I suck at coming up with names for my planets

[Somes J]

I'm trying to come up with names for the various planets I'm developing for my main hard SF universe and I'm just not very good at it. Anybody willing to offer any suggestions? I'm going to copy/paste the description of the various planets I just posted to my own forum to see if anybody gets any ideas from reading them.

XXX corresponds to I haven't thought up a name or assigned a star system yet, and names in [brackets?] means they're tentative ideas of mine, not settled. Some of them I think I'll probably use, like Nyx for the lightless brown dwarf planet, and others like Vulcan for the 40 Eridani planet ... eh, probably not (I'm not even 100% sure I could get away with that legally and even if I could it'd be a really heavy-handed homage).

PS this is nowhere near a complete list so I may add more later.

Thanks in advance.

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40 Eridani – XXX [Vulcan?]
EuGaianContinental world
Pre-colonization hominid population present

The nearest other solar system boasting a Gaian type world to Sol, and the first target of Earth’s starships. XXX is a biologically rich world, though general conditions are rather harsher than Earth’s. The climate is somewhat warmer, and the poles are free of ice. Almost the entire land surface is conglomerated into a single enormous supercontinent that covers much of a hemisphere. The coasts of this supercontinent support a variety of ecosystems, from polar to tropical. As one travels into the interior the terrain changes to grassland and then semi-desert until finally one arrives at the enormous desert that forms the heartland of the supercontinent. This landscape of dunes and rock barrens is as harsh or harsher than Earth’s Sahara and covers an appreciable fraction of the planet’s total surface area. This region remains one of the most well-known features of the planet today, despite the fact that a number of worlds are now know that have desert areas as large or larger.

The planet appears to have been terraformed over a billion years ago. Basic biochemically similarities betray a very distant common ancestry between life here and life on Earth, a pattern that is repeated on all known EuGaian worlds. There is also a hominid species, closely related to but genetically distinct from Earth humans, which is obviously a much more recent import, clearly only very distantly related to most of the rest of the biosphere. At the time of first contact the native hominids were living in a preindustrial Iron Age society.


Eta Cassiopeiae – XXX
EuGaianContinental world
Pre-colonization hominid population present

With a warmer climate than Earth and continents clustered toward the equatorial latitudes this planet enjoys conditions that make it a relative paradise for both life and humans. With no major ice caps sea levels are high and the planet boasts extensive shallow seas, a great number of islands and archipelagos, and a generally warm and maritime climate. Much of the planet is covered by tropical forest, but other biomes exist and cover a large amount of the planet’s land area. The extensive shallow seas make for significantly more fertile oceans than Earth, with extensive coral reefs. There is a hominid species on the planet, closely related to the one found in the 40 Eridani system. At the time of first contact they existed at a preindustrial level but that spread over the entire planet, a dispersal facilitated by a configuration of continents and islands that allowed for relatively easy planet-wide seafaring and trade.


XXX – Ocean
EuGaianPelagic world

This very water-rich superterrestrial planet is entirely covered by ocean. The top of the highest mountain is several kilometers below sea level. The atmosphere is thick and high in carbon dioxide and, as is common for Pelagic worlds, the climate is warm, wet, and stormy. With no land to break against storms and hurricanes can range over the entire planet and easily become more powerful than any on Earth. The human inhabitants of Ocean must live entirely on artificial floating towns. The colony on Ocean faced an exceptional struggle for survival, forced to live entirely off resources harvested from the sea and the deeply submerged planetary surface, which on average is farther below sea level than even the deepest regions of Earth’s oceans.


XXX – XXX [Trees? Forest?]
EuGaianContinental world
Pre-colonization hominid population present

This planet is at once a paradise for life, far richer than Earth, and an extremely difficult world for humans to survive on. The atmosphere is four times as thick as Earth’s, oxygen levels are almost twice as high, and carbon dioxide levels are thirty times higher. The strong greenhouse effect created by this atmosphere generates a very hot and wet climate; perfect conditions to support the world forest that completely carpets the planet’s continents. The trees of this world-forest reach truly enormous size, much higher than the tallest redwood on Earth. Different vertical layers of the world-forest are biomes onto themselves, ranging from the canopy to the surreal perpetually dark landscape of the forest floor. A heavily modified hominid species was found living on the planet. At the time of first contact they were living as foragers in the upper levels of the forest.


