Martian Naming Madness

Macblaster writes "With the rise of robotic exploration of Mars, scientists are having difficulty naming all the new features they're discovering. Accepted name lists have fallen by the wayside, and now scientifically important features are named after everything from 80's bands to romantic interests." From the article: "Like European explorers who named the New World after their homes in the Old, the Mars scientists have filled the strange landscape of the Red Planet with a mishmash of modern life on Earth. The twin rover missions have forced scientists to come up with more than 4,000 names to mark everything from the majestic Columbia Hills to a few pebbles in the sand. The result is an extravagantly labeled map punctuated by the scientists' ever-changing preoccupations with history, holidays, monkeys, ice cream, cartoon characters, sushi, Mayan words, Scandinavian fish delicacies ... the list goes on and on."

Comments

Is it really necessary?

[Atario]

To name rocks, I mean? Ones that are smaller than, say, a city block?

Are people just bored or what?

Re:Is it really necessary?

[mrchaotica]

Not to mention that since Mars is close enough to be colonized relatively soon, perhaps the first settlers should be the ones to name the locations where they set up their colonies. I know I sure wouldn't want to be living somewhere called "SpongeBob!"

Re:Is it really necessary?

[rkcallaghan]

To name rocks, I mean? Ones that are smaller than, say, a city block?

I'm sure we won't be the first culture to 'discover' an area and start out with many small and localized names and eventually end up with a few that are still with us. And people throughout history have been naming ares smaller than what we consider a city block. (Like say, some hypothetical area in colonial england called "The Old Farm")

Likely, most of these names will become temporary scientific community jargon, and eventually replaced by something more serious than naming a local hill after a music club.

I do expect a few will stick though and it'd be interesting to see how the "telephone game" affects the history behind the more comical names that stuck.

~Rebecca

Uh?

[Jack Earl]

Smart enough to get to Mars, but not creative enough to think up new names for things...?

A little seriousness, a little fun...

[Paolo DF]

I understand that it's a tough task to come out with thousands of names, but it should be clear that it's a serious thing, and we can't screw a planet toponomasthic just because we are quite far from it.
A mix of fun and seriousness is due.
At least they shouldn't use names that are just a evident current trend.

They should hold a contest

[MichaelSmith]

....on the web page and collect a big list of proposed names. Filter out dupes and obsene references and then build an online queue of names.

You could almost automate the process. Optical software on the rover identifies rocks (that's what it is for). Ground based software associates identifiers with submitted names.

Ah, yes, I can see it now

[Anonymous Coward]

A: "The weathering on RNX-395 is more indicative of water than the conventional weathering on PTZ-867 and HOV-284. Turn a the rover a little left so we can go by IPF-270."
B: "I have no idea what you just said."

The problem with numbering schemes is that all the numbers sound alike to people, and that matching the density of the numbering to the density of the items is hard. It's good for stars and rocky solar bodies because you don't actually have to navigate those, and you're rarely going to want to refer to a number of them that are in the same area, specifically, in a single sentence. They're also going to stay in the same place.... once the Rover has gone by a bunch of small rocks, the next robot or person to visit that area isn't going to be able to find the same rocks. The wind's going to blow them about.

These names are essentially temporary and conversational. They're here for the nasa engineers to use when having an intense conversation about the right thing to do. They're much more like the names of cities or neighbourhoods. Just about every state in the US has a Columbus and a Springfield. Every city has a street named after Martin Luther King. The conversational convenience of knowing that you only have to use that easy to remember name in a specific context is much more useful than a collision-free system.

After all, who do you know that gives directions based on postal codes? "Yeah, you just go down past 98245, you'll see it on the left." The Postal Office needs this kind of addressing, but almost nobody else does.

Re:Ah, yes, I can see it now

[Frizzle Fry]

The problem with numbering schemes is that all the numbers sound alike to people

Of course, so do 80s rock bands.

