My doctoral school in planetary science had students from a mix of academic backgrounds, so we all had to take astronomy as geology classes. We all went together across town to the observatory to meet the somewhat elderly astronomy professor. When he opened his computer, the screen was filled with hardcore porn. We all sat in silence as he closed it and opened his presentation. He then started his talk, which featured a classical painting of the milky way coming from the breast of Hera. When the picture was on the screen he looked at it for a while, then said “mmm, I like this picture.”
We here on planet Dirt are bad at naming things
Let’s normalize breastfeeding!
Omg LMAO its like in shows when there is a world called [thing]topia dominated by a race called [thing]lings that r always obsessively taking about [thing] like a kid that just learnt a magic trick X3
“Come on, Glarguplex, let’s visit a different poop-swirl.”
Find an alien that’s barely heard of milk. Now explain cheese.
milk: it does a planetary civilization good
Now look up the Greek mythology of how it got that name.
In Greek mythology, Zeus places his son born by a mortal woman, the infant Heracles, on Hera’s breast while she is asleep so the baby will drink her divine milk and become immortal. Hera wakes up while breastfeeding and then realizes she is nursing an unknown baby: she pushes the baby away, some of her milk spills, and it produces the band of light known as the Milky Way. – Wikipedia
I suspect the band of light looked whiter than the black sky and so was named that way first, and the the Hellenists invented a – I’m going to lose the proper word here – explanatory myth that tells the tale of how it got to be that way.
For most of the classical age, Poseidon was the big daddy, and Zeus came later, so I think this myth is late in the game.
Going off of memory, a god (Zeus?) was suckling his mother’s teat but somehow slipped off and sprayed milk across the sky? Been a while
Now i wish i hadn’t
Fun fact: In Chinese, the Milky Way is called Silver River (銀河系)
Looks like the Chinese aren’t as milky as us westerners
Well, that led me to an interesting hole
in Arabic, for example, the most common one is “The Straw Way” (درب التبانة—Darb al-Tabānah), after the sheafs of straw dropped by farmers on their way back from the fields. In India, the Milky Way is known as the “Heavenly Ganges” (आकाशगंगा—ākāśagaṅgā) and stretches across the belly of a cosmic dolphin.
There are plenty of other names in the link, definitely worth a read
When we form a global government, first order of business is to pick the least embarrassing language for our interstellar civilization.
That’s because it’s another language.
“So aeh you guys ahem breastfeeding usually?”
New PETA publicity campaign in 3… 2…
I think i will call it something that translates to “Dream Ocean” because it’s pretty
