Reach for the stars

A few days ago, I got an interesting email:

DO YOU WANT YOUR NAME TO BE REMEMBERED FOREVER?

With the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Telescope discovering new stars and planets and galaxies every single day, the astronomers can't keep up with naming them.  So many of them end up with strings of numbers and letters that no one can ever remember.  How much better would it be to have a heavenly body named after YOU?  Or your loved one?  Or your favorite pet?

We are the STAR REGISTERY [sic] SERVICE, where you can choose from thousands of unnamed stars, and give it whatever name you choose.  You will receive a beautiful framable certificate of ownership with the location (what the astronomers call the Declination and Right Ascension) of your OWN PERSONAL STAR so you can go outside any clear night and find it.  

A lovely idea for a gift -- or a gift to yourself!

We then are told that the fee for this service is a paltry $40 U.S., and that they accept PayPal, Venmo, and major credit cards.  And it's accompanied by this enticing and irresistible photo:

Okay, there are a few problems with this.

First, I can think of a great many better uses for forty bucks, and that includes using it to start a campfire.  Part of this is that I'm a major skinflint, but still.

Second, the vast majority of the "new stars and planets and galaxies" catalogued by the Hubble and JWST are far too faint to see with the naked eye, so I wouldn't be able to go outside on a clear night and see "my own personal star" unless I happened to bring along the Palomar Telescope.  So the most I could do is to find the approximate location, and try to gain some sense of ownership by staring up into the dark.

Third, what on earth does it mean to claim that I "own a star?"  The nearest star (which, so far as I know, is not for sale) is about forty trillion kilometers away, so unless warp drive is invented soon (not looking likely), I'll never go to visit my star.  And doesn't selling something imply that the seller owned it to start with?  I doubt seriously whether the "Star Registery Service" could demonstrate legal ownership of any of the things out there in space that they're trying to sell.

So needless to say, I'm not going to pay forty dollars for a piece of paper, however "beautiful" and "framable" it is.  If I gave it as a present to my wife, she would roll her eyes enough to see the back of her own skull.  And I'm not naming a star after my puppy.  Jethro is a lovely little dog, but smart, he isn't.  He seems to spend his entire existence in a state of mild puzzlement.  Anything new is met with an expression that can be summed up as, "... wait, what?"  So appreciating the wonders of astrophysics is kind of outside his wheelhouse.  (Pretty much everything is outside his wheelhouse other than playing, snuggling, sleeping, and eating dinner.)

But I digress.

So anyway, I didn't respond to the email.  But because I live for investigating the weird corners of human behavior -- and also because I never met a rabbit-hole I didn't like -- I started poking around into other examples of people claiming to own astronomical objects.  And this, it turns out, has a long and storied history.  Here are just a few examples I found out about:

• In 1996, a German guy named Martin Juergens claimed that he owned the Moon.  On 15 July 1756, Juergens said, German emperor Frederick the Great deeded the Moon to his ancestor Aul Juergens, and it passed down through the family, always being inherited by the youngest son.  Needless to say, pretty much no one took him seriously, although apparently he believes it himself.
• Back in 1936 the Pittsburgh Notary Public received a banker's check and a deed for establishment of property filed by one A. Dean Lindsay, wherein he claimed the ownership of all extraterrestrial objects in the Solar System.  Lindsay had earlier submitted claims of ownership on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but these were both denied.  The extraterrestrial objects one, though, was apparently notarized and filed, with the Notary Public taking the attitude that if the dude wanted to spend money for something he couldn't ever get to, that was on him.  Lindsay got the last laugh, however, when he was approached multiple times by other even loonier people who wanted to buy specific extraterrestrial objects from him.  Lindsay was happy to sell.  At a profit, of course.
• When NASA landed the NEAR Shoemaker probe on the asteroid 433 Eros in 2001, they were promptly served with a bill for twenty dollars from Gregory Nemitz, who claimed he owned it and they owed him for parking.  NASA unsurprisingly refused to pay.
• Nemitz wasn't the only one to trouble NASA with claims of ownership.  In 1996 three Yemeni men, Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil, and Abdullah al-Umari, sued NASA for "invading Mars."  They said they had inherited the planet from their ancestors three thousand years ago.  Once again, NASA declined to make reparations.
• In 1980, an entrepreneur named Dennis Hope started a company called the Lunar Embassy Commission, which sells one-acre plots on the Moon for twenty dollars each.  (It'd be fun to put him and Martin Juergens in a locked room and let them duke it out over whose property the Moon actually is.)  Once he gets your money, he chooses your plot by randomly pointing to a lunar map with a stick, which seems kind of arbitrary; at least the "Star Registery Service" was gonna let me pick my own star.  Despite this, he claims that former presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were both customers.
• Lastly, in the Go Big Or Go Home department, we have noted eccentric James T. Mangan (1896–1970), who publicly claimed ownership of all of outer space in 1948.  He founded what he called the Nation of Celestial Space (also known as "Celestia") and registered it with the Cook County, Illinois, Recorder of Deeds and Titles on 1 January 1949.  At its height in 1960 the Nation of Celestial Space had almost twenty thousand, um, "residents," but since Mangan's death in 1970 it has more or less ceased to exist as an official entity.  Space itself, of course, is still out there, and seems unaffected by the whole affair.

