[X] My Assistant

[nprev]

At last, a productive alternative to those 'name a star' ripoff artists! For US$10, you can "adopt a star" in your (or presumably someone else's) name, with the proceeds to be used for Kepler mission data reduction.

Might not have the fake razzle of the despicable naming schemes, but the payoff is that the star you adopt might have planets found by Kepler! Pretty good deal if you ask me.

[dvandorn]

Now, here's an idea that's perhaps less despicable than the old Name a Star deal.

How about Name the Planets?

Any new planetary system is likely going to have its planets "officially" categorized by some kind of star name / increment system, like Sol III, for example. But you could actually sell the naming rights for the planets of a given star. These wouild be "friendly" names, names like "Earth" for Sol III or "Jupiter" for Sol V, for example.

There would be limits, of course, and different types of contracts with different parameters. For example, you would pay a lot more for naming rights by you or your heirs into perpetuity than you would for a 10-year or 20-year naming rights window. You could buy naming rights for each and every planet found around your star during your contract period, or pay less for the rights to name the first, second or third planet discovered around given star. Even less for planets five through n.

If you could set up a program in which these "friendly" names for new planets are actually recognized by the IAU in some kind of special "friendly name" category, you could probably get thousands of dollars, minimum, for even 10-year shots at naming rights for planets around some of the closer stars. (Where those funds would go, and the purposes to which they would be put, are topics for another discussion, I think...)

You'd have to have some kind of regulation on the types of names that would be acceptable -- i.e., nothing pornographic, nothing extremely frivolous, and nothing already in use (i.e., no "Earth" or "Mars" in more than one solar system). But you might want to allow local placenames with descriptives attached, things like "Big Jupiter" or "Nueva Brasil" or even "New Chicago" (the latter with a moon named Evanston, for which the origin shall someday become obscure... ).

If you allow these names to become official "friendly" names for newly-discovered planets, you'd really have something marketable. And to eliminate the current problem with stadium naming rights, maybe you'd have to keep corporations from buying naming rights. After all, who wants to live or work on "MacDonalds Prime" or, even worse, "IBM System/3"??????



-the other Doug