Sedna The Clowns
By Carrington Vanston // 2004 Mar 17
Astronomers at Caltech's Palomar Observatory have found what might be our solar system's most distant object, and they've named it Sedna after an Inuit goddess whose public relations firm claims she created the sea creatures of the Arctic.
There are those who'd argue that this newfound ball of rock and ice is a planet. Then again, there are those who eat their own boogers. There are more than an average number of both among astronomers.
What kind of choice is Sedna for a name? Isn't there some sort of baby name book issued to astronomers who stumble across orbiting rubble? Can it really be true that the best they could come up with was a half-fish lady with dubious claims to aquatic creation?
The name Sedna is pretty high up on the Big List Of Worst Names For A (So-Called) Planet. It's wedged between #37, Matt LeBlanc, and #39, any other Friends cast member. Essentially, Sedna is worse than naming it after a sitcom actor, but not quite as bad as naming it after a sitcom actor who also makes monkey movies.
Why did we have to stick with the convention of naming planets after gods anyway? We're already stuck with god-based names for the other planets and for so many other things, such as the days of the week: we got Tuesday from Tyr, the Steel Belted God; Odin the All Father, or God Of The Rhythm Method, gave us Wednesday; we got Thursday from Thor, a character from a Douglas Adams novel and thus one of the last days to get named (before the early 90's Wednesday was just really long); Frida, AKA Frigga, gave us Friday, and she was the god they used to thank when they'd say "thank god it's Friday because Wednesday seemed to last forever"; we got Saturday from Saturn, the god of fixed price automobiles; and the gods of the sun and the moon (Helios/Apollo and Artemis/Diana) happened to give us Sunday and Monday, but by a staggering coincidence that was just a staggering coincidence.
Percy Lowell searched for a ninth planet which he called Planet X because he was very bad with roman numerals.
So god names are all around us, but we have a great excuse for that: they were named after Roman/Greek gods because the Romans and the Greeks believed the objects in the night sky were their gods, and that in turn was because the Romans and the Greeks were superstitious nitwits. Today, we can employ these planetary names and feel smug and superior and evolved. But how can we feel more evolved than the silly planet namers of the past when the naming took place mere weeks ago?
Actually, Uranus, Neptune, and Mercury weren't observed by the Romans and the Greeks, but that's only because they were at war so often that whenever anybody took a break to look up and count the planets they'd never get past five before being stabbed in the chest by some mindless juggernaut of a Spartan. Unfortunately, modern astronomy is held back by that same difficulty at most university campuses in the midwest even today.
In the early 1900s, after the Romans and Greeks stopped stabbing everyone in a lab coat, Percy Lowell searched for a ninth planet which he called Planet X because although he was a great astronomer he was very bad with roman numerals. He did manage to record images of the new planet but then he died in 1916 without realizing it--making him doubly famous not only as a successful astronomer but as the first undead one. Pluto was then rediscovered by Clyde Tombaugh, who wanted to name it Clyde Tombaugh's Planet Of Large Breasted Women.
The planet's final name was instead supplied by an eleven year old schoolgirl in Oxford, England, who, while obviously a fan of cartoon dogs, clearly did not have a knack for marketing the benefits of investing in manned space missions the way that Tombaugh did.
In the end, though, the world came to realize too late that Planet X will always remain the coolest name we could have ever given to a planet. I for one advocate changing the Earth's name to that at once, if only because we'd eventually get to greet space aliens with the phrase "Welcome to Planet X!" They'd think we were the coolest people in the galaxy.
If we must adhere to the god-naming tradition, why not pick a cooler one than a half-fish lady? Why settle for a touchy-feely politically correct deity choice like a flippered Inuit god instead of sticking with the hack and slash types that have served us so well in the past? Isn't it a little late in the game to try to ensure everyone's god gets some ice time?
Of course, it could have been worse. If we'd discovered this planet during the dot com boom our solar system could have been Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Pets.com.
Speaking of which, wasn't this planet naming a huge missed opportunity for funding space agencies? They could have raffled off the name to the highest bidding sect. If churches can afford to buy their parishioners thousands of tickets to The Passion Of The Christ they could certainly pool their funds to bid on a planet named after ol' Number One.
Or we could have donated the name to a religion for the betterment of all mankind, along with a note that read "If we name this planet after your god, do you promise to stop blowing people up in his name?"
Probably too much to ask.
Of course, the whole subject is moot because Sedna is not a planet anyway. It's far too far, and it's far too small.
Sedna is too far to be a planet because it is 90 times farther from the sun than the Earth is, and twice as far from the sun as anything else we even consider to be part of the solar system. Sedna is so far out that it takes 10,500 years to orbit the sun. Calling Sedna a planet is like saying you've discovered a new Chicago suburb...in Egypt.
Sedna is too small to be a planet because it's less than half the size of our moon. If we ever colonize this thing, what kind of travel slogan are we going to have? "Come to Sedna, where everything is walking distance!" Nothing should be a planet if it's small enough to be misplaced.
I've never even been fully sold on the idea that Pluto is a planet, and that ex Planet X is much larger than this fish-woman planetoid. Astronomers continue to debate the definition of what a planet is, with many arguing for "an object which is more massive than the total mass of all the other bodies in a similar orbit" (which rules out Pluto). I prefer to be guided by the concept of "an object which is more massive than the total mass of Cagney and Lacey" (which also rules out Mercury).
So in the end it doesn't matter that this distant pebble has been given the unfortunate handle of Sedna because it's not a planet anyway. It's clearly not a planet, and nothing that anybody says or does here on Earth will ever convince me to agree that Sedna is a planet.
Except renaming it after me.
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Carrington Vanston is a humorist and atheist. Or vice versa. He wrote and directed the long forthcoming feature film Duck Duck Goose. He has written two tiny plays which had two tiny productions: The Sound Of Two Hands Typing and Stark Raving Happy. He speaks three languages fluently, but two of them are English with a silly accent. The third is English with a slightly less silly accent. He can pronounce his full name backwards, he has a favorite mathematical equation, and he wants that $2 you owe him. Carrington should be stored in a cool, dry place, and may explode if heated.