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The first proposal for a solar system domain name system (zoharesque.blogspot.com)
18 points by anigbrowl 9 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments





Well this is just delightful. I get why they’re trying to replicate two-letter codes, but IMO three-letter ones scan so much better, giving you, what, 26 times more options?

For one thing, interplanetary caravans / stations can just use the name of the body they are orbiting — .sol! Definitely better than .sun, IMO.

From there, we could dodge all these concerns by making planets subdomains like .ca.gov (presumably a common thing?). This would have the appeal of robustly setting us up for galactic expansion, at least for the first 26^3 settled systems! You can never be too prepared…

Otherwise the mixing of name origins is a little jarring IMO, and the planets are already in a dead language, Latin. Why not keep em, if we have three letters and/or a super domain? For three letters, I’d propose; .mrc, .vns, .ter, .mrs, .jpt, .stn, .npt, .uns, and then .sol for the bits and bobs at the edges. Some of the naive three letter choices work great (.jup, .sat, .nep) but some are just ugly IMO (.mar, .mer, .ura), so some creativity might be called for.

Part of me really wants to say the big habitable moons deserve their own, but if we give it to them, then .jup and .sat would go basically unused ;(

I hope we get longevity tech in my lifetime so I can live to see this become a fight among interplanetary sys admins! If nothing else, .terra might be a cute climate change domain for right now…


>For one thing, interplanetary caravans / stations can just use the name of the body they are orbiting — .sol! Definitely better than .sun, IMO.

I wish we'd stop using "Moon" as the name of Earth's moon, since "moon" is not a proper noun anyway and there's hundreds of moons in our system. "Luna" is a much better name.

>For three letters, I’d propose; .mrc, .vns, .ter, .mrs, .jpt, .stn, .npt, .uns, and then .sol for the bits and bobs at the edges

No, I think planets should be sub-domains for .sol. Everything should end in .sol, unless it's of extrasolar origin. Then it'll be easy to have domain names for other star systems.

Also, your 3-letter proposals aren't good. How about: .mer.sol, .ven.sol, .ter.sol, .mar.sol (or .mcr.sol later), .jup.sol, .sat.sol, .nep.sol, .ura.sol, and also things like .cer.sol, .mak.sol, and .plu.sol.


>I wish we'd stop using "Moon" as the name of Earth's moon, since "moon" is not a proper noun anyway and there's hundreds of moons in our system. "Luna" is a much better name.

I mean sure I agree, but Luna means moon in Spanish / Latin so its not really that much better (just like Sol just means Sun in Spanish :) ). I get that we named them according to the Latin names, but they are still not that "unique" if you consider other languages apart from English.


>I mean sure I agree, but Luna means moon in Spanish / Latin

Sorry, what I really mean is that I think we should call the moon "Luna" in English (so we don't confuse it with other moons). In Spanish, they might want to call it "Moon" instead, for the same reason.

Edit: in addition, with my proposal, our moon's domain will be .lun.ter.sol, rather than .moo.ter.sol which would make people think of cows.


Nit pick: I do not like the abbreviation "mrs" for Mars, from an etymological point of view.

The root of the name of the Roman god is Mart-.

The "-s" is not a part of the name. It is the marker of the nominative case, like in "John's" the "'s" is the marker of the genitive case.

"Mart-" was a stem ending in a consonant, so the case marker was attached directly to the stem, without a thematic vowel like in the most frequent Latin words.

So the nominative of "Mart-" was "Marts". The Latins found difficult to pronounce "-ts", so in all such words "-ts" has been simplified to "-s", resulting in "Mars".

English has the habit to borrow Latin words in their nominative-case form, because this was their traditional dictionary form. I consider this habit as bad, but this would be a longer discussion, so English has settled for the form "Mars".

In Latin, in most other noun cases or in the derived words the complete name "Mart" was present, for instance in the adjective "martial", which has also been borrowed in English, or in the genitive form "Martius", which has become English "March" (and "Martius" is actually the name of the planet in Latin, because the planet Mars was not the god Mars, but the planet of the god Mars).

In conclusion, I consider that the correct abbreviation for the planet Mars is "mrt", not "mrs", which has a spurious "s".

