Probaby a “wandering planet”. They must have accepted that there are bodies that were giant rocks orbiting a star that had something cause them to deorbit and drift in interstellar space.
I’ve read too much SciFi to remember offhand if they exist, and my brain is downclocked from overheating right now so I’m not loading the paper.
Re the cartoon idea, when Pluto was downgraded, Jonathan Coulton recorded a lovely song of consolation sung to Pluto by its so-called moon Charon — so-called because the Pluto/Charon center of mass is actually outside of Pluto itself, so really both bodies revolve around each other. Hence the refrain: “I’m your moon / You’re my moon / We go round and round / From out here, it’s the rest of the world that looks so small / Promise me you will always remember who you are…”
Likewise we could have “standard elements” as a scientific, albiet clunky, way of referring to all those newfangled things like helium and lithium, thus allowing us to keep using “element” to exclusively refer to the original elements: earth, air, water, fire and Bruce Willis.
I’m sure we’ll need a few others. “Standard plants,” for instance, which use the boring, egg-headed definitions of plantae, and regular ol’ plants, which include mushrooms and corals.
if you want. i was really only offering a solution for one naming problem, not all of them. where would the world even start with the term “fish” after all?
that one might be awkward, if only because “planet” means “wanderer” in (ancient?) greek
Pluto was so shunned by the Science Community, that plutonium is no longer a considered a metal, they cooled on plutonic, and plutocrats were chased through the streets in derision.
: Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces — surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
Semi-justified. It doesn’t hold in any non-Euclidean geometry. e.g. Spherical. Example - there’s a equilateral triangle in spherical geometry with 3 right angles - e.g. if the Earth was a sphere take corners at the north pole, and on the equator on the UTC+0 time zone line and the UTC+6 time zone line.
The lovely thing about science is that it changes to fit new data. Astronomers of the 1930s had no idea about the Kuiper Belt when Tombaugh discovered Pluto. The ironic thing is that the solar system and universe are vastly more interesting with a demoted Pluto. Sure, we lost a “planet,” but we gained so many other cool, intriguing worlds and celestial concepts with our increasing knowledge over the last century!