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.”
Listen. It takes a lot to out-chill a geologist.
>65% of population can’t digest milk
Fun fact: In Chinese, the Milky Way is called Silver River (銀河系)
In swedish it’s the “winter street”
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.
So english and french are super denied
Embarrasing in front of whom, the aliens?
That’s the joke.
That’s because it’s another language.
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
Milktopia, dominated by mammals obsessed with milk?
Not quite right. How about:
Homotropolis, dominated by homosapians obsessed with homosex?
Closer, but what about:
Earth, dominated by earthlings obsessed with earth?
Fairly accurate, but ever since we moved away from agrarian societies, we don’t care nearly enough about earth. Unless of course, we consider our obsession with exclusive control of territory and property, in which case it totally checks out.
YEAH I was trying to point out in my comment how stupid the name “earth” is but didnt know how, Gaia and Selene(moon) FTW :3
name their whole taxonomic class of animals after glands that produce milk
Wait fuck this hurts my brain we’re in the titty class?
Holy shitJiggly jugs, batman!Mammals have mammary glands.
Titty class
Yo imagine no titties tho.
Now look up the Greek mythology of how it got that name.
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
NSFW: Jim Carrey in “Me Myself and Irene”
Yooo pls spoiler a gif like that, like:
::: spoiler NSFW  :::My man, thanks :)
Gotta watch that Carrey!!
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.
Hera creating permanent star clusters in the sky for all to see every time she spills her breastmilk:
We here on planet Dirt are bad at naming things
Reminds me of They’re Made out of Meat.
“So aeh you guys ahem breastfeeding usually?”
Let’s normalize breastfeeding!
Milk- kinda a big deal
milk: it does a planetary civilization good
All hail the cult of milk 🥛🥛🥛
Slurp slurp slurp it up.
New PETA publicity campaign in 3… 2…
Find an alien that’s barely heard of milk. Now explain cheese.
That would be the most understandable portion of the whole shindig. Fungi are a major idea (and everywhere in science fiction) for how to deal with interstellar travel because of their unique niche in the various cycles of life. I would bet an alien species that can travel through the vast reaches of space would also be familiar with using biotechnology.
but fungi aren’t inherent to cheese lol, most cheese doesn’t have more than an ambient amount of fungus in it
It’s not about fungi making cheese. We know that bacteria are the largest component of the microbial community making cheese. The point is that aliens traveling through the enormous, barren-of-everything wastes would likely know how to use biotechnology, such as fungi and bacteria, to replicate the life cycles found on their homeworld. In ours, it’s fungi breaking down organic matter, bacteria turning nitrogen into nitrates/nitrites, cyanobacteria turning carbon dioxide into reduced organic (carbon) compounds, etc., etc. In theirs, it could be strange silicon/phosporus/sulfur forms (unlikely, due to a bunch of esoteric but important rules about the chemistry of those elements) being processed by microbial life. After all, do you think a single celled microbe, or a relatively giant multi-cellular organism will arise first? If life there is anything like here, the single-celled organisms will be the foundation of any multi-cellular organism’s environment, each contribution of the microbes shaping the biochemical pathways that the larger organisms will use merely by providing building blocks and affecting the environment, ala the sudden explosion of atmospheric, gaseous oxygen when microbes began to explore the pathways of photosynthesis.