There are other languages than English, e.g. many Romance languages, where the name of the planet is derived from "Mart", not from "Mars". In the Romance languages, the nouns inherited from Latin are normally derived from their accusative-case form, not from the nominative-case form. Only for nouns that have not been inherited, but which have been reintroduced by scholars, it is common to use a form derived from the nominative case of the dictionaries.

In Latin, the complete name of the planet Mars was "stella Martius", the star of Mars. In ancient Latin or Greek, "planet" was not used as a noun, but as an adjective for "stella" or "aster" (star), to distinguish the wandering stars from the normal fixed stars.



W3C DID Decentralized Identifiers sk/pk can be generated offline and then the pk can optionally be registered online. If there is no connection to the broader internet - as is sometimes the case during solar storms in space - offline key generation without a central authority would ensure ongoing operations.

Blockcerts can be verified offline.

EDNS Ethereum DNS avoids various pitfalls of DNS, DNScrypt, DNSSEC, and DoH and DoT (which depend upon NTP which depends upon DoH which depends upon the X.509 cert validity interval and the system time being set correctly).

Dapps don't need DNS and are stored in the synchronized (*) chain.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32753994 :

> W3C DID pubkeys can be stored in a W3C SOLID LDPC: https://solid.github.io/did-method-solid/

> Re: W3C DIDs and PKI systems; CT Certificate Transparency w/ Merkle hashes in google/trillian and edns,

And then actually handle money with keys in space because how do people pay for limited time leases on domain names in space?

In addition to Peering, Clearing, and Settlement, ILP Interledger Protocol Specifies Addresses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503888

> ILP is not tied to a single company, payment network, or currency

ILP Addresses - v2.0.0 > Allocation Schemes: https://github.com/interledger/rfcs/blob/main/0015-ilp-addre...


Why not start at the top, the multiverse? We will only need another new dns root when we expand outside of the solar system. Another issue, like plate tectonics cause gps drift, is that objects are constantly moving so you would need to use a taxonomic directory vs geospatial.

This whole thing seems confused to me. DNS is not a hierarchical addressing system, but a hierarchical naming authority system.

It makes sense for NASA or ESA to have domains to name all their facilities or craft, and to use whatever sub-organizational structures best suit their methods. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with locations or trajectories.

One could argue that in a science fiction future, we need a new top-level to disambiguate our current networking universe. But is our current system earth-centric or just human-centric? Isn't it a leap to assume planets will be organizational units above current ones, rather than just internal details of other existing nations or multinational conglomerates?


With around 1300 TLDs, I'm not sure that more TLDs are a good solution. <planet>.sol seems adequate for now. Also, after doing interplanetary DNS, let's think about light-speed delays for NTP, and time zone abbreviations.

> Pluto - Pu. the closest available abbreviation

Did he not get the memo about Pluto not being a planet anymore?


Pluto is a small planet.

Actually, it is useful to distinguish between big planets, medium planets and small planets.

Big planets and medium planets differ in chemical composition, caused by the intensity of their gravity. Only the big planets can retain large quantities of the very abundant chemical elements that form mostly volatile compounds (H, He, C, N, O, Ne and S). The medium planets are strongly depleted in these chemical elements, in comparison with the average composition of their stellar system.

The medium planets and the small planets differ in their capacity of clearing their orbits of any other big bodies.

The celestial bodies which orbit the star, but which are not big enough to become quasi-spherical, are not considered planets.

By these definitions, the Solar system has 4 big planets, 4 medium planets and a large number of small planets, including Pluto and Ceres.

It is likely that the configuration of the Solar System, with some medium planets close to the star and some big planets far from the star, is typical for most star systems, due to higher temperatures closer to the star, which prevent the condensation of the volatile elements that contain most of the available mass for forming a planet and due to lower amounts of bodies condensed around the smaller orbit, which can be accreted into the final planet.


Pluto is a planet, the same way Ceres and Makemake are planets.

And dozens more. It's just not a remarkable major planet.

It's not a major planet at all. It is a fairly remarkable minor planet, however: it's just close enough to see with optical telescopes, it's large enough to have hydrostatic equilibrium (it's round), and it's actually a binary system with the barycenter between Pluto and Charon, since Charon is also quite large.

"Not a remarkable major planet" does not imply "major planet"

Yes, sure, this is a very important problem, a real blocker for the mankind.

BuT wHaT aBoUt PlAnEt 9!?huh?1?!



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