The Man Who Would Be King (of Mars)

Phil Davies doesn’t seem like a mad scientist bent on conquering another planet: he’s a mild-mannered general practitioner in a small town in southern England. But he is using science to craft a claim that he owns Mars, and he’s presented it to the United Nations. Some thirteen thousand people have signed on to his plan, purchasing rights to Davies’s putative land on Mars (rather cheaply). Davies thinks that the U.N. will have to rewrite the fifty-year-old Outer Space Treaty in order to stop him. But what’s a country doctor going to do with a planet, anyway? Simon Parkin goes to find out.