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The Only Land No Country Will Claim
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Sortition: The Case for Government by Lottery
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The Wow! Signal
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Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

In an age when every scrap of habitable land on Earth is fiercely claimed, fenced, and fought over, there exists a strange exception: a patch of desert that two countries actively refuse to own. It is called Bir Tawil, a trapezoid of sun-baked Saharan desert on the border between Egypt and Sudan, covering around 2,060 square kilometers (roughly 800 square miles). Neither nation will claim it. That makes it one of the last genuine examples of terra nullius on the planet, Latin for "nobody's land." This is not a case of bureaucratic oversight or a forgotten corner left off the map. Both Egypt and Sudan have studied Bir Tawil carefully, and both have deliberately chosen to push it away, each insisting it belongs to the other. To understand why, you have to go back to two lines drawn on a map by British colonial administrators more than a century ago.

The whole bizarre situation springs from a disagreement over which of two borders is the real one. In 1899, when Britain controlled Egypt and jointly administered Sudan, officials drew a clean political boundary along the 22nd parallel of latitude. By that straight line, a coastal region on the Red Sea called the Halaib Triangle fell to Egypt, while landlocked Bir Tawil fell to Sudan. Just three years later, in 1902, the British redrew the boundary along tribal and administrative lines, and this new border flipped the two territories. Now the Halaib Triangle sat under Sudanese administration and Bir Tawil under Egyptian. Here is the crux of the problem. The Halaib Triangle is roughly ten times larger than Bir Tawil, sits on the strategically valuable Red Sea coast, and holds genuine mineral wealth, while Bir Tawil is nothing but waterless desert. Both countries want the valuable coastal triangle, and each clings to whichever of the two borders hands it to them. That locks them into a perfect stalemate. Whichever border gives you the Halaib Triangle automatically hands Bir Tawil to your rival. For either country to claim Bir Tawil, it would first have to abandon its claim to the far richer prize next door, a trade neither is willing to make.

So Bir Tawil sits in limbo, orphaned by cartography, and its emptiness has drawn a parade of dreamers from around the world. Because it appears, in the eyes of international law, to belong to no one, a steady trickle of hopefuls have traveled there to plant flags and declare themselves its ruler. The most famous is an American named Jeremiah Heaton, who trekked across the desert in 2014 to raise a flag and proclaim the "Kingdom of North Sudan," reportedly so that he could make his young daughter a real princess. Others have declared their own fanciful states from the comfort of the internet, filing online claims to land they have never seen. Yet all of these gestures share a quiet arrogance, because Bir Tawil is not truly empty at all. For centuries it has been crossed and used by the nomadic Ababda and Bishari peoples, who graze animals, dig for gold and move through the land according to their own ancient customs. The flags of visiting hobbyists and the claims of distant capitals mean little to them. It is a neat little lesson in how arbitrary the map of the world really is. We tend to imagine national borders as permanent and natural facts, yet here is a place that exists in a legal void purely because of two conflicting lines drawn by foreign officials over a century ago.

Imagine if, instead of electing your politicians, your country chose them the way it picks jurors, by pulling ordinary citizens' names at random from the population. It sounds absurd to the modern ear, yet this was the beating heart of the world's first democracy. In ancient Athens some 2,500 years ago, the Greeks practiced sortition, the selection of public officials by lottery. They saw it as the very essence of democratic rule. The Athenians elected only around 10 percent of their officials, the specialist roles like generals and treasurers where expertise genuinely mattered. The other 90 percent, roughly 600 of the 700 annual magistrates, along with the members of the powerful Council of 500 and the juries of the courts, were chosen entirely at random from the pool of eligible male citizens. To the Athenian mind, this was the only truly fair system, because it gave every citizen an equal chance to hold power, regardless of their wealth, their family connections, or their skill at making speeches.

