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Comment by b800h | Hacker News Reader

In molecular biology, it's generally considered good practice to avoid giving things stupid names, principally because telling someone "your child has a mutation in their Sonic Hedgehog gene, and will suffer intellectual disability" isn't the greatest thing in the world.

I don't see why this shouldn't hold for these sorts of discoveries ("BEBOP" in this case) - it's just a sort of weird namespace pollution for the language. Or perhaps I'm just an old curmudgeon.

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I can’t see where the name for an exoplanet being silly affects humans directly though, unlike your molecular biology example. We’re never visiting there, sadly, so why not add some whimsy to what are otherwise staid research outcomes?

But what happens when they visit here, and then while they're on the fence of us being friendly discover what name we refer to them as and then just decide the universe is better off without us?

In molecular biology, you are doing research that will affect people's health. Out of respect for people who will be diagnosed with illness, you choose nomenclature carefully.

We are unlikely to ever visit BEBOP. In short, it doesn't matter. But if we identified a very large impactor heading towards Earth, I suspect we might have a care in the naming instead of calling the asteroid something silly, such as "Butthead".[1]

[1] _ This is not intended to be a possible name for future very large impactors.

You mostly can't shame all of humanity at the same time (shame doesn't work like that). So even something like "The Big Bunny Ass asteroid is predicted to collide with Earth in 12 years and kill 5 billion people" doesn't get the same reaction as the Sonic gene from the example.

But the tradition from physics (and the closest areas, like astronomy) of using silly names does make it sound a lot like witchcraft. What is very funny for some people, and enraging for others.

I agree that a "Sonic Hedgehog" gene would sound silly but honestly I don't see how "BEBOP" qualifies as silly. What would be the better alternative? Cultural references are a good way to name things. A style of jazz is not a bad choice.

Additionally:

  The newfound world is called BEBOP-1c, after the name of the project that collected the data, BEBOP, which stands for Binaries Escorted By Orbiting Planets. (BEBOP-1 is another name for the binary system TOI-1338.)

How silly the name sounds depends on whether it brings to mind a style of jazz or a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles henchman.

To me, it calls back to Cowboy Bebop, when combined with the fact it's an exoplanet!

The likelihood of an exoplanet being part of a discussion with deeply personal implications seems extremely low to me.

If we ever, I don't know, make contact or send a mission to one of these planets, we can probably handle renaming it.

How is this any worse than, say, how we've named our local planets? Those are also cultural references - they're just ones that you're already used to.

I often see tangentially related things like this brought up in astronomy related posts.

I think it's because people don't know very much about astronomy but they want to sound smart so they pivot to an opinion on a subjective but related subject.

Its way more rememberable then QX-19x$x which is what you would get basically with crocford encoding. "Stupid names" FTW!

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