Sun is called Sol.
And Luna makes a ton of sense if you want to remove the ambiguity of a moon and the moon.
Sol too, if you want to call the closest star the sun wherever you are.
Moon-like natural satellite.
Not if you are Spanish.
Let’s just settle on Moon™ as a compromise for our moon and just moon for all other moons.
Right? I can’t think of any scifi that refers to the sun as helios?
Any sci-fi that takes place in antiquity, I suppose.
Lucian’s Secret History, perhaps?
And moon is called Luna
That’s why an orbit around the sun is “solar” and an orbit around the moon is 'lunar"
It seems like earth is just called earth for most spaceflight purposes (e.g. low-earth orbit), although the word for it in some Latin languages comes from “terra”
I think it’d be fun to call earth “Humus”. We get words like posthumous, exhume, humility from it, and it’s theorized that it may share an origin with the word Homo, from which we get “Human”.
So if we called it Earth we’d be Earthlings, if we call it Terra we’d be Terrans, if we called it Tellus we’d be Tellurians, but if we called it Humus we could stay as Humans =D
Isn’t humus ‘earth’ more in the sense of literal soil on the ground, rather than the planet? More of a human scaled interpretation, at least.
Originally it was called Jimmy though.
Jimbo > Jimmy > Jim > Big Jim > James Sol > Big Gay Jim > Short Fat Jim > Little Gary > Jimothy > Jimward > Mothy Jim > Jimjim > Little Jim and finally Stankeye Jim
I’m no Astrologer, but I hear we’re entering the age of Big Gay Jim.
deleted by creator
It has been so funny to me reading Foundation by Isaac Asimov as it appears very tropy, but then you realize that those things are tropes because of the books.
Also see: Tolkien was a total hack.
TVTropes is a cancer site now. Can’t recommend anyone visit it.
Lesson: Never support a project unless it’s open source.
Tropes exist because they work and who cares what the money is called
The money can’t be any real earth currency, and making up something like florbs would also make people roll their eyes. Credits is fine
Exactly. You’ve got limited time to tell your story in a movie, so establishing a fake currency that nobody except hardcore numistatics nerds will care about is kinda pointless when everyone already understands that credits = future money.
And as you say using a real currency doesn’t make sense in most future movie contexts, and using the “wrong” one may even offend some people who may then boycott your movie - which is obviously not desirable when you’re a studio trying to make money.
I image its the same reason for the Gold/Silver currency in many fantasy settings.
I image its the same reason for the Gold/Silver currency in many fantasy settings.
I think that’s also because a couple hundred years ago practically every currency was just a certain weight of gold, silver or copper. Different coins were just an easy way to recognize the weight.
I think that’s also because a couple hundred years ago practically every currency was just a certain weight of gold, silver or copper. Different coins were just an easy way to recognize the weight.
Maybe we need to get some numismatics to weigh in here, but I think currency could be extremely tricky depending on where and when you were. I remember reading about medieval Italy and it seemed every city issued its own currency with different denominations, names, and weights. And even then, people would be scraping them to get some precious metals off of them, and with all those different currencies, counterfeiting must have been a real issue.
To apply this Tolkien, the Shire would probably have a different currency than even Bree, though Butterman would even take your coins from Gondor out of politeness to travelers.
They would all have different coins, but the actual value of those coins was determined by their weight, so as long as you could verify that it didn’t matter much. Scraping worked because not every salesperson would check the weight of the coins.
Are you spitballing like me or is this your field? Because you’d need to know the percentage of the metal present in the coin to weigh it; gold and silver are too soft be pure. That introduces problems of debasement, a coin from an earlier minting might have a higher content than a later printing, and multiply that by all the different city-states, and you have a potential headache.
It is not my field, so don’t take it too serious. But I think I’m those times it was not doable for most people to test metals for purity, so that wouldn’t have influenced it much unless it became noticable by eye (or biting)
“I need a length of rope!”
[Puts down a gold coin worth a month’s wages.]
And for everything else, there is multipass.
I think in Rick and Morty one of the fake currencies is called a schmeckle, which is Yiddish for penis (diminutive).
The money can’t be any real earth currency
no, now that you’ve said this i want to see a sci-fi movie where all trade is based on the Vietnamese Đồng
No, they won’t.
Oh, okay
Yeah, I like being thrown into a new world and still somehow understanding the basics of it so it’s familiar. No need to name everything differently if that’s not the focus of the game.
Credits will do fine
Watto, lul!
Credits are for future and guns, it’s coins/pieces of gold/silver when swords.
Somehow I understand completely & agree.
2 strips of gold-pressed latinum for you
There’s just so many more interesting options. Like what if the worms are their dollars?
what if their dollars are worms?
I think that’s super valid for a novel especially, as long as you don’t mind that the movie adaptation decides it’s not worth taking 10 minutes out of the runtime to explain vs something people will immediately understand
Or maybe there is nothing else interesting in the novel, and it won’t matter anyway because no one reads or adapts it
Helios and Luna? You’re mixing Greek and Latin nomenclature! My immersion is ruined!
