is small. But we will have the strongest claim to a celestial body that’s ever been made.” He believes the claim is not only strong, but also enduring.

“It will present a significant hurdle when those wealthy space-faring individuals or companies start to insist on celestial acquisition.”