Proposal: Uranus et. al. should no longer be called "plane-ettes".

[Fat Rooster]

I really hate the whole human tendency to try to build one name for all purposes. A definition that is useful to somebody who is interested in system formation might be slightly different from one useful to somebody who wants to fly a spacecraft, which might be different to somebody who wants to talk about colonies or talk about ISRU. It is similar to how the astronomers definition of 'metals' is entirely appropriate to their use case, but useless to anybody on earth who is doing any sort of work with materials.

That's what I grew up being taught, but it's not what they are now!

Jupiter and Saturn as 'Gas Giants', Uranus and Neptune are now 'Ice Giants' whatever that means.

The distinction between gas giants and ice giants is extremely important if you want to talk about ISRU, because the ice giants contain far more 'metals' than the gas giants. Their cores are also much larger. To somebody doing a gravity assist the difference isn't important, but for many purposes it is.

They clearly have visible surfaces, just not visible surfaces of anything solid. A lot of people are fine with talking about surfaces of liquids, and some even go along with talking about surfaces of clouds.

Liquids clearly do have surfaces; surface tension is sort of what defines a liquid. A material scientist would say that fog does not have a surface. We just have to accept that the definition of 'surface' we are using when talking about large foggy objects like the giants or the sun, or even clouds, is not the same one a material scientist would use. Astronomers are usually talking about optical depth. 'correcting' them is not pedantry, it is failure to acknowledge or clarify the precise definition being used in the context. Correcting somebody who is talking about 'walking on the surface of the sun' should not be about telling them the sun has no 'surface' at all, it should be telling them that there are two definitions of 'surface' in play and they have switched from one to the other in a way that is not valid.

Yes, but the hot molten rock Jupiter mass things out there are not part of what I'm suggesting naming.

The Kuiper belt objects seem to be snow rather than ice, I don't know what happens with hydrogen snow but water snow is mostly much less dense than ice.



I'm talking about most of the Earth, all the hot high pressure rock between the crust and the core, which seems to be in a fluid-solid hybrid sort of state.



I find gas-giant-planet and rock-ball-planet to be overly long and cumbersome. "Planet" for the rock-balls and something else (hpefully equally concise) for the gas-giants would be an improvement in my view. I do hate it when people steal words which have a meaning already (like "colour" and "charm" in nuclear physics), so hopefully not one of those.

What's not concise about gas-giant? Why would we want a more concise word for rocky planets? Somebody interested in orbital mechanics doesn't care what they are made of so doesn't need something more specific that 'planet', while somebody looking for somewhere to land on wouldn't care that the object had cleared it's orbit or even if it was orbiting something else! Arguably we would want a word for anything with more than about 0.05G of gravity and a defined surface, that doesn't care about orbital mechanics (including moons like Titan), but currently the only people that should care are sci-fi authors.

Context specific definitions are sometimes frustrating, and in my experience are the source of the majority of misunderstandings (both externally in terms of arguments, but also internally in the form of people coming to some bizarre conclusions because some definition changes half way through their argument). They are the reality though, because the real word rarely fits neatly into a type system. We don't need new words, we need people to start listening in a way that tries to understand precisely what a speaker means when they use a word, rather than naively attempting to apply their own inflexible single definition.

Spoiler: Tangent

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People dunking on alkaline diets are the worst for this. The explanation for alkaline diets usually starts with an explanation of what they mean by alkaline in this context, yet the criticism almost always starts with 'that isn't what alkaline means'. That isn't an intelligent correction, it is a failure to listen and understand what is being said. It might be better called an alkalinogenic diet, or maybe even a reduced chloride diet, but they don't quite roll of the tongue in the same way, and the use of the word is not unreasonable.
I am not advocating alkaline diets. I have not seen enough evidence to conclude either way, but I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that changing the sodium to chloride ratio in our diet would have some health effects. I am just pointing out that it is often dismissed as pseudo-science because of listeners failing at language, and not because there is nothing there that could do anything or even the speaker being unclear.

As for why we might refer to Earth's moon as Luna in a conversation where the moons of other objects might crop up? Clarity. While in most contexts talking about the Moon will clearly be referring to Earth's moon, in this specific context it is not, so switching to calling it Luna communicates better.