Slashdot Mirror
Trekkies Vote 'Vulcan' Into the Solar System
New submitter jollyrgr3 writes "If William Shatner gets his wish, one of Pluto's two new moons will be named Vulcan. The two small moons were discovered recently, and the SETI Institute launched an online poll to let people choose names. Captain Kirk himself suggested the names Vulcan and Romulus. Vulcan was accepted as a candidate, and Shatner exhorted his Twitter followers to vote. Vulcan ended up winning by a landslide, taking 174,000 of the 450,000 total responses. The next highest was Cerberus at just shy of 100,000. The names still have to be approved by the International Astronomical Union, as they have the final say. Leonard Nimoy approves."
I'm starting a NEW poll for Wookie and Ewok.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I can understand the "nerd" value for the story but on any given day there are about a dozen things more interesting in the world of astronomy that never get page space here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)
Vulcan was the name of the hypothetical planet between Mercury and the Sun.
Especially something that is going to crash and burn in a horrible way in the near future?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Shatner is a very funny man, who doesn't take himself very seriously.
Why wouldn't he have twitter followers?
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
...given that Vulcan was the god of fire and that moon is presumably rather cold.
While I'm a huge fan of Star Trek and Astronomy in general, I don't think a moon of Pluto should be called Vulcan. Why? The name "Vulcan" is from Roman mythology, and is the name of the Roman god of fire and volcanos. Last I checked, Pluto and it's moons were too far away from the Sun to have any connection to fire and volcanos. In other words, Pluto's moons are too far outside of the system to make the name "Vulcan" appropriate. I hope the IAU has the sense to name this moon after something that fits contextually.
Now if they'd discovered that Mercury had a moon, Vulcan would be the obvious choice!
A planet Norris would be neat. Add in all Chuck Norris jokes as a response.
so please call one "G spot"
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
It's a shame really that all those Trekkies are jumping on this bandwagon.
Just think how silly they'll feel when we start voting on names for exoplanets and the name Vulan is already in use.
One does not simply vote Vulcan into our solar system. It is 16 light years away.
sudo make me a sandwich
I voted for Orpheus and Eurydice. I thought it fitting that probably the last two decent-sized objects in the planetary part of the solar system be named after a man and his god-wife to symbolize humanity's progress.
Mythology notwithstanding, even in the Star Trek universe Vulcan is a hot desert planet. Not a cold, dead moon.
Make it so.
William Shatner has over 1.3 million Twitter followers. If we assume that every vote was thanks to his plea for votes, then he had about a 13% response rate. Not too shabby.
(For the record, Leonard Nimoy has 450,000 Twitter followers.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Oh, wait, wrong franchise.
174,000/450,000 is not a landslide.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Vulcan was a roman god. For Pete's sake, we name planets after gods. Not two-bit meteor sized moonlets of a minor planet smaller than our own moon. Vulcan should be reserved for some planet orbiting a star relatively nearby that we think has some possibility albeit remote of life, perhaps towards the warmer end of the habitable zone. Cerberus was a logical name for this moon, although I cannot believe it was not already used...
I guess now it is being downgraded to a moon of a former planet.
In keeping with the new Star Trek movies, they should be called "Lens" and "Flare".
"The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Yakir Aharonov
that will leave Cerberus and Styx as the winners. Rock on, I suppose.
And Pluto orbits William Shatner.
Do you any source that Pete really wants that? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We will take into consideration the results of the voting, but they are not binding. The discovery team, in consultation with the Nomenclature Working Groups of the International Astronomical Union, reserves the right to propose the names. Note that the International Astronomical Union has final authority over the naming of Pluto's moons.
IAU has the final say and would be likely to reject this name I would think for scientific consistency with their previous naming conventions.
And the discovers are not even saying they will propose this name to IAU - just that they will consider the voting.
So dont hold your breath !
That way, if any Vulcans or Romulans from an alternate dimension do wind up here, seeking "James Kirk" or "Spock", we can point at the visitors from the /finger quotes "Alternate dimension" /close finger quotes and mock and say, those barren cold moons of Pluto?? No frickin way!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Save the name Vulcan for a desert exoplanet. The Legion of Space, classic space opera by Jack Williamson, mentions a moon of Pluto named Cerberus. It's the only correct choice.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Why is the SETI Institute involved in naming objects in our solar system? That wasn't even close to their thing last I checked.
And If it was up for popular vote Pluto would be a planet.
Everyone who knows anything knows Vulcan orbits 40 Eridani A.
We just haven't found it, yet.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
These are the same idiots that did a write in campaign to have the first shuttle names Enterprise..even though it would never fly into orbit.
Oh look, it a references to a TV show I enjoy, we must mindlessly vote for it even though it is only a moon and nothing like the planet in my TV show.
Disgusting. If it was an extra solar planet? that would have been fine.
I say this and I am a Trekkie...just not a mindless one.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My money is on 2nd and 3rd choices:
Styx - a river in Greek mythology that formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld
Kerberos - a multi-headed hound which guards the gates of the Underworld, to prevent those who have crossed the river Styx from ever escaping
These form a nice pair and are themed on the transition from Earth to another world (the underworld) ...
Pluto is very much a transition from our planetary system to interstellar space (or at least the Oort cloud)
Astronomers do see still the romance in the skys and are quite apt to draw these parallels.
Naming some really cold moons of a planetoid after a widely-known fictional hot inhabited planet seems like a recipe for confusion.
I wasn't too keen on the idea either, until Leonard Nimoy approved. After all, he was the prototype Vulcan, and with his new career in erotic photography, he's quite well qualified to be naming moons...
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
If they call it Vulcan, JJ Abrams must blow it up.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
How about a revived effort to name a space station "Babylon"?
Space stations are far more important than planets anyway. What would you rather have named after you, a bustling 3D mega-city in space, or a spherical mountain somewhere far-off in the remote wilderness of the outer solar system?
What most people don't understand is that planets / moons are just chunks of natural resources for mining, and pretty inaccessible ones compared to smaller asteroids. We evolved on a planet, so we're biased, but if you really think about it - living on a planet is a nuisance! Most people living in space would choose to live on detached space stations instead.
Disadvantages of being attached to a planet include: approach difficulties, natural gravity, climate / weather, seasons, the "tragedy of the commons" of sharing one atmosphere (ex. pollution, diseases), lack of flexibility, etc. Robotized space manufacturing can print out vast space stations very easily, which can rotate for desired gravity, but planets come with their own gravity and make construction projects vastly more difficult. Space stations can be placed close to the sun for maximum solar panel efficiency, while most planets are far from the sun, and the sun's energy is further dissipated by the atmosphere, clouds, dust, etc.
(Make it worth my while, and I can go on about this for hundreds of pages...)
---
PS: "Live long and prosper"? Vulcans must really like Ray Kurzweil and Ayn Rand. 8-P
--libman
Damn, missed commenting by a hair. I wish I had Mod Points....
Clearly the only choice is to name the larger moon "Colbert."
Since some trekkie will think that naming the other one "Stewart" means Jean-Luc, maybe name it Tosh.0 instead.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
So does this mean Pluto is a planet again and they can go back to teaching it as such in schools? Or are they still considering it a moon that orbits nothing...
(Having sex outside your species is beastiality, even if they do look like member of your species with prosthetic rubber glued onto their faces, arms or tits.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Cerberus does it for me. Far more interesting than Star Trek, and just as worthwhile to acknowledge.
According to the dictionary a moon is: A natural satellite revolving around a planet. So how can Pluto have moons if it's not a planet anymore? Is there a more scientific definition of a moon, because I think we're just naming an asteroid at this point.