Let's say land ownership gave you complete ownership of the infinite wedge of space extending down from your plot of land to the center of the earth and extendi

Let's say land ownership gave you complete ownership of the infinite wedge of space extending down from your plot of land to the center of the earth and extending up from your plot of land out to infinity. We might give this imaginary system a fancy latin name: the ad coelum doctrine. In this world air travel would be next to impossible because you would need to find routes where you could negotiate passage with every land owner between point A and point B. That is obviously undesirable, cheap air travel is incredibly socially beneficial. This was the way common law worked for centuries. But once we invented air travel we quickly realized it was absurd and sharply restricted property rights and this does not seem to have been a particularly big blow to "liberal democracy". when you have a bad law it is perfectly fine to realize you have made a mistake and then change the law. Our current system is absurd, "we've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it", let's change the law and take ourselves to a somewhere less absurd timeline.