How come in Star Trek all the planets are named after their star and orbital position?

Question

Like Nimbus 2 or Rigel 7. What about the local inhabitant's name for their planet? Why isn't Earth called Sol 3? In Star Wars they managed to have proper names for planets.

Answer 1

Because star trek is a cheap version of Star Wars. I know I'm not winning over any Fans here but if you can't even make up a couple of planet names then it has to be a cheap carbon copy. Star Wars is the best by the way. Just thought of adding it because it is true.

Answer 2

It was the easiest way to go.

Answer 3

The named planets are only named because they are in our solar system. When looking at the other solar systems and their planets it just makes sense to name them after their orbital position. If you think about it,,,there are probably millions of planets,,it would be kind of hard to just randomly name them all. Plus, naming them after their orbital and star position makes them easy to find for everyone, including anyone who is not based on Earth.

The planets in Star Wars were named because the people who lived there named them.

Do you think if we found martians that the martians also just happened to name their planet Mars?? I doubt it.

Answer 4

Same thing happens in Eve Online...

Still Nimbus 2 is more exciting than the names given by astronomers to the planets they are finding - they're all reference numbers!

Besides there are probably too many planets for each to have a name!

Although the solar system of Simon I, II, III, IV etc, sounds pretty cool!

Answer 5

Not all of them, but it was a lot easier to tell the viewers where the Enterprise was visiting.

Answer 6

When we named the Earth, it wasn't considered a planet.  After all, planets were things that move in the sky - and the Earth isn't even in the sky.  So, the Sun, Moon, Mars, etc., were planets.  We still have a day of the week named after each of them.

The names of extrasolar planets that we've found are not named either.  You use the name of the parent star - which may just be a catalog number, and a letter, A, B, C, and so on.  But these aren't even lettered by orbital position. They're lettered by order of discovery.  That's so that the literature isn't totally obsolete once a new inner planet is discovered.

Star Trek is fiction based in Earth's near future.  So they use current naming conventions.  Star Wars takes place long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.  So they gave planets better names.

Well, we have pretty good names for planets and some other objects in our solar system.  All except for the Moon, and Earth.  Who'd name a planet after dirt?

Answer 7

When you're dealing with lots of planetary systems it's the easiest way to catalogue the planets.  Some of the major inhabited planets were named, such as Earth, Vulcan, Qo'Nos, Romulus or Bajor.

Answer 8

i never noticed

Answer 9

There are probably several hundred billion planets in the galaxy. Naming them the star Trek way instantly tells what planet in what solar system it is.

Answer 10

because when they were colonised it made it easier for captains of freight transports so they would no were to go in star wars which is fictitious they called planets names but doing it that way would mean trialling through computer databases  

Answer 11

That's the great thing about making up a story, you can call things whatever you want.