XXX – XXX
EuGaianXeric world

This GaianXeric world has only relatively small and restricted regions of surface water and is clearly nearing the end of its biosphere lifespan. Geologic activity is dying down as the planet’s interior cools. The atmosphere is thin; even in the lowlands the concentration of oxygen is so low that the planet’s human inhabitants must breathe bottled oxygen, like mountain climbers on Earth, and live in artificially pressurized buildings. The planet is a good deal colder than Earth and most of its surface is extremely dry, and the thin atmosphere and lack of water creates extreme temperatures. The closest equivalent on Earth to much of the planet’s landscape and climate is the high deserts of the Andes. Complex life is mostly found in the planet’s small restricted seas. Land life is restricted to hardy, low-growing plants and relatively small animals. The largest land animals are about the size of a dog.


XXX – XXX
EuGaianXeric world
Pre-colonization hominid population present

A dying world, its geology slowly shutting down as its interior cools. The atmosphere is thin and oxygen and carbon dioxide are low. There is relatively little surface water, present as small seas and lakes, some of which are extremely saline. Temperatures are extreme, and the biosphere is dying out due to the increasingly harsh environment and lack of carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. The land is largely barren, with little but hardy low-growing plants and small animals, and those are sparse even near the small seas. Most complex life that remains is in the seas. There is a hominid population on the planet, modified to adapt them to the difficult environment. Despite these adaptations the hominid population was near the brink of extinction when Earth humans arrived. They retained only extremely simple technology and numbered only a few thousand, scattered over the face of the planet in small bands of foragers and herders.


XXX – XXX
EuGaianContinental(?) world
Pre-colonization hominid population present

This planet’s biosphere is being destroyed by the brightening of its F class sun. Carbon dioxide levels have reached extremely low levels as the planet’s feedback loops attempt to compensate for the brightening of the sun, strangling plant life and rendering the planet’s land largely barren. Both terrestrial and oceanic biospheres have been devastated; the planet resembles Earth after the Permian mass extinction. The surface receives high levels of UV light from the F class sun, which produces proportionately more high-energy radiation than Sol. The result is a barren world seared by extreme heat and high UV radiation. It is expected that the planet will not be able to sustain Gaian conditions for more than another few tens of millions of years; it will soon reach a point where enough photosynthetic life chokes for lack of carbon dioxide and a runaway greenhouse begins, which will quickly convert the planet into a Cytherian type world. There is a hominid population on the planet, modified to endure the heat and radiation.


XXX – XXX [Nyx]
Nyxian world
Pre-colonization hominid population present

A roughly Earth-sized satellite of a brown dwarf star that has long since become almost totally dark. This world has not known daylight for billions of years. Its surface is in eternal night, and as cold as interstellar space. Most of the surface is covered in a deep layer of frozen water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. The only indigenous life is simple single celled forms that survive near hydrothermal vents.

At the time of first contact there was a hominid population on the planet, living in a single impoverished population center that lived off geothermal energy from the volcanic mountain it was built into.


XXX – XXX [Bellomy?/Kalanaga?]
EuGaianContinental world

This planet is an example of how even a seemingly benign world may have nasty surprises for human colonists. Superficially the planet appears inviting, with an Earthlike atmosphere, a warmer climate than Earth, continents covered by forest and grassland, and an almost complete lack of indigenous land fauna. However, in the absence of animals fungi have filled many of the same ecological niches, and the soil is a battle zone of aggressive fungi. The fungi make it impossible to grow introduced crops, and worse, the spores of some of the more aggressive generalist forms will colonize the human body if given the opportunity. The planet’s inhabitants must live in sealed habitats and venture out only in sealed suits.

[Ford Prefect]

This is a difficult question. I don't really have an specific ideas, but I'm going to try giving you advice: think about who's actually doing the naming. Try and think about the group who would be doing the naming, and what they would be inclined to choose. I'm not sure if that will really be useful, but hey.

[Malchus]

If you want a lazy option, there's always the old standby of cracking open an encyclopedia volume or two and looking up vaguely interesting sounding names of people, places, events, etc. For example, I always thought that Breitenfeld would make a pretty descend name for a planet.

