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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."
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.
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
...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).