Yep. It’s Sol, not Helios.
Raised by Wolves comes into the chat.
What if they were wrong about Selene, not Sol
So does English.
Megafying glass? Suffering from cold = superformia? Do you prefer monoceros or Nasacorn?
Nasacorn is delicacy in some places.
Would actually be fun to have an android character that tries to be less human. Like it’s an unfortunate happenstance that someone designed him to be human-like, and its primary goal is to purge this aspect of itself. Like an Uncle Tom character with deep-rooted anxieties and a machine supremacy complex. Come to think of it, this has to exist already, it doesn’t feel all that original, but I can’t point to where I would’ve seen that.
Marvin the paranoid android from Hitchhikers Guide.
Literally the One’s from Battlestar Galactica.
Have never seen the show, but from a quick search, that seems pretty spot on for what I had in mind.
Check out this recently published book: Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer
Main protagonist is a humanoid bot who strongly rejects the human trappings and designs given to it by its creator.
Check out Automata (2024)
I won’t spoil anything, it’s a good movie.
You know Uncle Tom was basically the perfect human right?
That’s the point of the book. Pro-Slavery people use to argue that slavery wasn’t that bad so long as your slave master treated you well; so Uncle Toms cabin is a book about a flawless human who is also a slave named Uncle Tom that literally every single person who ever meets him deeply loves and respects but is powerless to stop anything bad from happening to him because he’s not legally a person
If Uncle Tom sucked in any way the reader could always justify the bad shit that happened to Tom not as a result of his legal status, but as a consequence to his shitty actions or personality.
It destroys in every way the argument that slavery can be fine if your slave masters treat you well and for this reason it’s rumored to be the book that broke the proverbial straw and kicked off the civil war.
Especially the later assimov robot books have that theme somewhat; at least robots that think weather being more or less human in some regards is better.
Gunther Hermann
In real life, the sun is called “Sol” and we are in the “Solar system” as in, sol-ar. Others are called star systems, some are named; “Polaris” is usually just called that instead of the “Polaris system” or the like
Helios -> Helios system follows this same logic.
Actually, our star’s name is The Sun. We do call the system the Solar System, though.
It’s called “the sun” in English yes. Now, this is going to sounds crazy, but hear me out on this one… There are other languages than English. And I’ve heard rumors, that scientists across the world are all using this weird one called “Latin” when it comes to naming stuff.
Using Latin to name things has been falling out of fashion over the last few decades. But a bit more to the point, you will not find a scientific paper that names the star we orbit ‘Sol.’ That is strictly sci-fi. It’s always ‘Sun,’ ‘the Sun,’ or ‘The Sun.’ We should start calling it Sol in official capacities because it’s consistent and less confusing, but we haven’t. We do the same thing with our moon - it’s always ‘Moon,’ ‘the Moon,’ or ‘The Moon’ rather than Luna. If you want the standard changed, you could try petitioning the International Astronomical Union.
Ah, I was wondering why NASA kept talking about “Trans Lunar Burn” and “Lunar orbit” instead of “Trans moonar burn” and “moonar orbit”. So silly to talk about “circumsolar orbits” when it’s clearly “Circumsunar orbit”.
The only major exception is Earth, where orbits around us are called out in english, more specifically, the initials. LEO, MEO, HEO. The L stands for “Low”, so I’m sure you can figure out what the M and H stands for.
And no, using latin to name things have not been falling out of fashion. Every time we discover a species (which we still do, every single day), their species are immediately named in latin.
And lots of things, are still called by their latin names in English. e.g. (exempli gratia) Virus. Alibi. Malfeasance. Agenda. Incalculable. Modicum. Mundane. Ambiguous. Bacteria. Naive. Atrocity. Cull. Debilitate. Et Cetera.
I could go on but you get the point. Latin is everywhere. You just didn’t know that it’s Latin to begin with.
NASA calls our star the Sun. NASA calls our moon the Moon or Earth’s Moon. They use solar and lunar anyway, except for a few instances where they use Greek, like ‘heliosphere.’ It’s inconsistent with everything else and it bugs me, but that’s what they do.
New species the last couple years have been named after David Attenborough, Mothra, a teacher, a cartoon character, and one that uses ChiShona in the same way that Latin is more commonly used. Latin is still used, of course, but with decreasing frequency.
Yes. They use the english name when talking about the object in english. So what? In Sweden our scientists call Luna for “Månen”. Because that’s the name in our language. But the standard of naming things in latin stems from that every scientist will speak the same language.
If you want to gather studies about dogs. You’ll be very limited if you only know their english name. So instead you’ll use the latin name. Canis Familiaris. And all of a sudden you will find studies from all across the world.
Yes, they have been naming species after people and things. Those that discover a species will often get the naming rights. But they still have a latin name.