[speaker-to-trolls]

As part of Ford's suggestion, think about whether the planet's name will be the one it's given when it is discovered on Earth or when the colonists land. For an example Sky's Edge in Alastair Reynolds books, was probably called 61 Cygni A back on Earth but the colonists gave it a different name based on what happened when they arrived. If it's named on Earth I would imagine it would be more likely to be named based on mythology or possibly on the whims of whoever was financing the expedition, if it's named by the colonists I think it would probably be named based on what they see when they get there. So for instance the dying xeric planet could be called something like Phaeton if it was named on Earth but something like Slowburn (or something better) when they arrive.

[Artemis]

Check out also historical precedent for what people have named places when they first set foot on them. A lot of times they're pretty literal descriptions: i.e. Arizona, literally just means Dry Place. Often, a place will get named for the people who live there. This was especially common in the Muslim world (the -stan suffix just means "land of the [prefix]) and in North America (my home state of Iowa is named after one of the native tribes who lived there). Think simple, think directly.

Also think about the languages your colonists will be using to name worlds, and draw from them for inspiration. Is Spanish still commonly spoken, or at least not entirely forgotten? Maybe your EuGainPelagic world could have be Costa Pick-Your-Favorite-Color and/or Local-Abundant-Resource. Or you could go the French route, and name it Cote de-something. Or you could go for a more obscure or even dead language to give it a more exotic, alien feel.

[Siege]

What frequently works well for me is to pick a trait that would describe the world in question ("dry", "dead", whatever) and pull it through a thesaurus for some sweet synonym action. So dry becomes acetose, dead becomes cinerary, and so on. From there it's not too difficult to work that into a name, i.e. Acetos, Cinerary Majoris, etc.

[Magister Militum]

Check out also historical precedent for what people have named places when they first set foot on them. A lot of times they're pretty literal descriptions: i.e. Arizona, literally just means Dry Place. Often, a place will get named for the people who live there. This was especially common in the Muslim world (the -stan suffix just means "land of the [prefix]) and in North America (my home state of Iowa is named after one of the native tribes who lived there). Think simple, think directly.

A variant of this is to butcher the original pronunciation in another language. A lot of American locales basically did this when they adapted the Native American names for a particular area.

[Somes J]

Named by colonists vs named by people back on Earth is an interesting question. So far there hasn't been much (any, really) assigning of formal names to exoplanets, just numbers and letters, so based on that having the colonists doing the naming would make sense. On the other hand, with exoplanets confirmed to have an oxygen-rich atmosphere I could see there being more of a push to come up with actual names.

One thing that comes to mind about descriptive names. I remember reading this book by Jack Williamson (IIRC) about colonists landing on some planet around a dead star. They were talking about what to name it and somebody wanted to name it Hellfrost, and somebody basically pointed out that this is a really horrible idea because this is going to be their new home and the last thing they need is a name that reminds them of the fact it's a shithole. There's a temptation from a fiction-writing perspective to give unpleasant planets names that emphasize their unpleasant nature, but I don't think this seems very authentic because it strikes me as a pretty bad idea from a morale perspective. On the same token I could see a lot of planets names something like "Hope".

Like Nyx is a good example. Yeah, it's a nice descriptive name of a place where it's always dark - but are the colonists going to want a name that constantly reminds them of that?

My vague idea of its backstory is the native settlement there was founded at a time a prehistoric (~9000 BC) not forehead alien space empire at the time it was being threatened by Inhibitor-esque bad guys, by guys who had the idea of surviving by running and hiding out there. So the native name might translate as something like "Sanctuary", and that might be picked up as the official name. That sounds better to me.

Hmm, ideas so far:

40 Eridani - Tellus
Eta Cassiopeiae - Esperance
brown dwarf planet - Sanctuary

Yeah, those work nicely for me.

[Artemis]

A variant of this is to butcher the original pronunciation in another language. A lot of American locales basically did this when they adapted the Native American names for a particular area.

Even better.

[Destructionator]

There's a lot of places named after a famous person, the discoverer, or some friend of the discoverer. One problem here is the names are hardly unique: how many Alexandrias are there?

