That's No Moon

Some people have started a drive to come up with a name for The Moon.  See, Earth's moon is a moon, but it doesn't have a name; we just call it "The Moon," just like how people in Los Angeles call the San Fernando Valley "The Valley," as if it's the only valley in the world. But there are lots of other valleys on Earth, and lots of other moons in the solar system.

You might assume that this campaign is something a few physics students came up with while high, and in the age of Kickstarter, you end up kind of committed to crazy ideas like that.  Well, that might well be how it started, but it's actually pretty elaborate - they even have their own animation with adorable anthropomorphized moons of the solar system.  I never would have thought the Moon would sound so much like Linus from Peanuts.

Anyway, the reasoning is that calling it "The Moon" made sense when we only knew about the one Moon, but then we found that there were similar things for other planets, and called them "moons" too.  Apparently it's all Galileo's fault, since he was the first to study moons of other planets (Jupiter, to be precise.) I guess we're lucky he didn't decide to call these things "Galileos," with ours being a Galileo called "Moon."

Of course, there are a few things that could use names.  The Sun, God, etc. Really, this is a kind of retronym.  In the same way that we had to create the term "acoustic guitar" only after we invented electric guitars, we needed a name for the Moon only after realizing we had to deal with other moons.

As for the Sun, we at least have the sun/star distinction.  And we sometimes fall back on the name "Sol" when astronomers or science-fiction writers need to call it something specific.  Yeah, they also sometimes call the moon "Luna," and I suspect that would be the most likely name.

I like the idea of naming the Moon, and it's great that these people want to do it consciously, so we don't end up naming it after dirt (The Earth) or giving it a silly name without realizing what we were actually talking about (The Milky Way.) But I don't think it's too likely that this effort is going to work.  For one thing, look at the fuss over reclassifying Pluto.  And that's for something no one can see with the naked eye.  But more to the point, we'll probably only give our moon a name when more of us are conscious of the existence of the rest of the solar system.  That will only happen when we've moved on to realize our place in the universe. Damn - The Universe: another thing that needs a name.