Platysaurus attenboroughi.
It’s in latin. And because of that. Every single scientist that are familiar with the concept of how we name species will see that the species Platysaurus Attenbiroughi is in the Platysaurus genus, and saurus means that’s it’s a reptile.
Euptychia attenboroughi.
So we know that this is an animal in the Eutychia genus. Named after Attenborough.
Trigonopterus attenboroughi
By now you should know what genus this animal is in. And that’s why we give them latin names.
If we just called then all “attenboroughi” it would be really fucking confusing about which animal it is we’re actually talking about.
Just because you don’t know that you use any latin. Doesn’t mean the useage have decreased.
Latin isn’t going anywhere. Our entire scientific understanding of life on earth is built on the back of latin. It’s the language all scientists speak.
So when a doctor writes in the journal that you have a fracture in your femur. Every other doctor on the planet earth will know which bone it is he was talking about.
Sunar System
Earther Systrem
It’s “hard sci-fi”, so that means no lightspeed travel but also we’ve had cryo sleep since the 90s because obviously that’s so fucking easy to invent.
Also, lots of mixed culture names like Aleksander Ho because your genius prediction of the future is that people will intermarry.
no no no the name will be Ho Skywalker because they’ll be named after jobs and fiction
Aliens land in the US.
Soldiers open fire on the Aliens
Why is there no movie where they land somewhere else and we all go “well thank fuck they didn’t land in Texas”
In Doctor Who the aliens are mostly concerned with Great Britain.
Yes, it was an experience watching Torchwood and thinking it so hilarious all this stuff was happening in Wales. Made me reflect on how I never gave a second thought to how aliens only ever landed in the United States in all the time I’ve been watching shows about aliens.
Though, to be fair, every once in a while, the (usually movie) wants us to know that the United States liberated THE ENTIRE WORLD so we’ll see a montage of racially diverse people celebrating around recognizable global landmarks. Thank you America! Please continue to bomb us to spread your freedom!
<insert various clips from Team America here>
Regional childrens tv show doesn’t count.
But I did forget about Dr Who.
Just a little regional kids show that is also one of the most famous TV shows of all time lol
I’m from Britain. Its an export show for Americans.
In my opinion as neither Brit nor Murican I would say it becoming an export show started with Matt Smith as Eleventh Doctor and especially with series 6 in 2011.
I’m (unfortunately) American and can assure you it’s a well-known export. Not really my thing either but it has more reach than you’re giving it credit it for
I come from the island and the Hambly Pambly franchise has outperformed it in mindshare, at-least before I became an immigrant and escaped.
Very true and so has James Bond! I’d even say Taskmaster is giving a run for its money now that they’re uploading it. Even my brother in law asked me if I’ve seen it and he’s all-in on American entertainment
District 9 did this really well.
District 9 was excellent, but those were also refugee aliens.
You know how that’d play out over there…
…the same way it played out in the movie?
That was kinda the point of the film, yes.
I’d imagine more agent orange.
District 9 was set in South Africa.
EDIT: Oh, should’a scrolled down. Consider this a mirror comment.
ɒɔiɿʇA ʜƚuoƧ ni ƚɘƨ ƨɒw 9 ƚɔiɿƚƨiᗡ
Broke: Memory units in optimistic numbers of megabytes and gigabytes.
Woke: Memory units in astronomically-high numbers of gigabytes and terabytes.
Bespoke: Memory units in totally incomprehensible units like kiloquads or exanodes.
Slaps the superships central computer “This here runs on 12 bits of memory! Our engineers really outdone themselves with optimisation this time.”
It only has one memory cell, but we’ve fully implemented real computation
I mean, the word size — alone — on the Voyager space crafts seems to have gone further than anything today.
Or never specify. “That spacestation has massive computing power” “How big?” “Massive.”
“This baby makes the NASA computer seems like a V-Tech.”
Meanwhile at NASA, they compute simulations on like 2 PlayStation 3s… With a high accuracy.
My pet peeve one
Broke: measuring distance in millions / billions of kilometers
Woke: measuring distances in gigameters / terameters
The warrior alien who solves problems through brute force, and struggles to understand Earth customs in comedic ways.
crunch
Why did you post a picture of a random empty background?
Maybe update from Netscape Navigator and it might load up for you.
Maybe get off Internet Explorer and you’ll understand memes from 7 years ago.
Farscape called currency… Currency…
i missed that. when i made a “dnd” (i forget which system) module, i named the money units “moneys”. i mean we were all high except my wife, and she’s contractually obligated to giggle at my jokes and the rest of us were high and giggly so it went over well. it’s nice to know i thought up the same joke as farscape. we were probably inspired by the same thing, only i watched it like 30 years later because i’m me.
an uncredible scifi where billionaires gain empathy
Eh, in my sci-fi universe the Sun is called “Sol-Centauri”, but still just referred to as “the Sun” by most people.