Then again, there's lots of repeated names anyway. Take where I live: Watertown in Jefferson County. There's at least 5 watertowns throughout the US and I know of two Jefferson Counties, both named after Thomas Jefferson. It doesn't really cause much confusion anyway.


but the idea is you might be able to just take a random person's name and name a character and a planet at the same time.

[Blackwing]

Personally, I do not follow a single style, since it's unlikely that a single person in-universe is responsible for naming each and every planet.

So I have stuff like:

• Jarlsheim: 'Home of the Nobility' in whatever language the Vikings spoke... And also pilfered from an old D&D campaign I played in,
• Pallas Artemis: 'Pre-Adolescent Girl/Virgin Artemis' in old Greek and based on an aspect of the Greek goddess.
• Mudhole: Which is named after the fact that 'Watering Hole' is a term for a certain type of Wormhole-esque 'anomaly' that people used to travel through and Mudhole is a planet which has a Watering Hole on it's surface (thus a watering hole full of dirt, a mudhole).
• Che: A jungle planet. Some people thought it was named after Ché Guevarra (because it was a resistance stronghold), but it's actually from Vietnamese 'to hide/to cover'. Because its heavy jungles provided the colonist with a chance to do exactly that.
• Moira's Crossing: Is named after the original 'owner'. Specifically a woman who set up a trading station around the planet by that name and later chartered the world for 'themeworlding'.
• The Wayfarer Colony: Originally called 'Farthest Reach' because it was the farthest humanity had ever reached and then renamed after the invention by a local inventor that put it on the political map.

So when naming a planet, a good way to go is 'Who discovered it and what kind of person was it?' then 'Who lives there?' and 'What's special about it?'. If those fail, the planet probably isn't interesting enough to have a cool name...

What worries me more though is some of the biology/geology in those descriptions. For instance, the forest world has both an atmosphere much thicker than Earth, twice as much oxygen and thirty times as much Carbon Dioxide as Earth, a much warmer overall atmosphere than Earth and trees much taller than Earth's. However for the first two to be the case, the second two can't. Remember: Oxygen on Earth is mostly the result of plantlife. First there was a lot of Carbon Dioxide (and Carbon Monoxide) and Water, then plants in the sea started producing oxygen from those two. Then the Ozone Layer former from that Oxygen, then land plants were possible.

However with an atmosphere 4 times as thick twice the oxygen level (40% of the atmosphere then) and Carbon Dioxide thirty times the level of Earth (a little over 1%), then back when all the oxygen on this world was Carbon Dioxide and Water, the atmosphere would be a lot cooler. With that much water in the atmosphere (contrary to popular belief, most of our oxygen from plants comes from water, not carbon dioxide) the atmosphere would be much more saturated than ours. With atmospheric pressure keeping most of that liquid, it wouldn't have much chance to cool through evaporation and it wouldn't form clouds to cool the atmosphere.

Have you ever put water in the microwave without a spoon and then had it blow up in your face when you let it get into contact with something? Probably not because it's not likely to happen in a microwave.
That's the kind of water this planet would have though. It would be damn near impossible to seed with life since it would be: a. Too hot and b. would pretty much blow up if you tried to cool it through any means that would allow it to evaporate.

Also the worlds where 'carbon dioxide is running out and the plants are suffocating' suffers from the problem that this simply can't happen. As the rainforests (which are Carbon and Oxygen neutral for the most part) show, plantlife stabilises it's carbon dioxide intake vs. oxygen output over time and when there's no carbon dioxide to metabolise, plants switch to oxygen and 'breathe' that until carbon dioxide levels are back to 'breathable'.

Whenever animals die out in mass numbers, plants become more numerous by default (due to decomposition producing carbohydrates which are then further metabolised into carbon dioxide and water) and whenever the fossil record shows lots of plants dying, it's usually due to a population explosion due to herbivores.
At any rate, no amount of extreme conditions short of the atmosphere getting blown off is going to be enough to kill off 'plants' in general once they're present in a biosphere. Mass extinctions among plants (which are extremely rare on a global scale) usually reflect one species overtaking the rest, the number of species of plants decreases, but the overall amount of plants stays pretty much the same. Likewise any world that has actual plants on it already will, during a time of environmental upheaval, see a change in the types of plants present, not the number.

