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the outer solar system—a crater on Callisto, a volcano on Titan, a ridge on Miranda, a glacier on Halley’s comet. (Comets, incidentally, are given the names of their discoverers.) I sometimes wonder what the arrangement will be—whether those who are bitter rivals will be separated by being placed on different worlds, and whether those whose discoveries were collaborative will nestle together, crater rampart to crater rampart. There have been objections that political philosophers are too controversial. I myself would be delighted to see two enormous, adjacent craters called Adam Smith and Karl Marx. There are even enough objects in the solar system for dead political and military leaders to be accommodated. There are those who have advocated supporting astronomy by selling crater names to the highest bidders, but I think this goes rather too far.

THERE IS A curious problem about names in the outer solar system. Many of the objects there have extremely low density, as if they were made of ice, great fluffy snowballs tens or hundreds of miles across. While objects impacting these bodies will certainly produce craters, craters in ice will not last very long. At least for some objects in the outer solar system, named features may be transient. Perhaps that is a good thing: it would give us a chance to revise our opinions of politicians and others, and will give eventual recourse if flushes of national or ideological fervor are reflected in solar system nomenclature. The history of astronomy shows that some suggestions for celestial nomenclature are better ignored. For example, in 1688 Erhard Weigel at Jena proposed a revision of the ordinary zodiacal constellations—the lion, virgin, fish and water carrier that people have in mind when they ask you what “sign” you are. Weigel proposed instead a “heraldic sky” in which the royal families of Europe would be represented by their tutelary animals: a lion and a unicorn for England, for example. I hate to imagine descriptive stellar astronomy today had that idea been adopted in the seventeenth century. The sky would be carved into two hundred tiny patches, one for each nation-state existing at the time.

The naming of the solar system is fundamentally not a task for the exact sciences. It has historically encountered prejudice and jingoism and lack of foresight at every turn. However, while it may be a little early for self-congratulation, I think astronomers have recently taken some major steps to deprovincialize the nomenclature and make it representative of all of humanity. There are those who think it is a pointless, or at least thankless, task. But some of us are convinced it is important. Our remote descendants will be using our nomenclature for their homes: on the broiling surface of Mercury; by the banks of the Martian valleys; on the slopes of Titanian volcanoes; or on the frozen landscape of distant Pluto, where the Sun appears as a point of bright light in a sky of unremitting blackness. Their view of us, of what we cherish and hold dear, may be determined largely by how we name the moons and planets today.

* Kowal has also recently discovered a very interesting small object orbiting the Sun between the orbits of Uranus and Saturn. It may be the largest member of a new asteroid belt. Kowal proposes calling it Chiron, after the centaur who educated many Greek mythological gods and heroes. If other trans-Saturnian asteroids are discovered, they can be named after other centaurs.

CHAPTER 12

LIFE IN THE

SOLAR SYSTEM

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

LEWIS CARROLL,

Through the Looking Glass

MORE THAN three hundred years ago, Anton van Leeuwenhoek of Delft explored a new world. With the first microscope he viewed a stagnant infusion of hay and was astounded to find it swarming with small creatures:

On April 24th, 1676, observing this water by chance, I saw