Anyhow, I think I'll pass on star ownership.  (Or Moon, or Mars, or outer space, or whatnot.)  The whole thing strikes me as a little ridiculous.  Of course, if I think about it too hard, even our concept of owning land down here on Earth is pretty goofy; what does it mean to say I own this parcel of property, when it was here before I was born and will still be here long after I'm gone?  Okay, I can use it to live on; ownership gives me certain rights according to the laws of New York State.  I get that.  But honestly, even the concept of dividing up the Earth using (mostly) arbitrary and invisible lines, and saying stuff is legal on one side of the line and illegal on the other side, is weird, too.  (And don't even get me started about how to cross certain invisible lines, you need a special piece of paper, and if you don't have it and try to cross anyhow, mean people get to shoot you.)

You have to wonder what would happen if the intelligent creatures out there who come from those far distant star systems traveled here, and I tried to tell them, "See, your star, I bought that for forty dollars from some guy on the internet."  My guess is they'd vaporize me with their laser pistol and head back out into space after stamping their map of the Solar System with the words "No Intelligent Life Present."

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Finding yourself

Today's story is more of a puzzlement than anything else.  It came to my attention thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link to a site called What3Words with the message, "People will surely be making up conspiracy theories about the secret meaning of THESE words being attached to THAT place.  So I thought you might want to get the jump on them by making up your own."

What3Words turns out to be a "universal addressing system" that divides the entire world into 57 trillion three-meter-by-three-meter squares, and gives each of them a unique address made up of three random words.  My pond, for example (or at least one three-by-three bit of its surface) is extras.equine.outsmart.  As the "About" page explains it:

The world is poorly addressed. This is frustrating and costly in developed nations; and in developing nations this is life-threatening and growth limiting. 

What3Words is a unique combination of just 3 words that identifies a 3m x 3m square, anywhere on the planet. 

It’s far more accurate than a postal address and it’s much easier to remember, use and share than a set of coordinates. 

Better addressing improves customer experience, delivers business efficiencies, drives growth and helps the social & economic development of countries.

Which may well be true, but still strikes me as kind of weird.  Why do we need that kind of accuracy? My pond, for example, is about eight meters by twelve meters in area.  So this means that just in my pond alone, there are on the order of ten different "addresses."  If I swim across the pond, I've moved from "extras.equine.outsmart" to "ranch.speculated.dressing."  So what does that gain me?  If I order a pizza, and the delivery person can't find me when I'm eight meters away, the pizza place needs to hire a new delivery person, not use a better addressing system.

I have to admit the map is fun to play with, though.  The assignment of the words seems random to me, although there may be a deeper structure there than I'm seeing.  The site explains:

Each What3Words language is powered by a wordlist of 25,000 – 40,000 dictionary words.  The wordlists go through multiple automated and human processes before being sorted by an algorithm that takes into account word length, distinctiveness, frequency, and ease of spelling and pronunciation. 

Offensive words and homophones (sale & sail) have been removed.  Simpler, more common words are allocated to more populated areas and the longest words are used in 3 word addresses in unpopulated areas.

I'm a little disappointed at the removal of the offensive words, because that could create an opportunity for a great deal of barbed hilarity.  Just think, for example, if the headquarters of the Church of Scientology were located at "bloody.fucking.nonsense."

And it does offer more precision, especially in areas that lack ordinary street systems (the site says it's already being used by the postal system in Mongolia).  But here in the United States, I'm not sure what's to be gained, especially since (most) house numbering systems are pretty logical.  You'd expect that 101 South Street would be next to 103 South Street, and across the road from 102 South Street, and most of the time you'd be correct.

What3Words addresses, on the other hand, don't tell you much of anything.  Good luck figuring out what "huge.mutant.weasel" is next to, for example.  The nuclear power plant, probably.

To be fair, some street addresses are equally bizarre.  Not far away from where I live there's a "Gravel Road."  It probably goes without saying that it's paved.

There's also the problem of minor misspellings making a huge difference.  As I mentioned, one bit of my pond, in Trumansburg, New York, is "extras.equine.outsmart."  On the other hand, "extra.equine.outsmart" is in Salem, South Dakota, and "extras.equine.outsmarted" is in southern Peru.  At least if you're trying to find 219 East Main Street, Trumansburg, New York, USA, you won't be off by six thousand kilometers.

And since there is no apparent rhyme or reason to the choice of words, I'm afraid my friend is quite right; it's only a matter of time before the conspiracy-minded start "discovering" their own meanings for What3Words addresses.  A search for the What3Words address "all.seeing.eye" came up with nothing, as did "new.world.order."  Most of the addresses I've seen are simply weird and random.  But there are bound to be some combinations that raise eyebrows, and believe me, someone is gonna find them.

Anyhow, that's our news from the "Who Even Thought Of This?" department.  So I'll sign off from my comfortable office at "mango.trinkets.embedding," and am heading for a nap in my hammock over at "corresponding.scream.spot," which seems a little misnamed.

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