Also, areas that have plants in them do not 'simply' become barren all of a sudden. When the world becomes hotter overall, the areas that used to hold temperate plants will now hold subtropical plants, areas that held subtropical plants will now hold tropical plants and areas that held tropical plants will... still hold tropical plants.

The Sahara desert for instance isn't barren because all the plants there just suddenly up an died one day. It's barren because a large sheet of ice during the ice age pushed the nutrient-rich top soil around a bit and created an area that could only hold the kind of plants that don't need (and eventually, through their decomposition, form) top soil. Which in return led to those plants dying out when the rains stopped coming.
However, the Sahara, at the moment, is actually re-greening and in a few thousand years will probably look like it did a few thousand years ago (if we leave it alone). (It currently looks like it did before a few thousand years ago and like it will after the regreening is done and the plants start becoming less numerous again).

Overall, it reads to me like trying to apply region climatology to an entire planet at once.

But enough about that.

[Somes J]

However with an atmosphere 4 times as thick twice the oxygen level (40% of the atmosphere then) and Carbon Dioxide thirty times the level of Earth (a little over 1%)

You misunderstand, sorry. The breakdown is:

.365 bars nitrogen (5.2X Earth's)
. 35 bars oxygen (1.7X Earth's)

It's basically Carboniferous Earth atmosphere with a lot more nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The nitrogen is fairly chemically inert so it doesn't worry me too much. The oxygen doesn't worry me because Earth had that kind of atmosphere at one time, so we know that level is possible and life-sustaining. The carbon dioxide does a bit - all that plant life should lock away a lot of carbon dioxide, the Carboniferous was one of the lowest CO2 periods of the Phanerozoic (the other being today) - but the atmosphere (and the world in general) is loosely based off Blue Moon and I figure if it's good enough for National Geographic it's good enough for me. Maybe write it up to lots of volcanic activity. Blue Moon was a habitable moon of a gas giant so that's pretty plausible - I haven't worked out what the astronomical setting for my world is in any detail, but it probably wouldn't be too hard to include an equivalent tidal heating source if I really had to. Another consideration is carbon dioxide/oxygen is controlled by various feedback loops which are influenced by climate - maybe the planet is farther from its star, so those systems just naturally keep carbon dioxide a lot higher, because it needs that to retain a hydrosphere. That's actually nice from another perspective: a star's habitable zone expands as it ages, so a planet toward the outer part can last longer (though it's colder early on, and less energy for photosynthesis). Earth is probably going to become too hot for a liquid hydrosphere in a billion years or so, but if was farther out (say, near where Mars actually is) its biosphere might last until the sun leaves the main sequence - billions of years of extra biosphere lifespan.

Also the worlds where 'carbon dioxide is running out and the plants are suffocating' suffers from the problem that this simply can't happen. As the rainforests (which are Carbon and Oxygen neutral for the most part) show, plantlife stabilises it's carbon dioxide intake vs. oxygen output over time and when there's no carbon dioxide to metabolise, plants switch to oxygen and 'breathe' that until carbon dioxide levels are back to 'breathable'.

They still ultimately need to photosynthesize though, right? Photosynthesis is useful because it lets them capture sunlight for biological energy. If they can't do that, where does the biosphere ultimately get its energy from?

Anyway, if you're talking about the F class star planet I actually was dissatisfied with it and changed that before I saw your post - it just has a huge supercontinent centered on the north pole with a coast in the arid climate zone (~30 N) now. The other one I'm not sure of, but I could always replace the lack of carbon dioxide with an extremely long day/night cycle creating huge temperature extremes or some other reason land plant life might not thrive. I'm sure I could think of something. Heck, cold climate alone could probably do the trick; ice age Earth had a lot less forest than present Earth.

At any rate, no amount of extreme conditions short of the atmosphere getting blown off is going to be enough to kill off 'plants' in general once they're present in a biosphere.

I think runaway greenhouse or glaciation might do it pretty well (at the very least cause biomass to crash pretty hard) but yeah, those are more extreme scenarios than I've been talking about.

The Sahara desert for instance isn't barren because all the plants there just suddenly up an died one day.

I'm no climatologist but isn't it barren for the simple reason that it's very dry and plants need water?

Thanks.