Encroaching on IP

[FlynnMP3]

If this isn't a karma whoring subject, then I don't know what is. *smile*

A rock up there is named Spongebob Squarepants, with a feature on the rock named Patrick (Squarepants' friend & sidekick). I am sure the name is unofficial, well I hope it is anyway. With names taken from popular culture, somebody somewhere is going to get their panties in a bunch over it. What happens if a region starts getting names from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series? I mean, it was last year I think that the word 'moogle' was entered Dictionaries. That's pretty mainstream. Personally, I think that is a travesty.

Point being, if J. Rowlings takes offense at her names of characters and world in her books are starting to be used for features on Mars, then she might want some kind of compensation for them, maybe only a paraphysical presence in a future mars mission. But what if it comes later? Like all this IP submarining crap that is all the rage is legal and corporate circles these days.

Some dead tired scientist names a obvious shaped rock 'Big Mac'. McDonald's finds out about it 3 years later and wants a clause written in some contract somewhere that everytime a name is used from their menu, NASA has to pay royalties or some such. Or worse yet, could NASA be cohersed into commercial or corporate interests in a different way than they already are?

It's 5 o'clock in the AM where I am typing this message at and my brain is starting to hurt. I hate the fact that any resonably intelligent person now automatically starts thinking of how IP can be used in a negative light. However you want to characterise that.

-FlynnMP3

Re:Cultural Phenom

[eggegg]

If you read that list of names and felt like laughing, you are probably not black, and you are probably offended that rocks on Mars are getting silly names. On the other hand, if you don't care about those names and how non-standard they are, I bet you don't care what the rocks on Mars get called either.

Not really -- there aren't many NFL players (black or otherwise) named "Sashimi", "SpongeBob SquarePants", or "Be My Valentine". Names such as those you mentioned, while unfamiliar and foreign to the (white) American ear, would be vast improvements over the dictionary-attack-style naming described in the article. The adjectives "unique" and "silly" have entirely different meanings and when applied to naming conventions deliver entirely different results. Thing is, the examples given in TFA are not "silly" at all. Random yes, but more "stupid" than "silly" -- and certainly not "unique" enough to be originate from black or poor thought processes, apparently.

Do the creatively void, such as the persons mentioned in TFA, fall into an ethnic and economic stereotype as well? Or being a non-poor, white American myself, did I miss your implication?

Names, like history, are the story of the victor..

[Butt]

...and they don't last forever. In Australia and New Zealand, for example, names that were in place for hundreds (NZ) or thousands (Aust) years were ignored by the British settlers when naming them in the 18th/19th century. Slowly, more of them - particularly significant ones like mountains - are becoming known by their original names.

A lot of people view this as being PC, but I think a bigger issue is that the names actually had meaning for the original inhabitants and the stories of these names were recorded in song, visual arts, histories, etc. which gives them an ongoing reason to have the names. On the other hand, if you just give something a name because it's different than anything else, at some stage someone will have to make a name meaningful, and they'll do it without reference to the original. (When China settles Mars, for example, I'm sure they won't keep the English names).

biologists have been doing this for years

[The_Rook]

in biology, when someone discovers a new species, that person gets the right to name it. while most biologists will name new species after their mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, girlfiends, etc. some have been a bit more - creative.

some examples:
Eurygenius (pedilid beetle)
Ochisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Dolichisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Florichisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Marichisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Nanichisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Peggichisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Polychisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera) Kirkaldy was criticized for frivolity by the London Zoological Society in 1912.
Pieza deresistans Evenhuis, 2002 (mythicomyiid fly)
Lalapa lusa (tiphiid wasp)
Agra vation, Agra phobia (carabid beetles)

apparently, as long as the name can be made to sound vaguely greek or latin, it's acceptable. for more names try

http://home.earthlink.net/~misaak/taxonomy/taxPuns .html

or

http://home.earthlink.net/~johnepler/names.html