The Athenians were serious enough about this that they engineered a remarkable machine to do it, a slab of stone called a kleroterion. Citizens who wished to serve inserted their personal identity tokens into a grid of slots carved into the stone. The operator then poured a cascade of black and white balls down a tube on the side, with each ball randomly selecting or rejecting an entire row of candidates at once. The design was beautifully simple and had one purpose, to make corruption almost impossible. No one could bribe or flatter their way into office when the choice was left to pure chance. The philosopher Aristotle captured the underlying logic with striking clarity, observing that choosing officials by lot is characteristic of democracy, while choosing them by election is characteristic of oligarchy, the rule of a wealthy few. The system worked alongside strict rules forbidding anyone from holding the same office twice. As a result, by some estimates well over half of all Athenian men over thirty served in government at some point in their lives. It created a culture of civic participation that is almost unimaginable today.

The idea faded for centuries, dismissed as a historical curiosity, but in recent years a growing chorus of thinkers has begun arguing that it is time to bring it back. The Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck lit the fuse with his influential 2016 book Against Elections, in which he argued that modern societies have become gripped by what he calls "electoral fundamentalism," worshipping the ballot box even as public trust in elected politicians collapses. The case for sortition is that a randomly chosen group of ordinary people would be a genuine cross-section of society, truly representative in a way no elected parliament of career politicians and lawyers ever is. Freed from the need to raise campaign money, win reelection, or toe a party line, such citizens could deliberate on problems honestly and in the public interest. This is no longer just theory. Citizens' assemblies chosen by lot are quietly spreading across the world, and the OECD has counted nearly 600 of them. Ireland famously used one to help break its bitter deadlock over abortion, gathering a random group of citizens who studied the issue in depth and paved the way for a national referendum. The obvious objection is that average people may not be equipped to make complex technical decisions. Supporters counter that these assemblies are given expert evidence and time to learn, much as a jury is walked through a complicated trial.

On the night of August 15, 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio heard something that has haunted astronomers ever since. The telescope, nicknamed "Big Ear," was a vast array the size of three football fields run by Ohio State University. For years it had quietly scanned the heavens as part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, listening for any whisper of alien life. A few days later, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman was leafing through the telescope's computer printouts, columns of numbers and letters representing the faint hiss of the cosmos. Suddenly a single vertical sequence leapt off the page. It read "6EQUJ5," a code indicating a signal of extraordinary strength, rising smoothly to a peak some thirty times louder than the background noise of space and then fading away. Ehman was so startled that he grabbed a red pen, circled the sequence, and scrawled a single word in the margin that would name the mystery forever. He wrote, simply, "Wow!"

Strength alone was not what made the signal so electrifying. It looked uncannily like the alien broadcast scientists had predicted. It was narrowband, meaning concentrated into a very tight range of frequencies, which is the hallmark of an artificial transmission rather than the broad static of a natural object like a star. More tantalizing still was its frequency, sitting almost precisely on the hydrogen line of 1420 megahertz. This is a deeply significant number, because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and resonates naturally at that frequency. SETI researchers had long reasoned that any intelligent civilization trying to make contact would logically choose it as a universal calling frequency, a cosmic meeting point any species would know to monitor. The signal came from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, from a patch of sky near a star group called Chi Sagittarii, and it lasted for exactly 72 seconds. That duration was itself revealing, because 72 seconds was precisely how long Big Ear's fixed gaze, carried by the Earth's rotation, would take to sweep past a single stationary point in the sky. The signal behaved exactly as a genuine source out in space should have behaved.

The most maddening part of the whole story is what happened next, which was nothing at all. Ehman and his colleagues trained the telescope on that same patch of Sagittarius again and again over the following months and years, desperate to hear it a second time, and the sky stayed silent. Other telescopes have searched the spot in the decades since, and the Wow! signal has never once repeated. That is what makes it impossible to resolve. Science demands that a result be reproducible before it can be believed, and a one-time event can never be confirmed. Scientists have proposed many down-to-earth explanations over the years, including signals reflected off tumbling space debris and, in a much-discussed 2017 theory, a cloud of hydrogen gas trailing a passing comet. Most researchers find that explanation unconvincing, since a diffuse comet cloud should not produce such a sharp, narrow signal, and the comets were not even confirmed to be there. Ehman himself remained cautious to the end, refusing to declare it was aliens while admitting no ordinary source fit the evidence.

Until next time — stay curious.
The A Little Wiser Team