[Blackwing]

You misunderstand, sorry. The breakdown is:

.365 bars nitrogen (5.2X Earth's)
. 35 bars oxygen (1.7X Earth's)

It's basically Carboniferous Earth atmosphere with a lot more nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The nitrogen is fairly chemically inert so it doesn't worry me too much. The oxygen doesn't worry me because Earth had that kind of atmosphere at one time, so we know that level is possible and life-sustaining.

This still leaves the problem of atmospheric pressure though. With four times as much atmosphere as earth, all that gas becomes pretty heavy. Combine this with the amount of gravity needed to hold that much atmosphere, trees much larger than those on earth would be impossible due to the Square/Cube Law and the fact that a stiff breeze would be a lot stiffer than on earth (hurricane strength winds would be normal with at least one permanent tornado present on the surface). Even in areas where the heavier gasses (like water vapour and Carbon Dioxide) don't liquefy due to pressure, the 'trees' that grow would be more like woody lumps with lots of leaves sticking out the top than actual trees.

Nitrogen is also pretty much essential to life. It being the prime building stone of DNA and all. And is a lot less inert than you'd think.

They still ultimately need to photosynthesize though, right? Photosynthesis is useful because it lets them capture sunlight for biological energy. If they can't do that, where does the biosphere ultimately get its energy from?

Well they actually store a lot of that energy too. In fact, all photosynthesis does is build energy reserves, which plants then take out of it through oxygenation and using it for constructing materials, same as all macroscopic life on earth. So if there's suddenly a lot less Carbon Dioxide around (earth only has less than 1% of it's atmosphere in Carbon Dioxide at the moment, for instance), plants will actually be encouraged to grow MORE to re-carbonise the atmosphere. Also Plants, being largely inert while not growing, don't need that much energy to start with. This is how many plants outside the equatorial regions (or in regions that have winters at least) can spend a little under half the year not photosynthesising: They simply don't use any energy to grow and that cuts their energy use down to almost nothing.

I'm no climatologist but isn't it barren for the simple reason that it's very dry and plants need water?

More or less. It's very dry because it has no plants. Because with no layer of rock or clay very near to the surface, plants need to dig deep to get water (so deep in fact that few plants can manage to both reach water with their roots and sunlight with their green surface). This causes the area to reflect a lot of heat, causing it to push clouds away, causing no rain to fall, preventing plants from getting water... etc... However, as plants around the region expand, they capture more water, slowly carrying it into the desert and re-greening it (thus cooling it, thus enabling rain, thus re-greening it further.)

This process can take thousands of years. In fact the Sahara was in constant flux until humans started burning forests on it's edge for farming.

Thanks.

No problem, just trying to shed some light on a much overlooked area of 'hard science'.

[Somes J]

This still leaves the problem of atmospheric pressure though. With four times as much atmosphere as earth, all that gas becomes pretty heavy. Combine this with the amount of gravity needed to hold that much atmosphere, trees much larger than those on earth would be impossible due to the Square/Cube Law

I don't think you'd need higher gravity. Venus has less gravity than Earth (about .9 G) and yet has no problem holding onto a 92 bar atmosphere. Compared to that 4 bars is nothing. In fact the original Blue Moon proposal was a low gravity world; it was part of the reason the trees could get so big.

and the fact that a stiff breeze would be a lot stiffer than on earth (hurricane strength winds would be normal with at least one permanent tornado present on the surface).

That's something I didn't consider - but I think the people who came up with Blue Moon might have! They had the forests be interconnected so that the trees supported each other structurally. Such an arrangement would be a lot more stable than free-standing trees. I think high winds might have been one of the considerations when they arranged it that way.

Even in areas where the heavier gasses (like water vapour and Carbon Dioxide) don't liquefy due to pressure

Hmm, looking it up, according to this carbon dioxide can become a liquid at 350 kPa. 1 bar is 100 kPa, so I should probably reduce the atmospheric pressure. 3 bars instead of 4 should eliminate that problem. Thanks!

Nitrogen is also pretty much essential to life. It being the prime building stone of DNA and all. And is a lot less inert than you'd think.

Lack of it certainly shouldn't be a problem here! Humans would suffer nitrogen narcosis in that kind of atmosphere, but I don't see why native life couldn't be adapted to the higher levels.