In the last five months, Mars has become a whole lot more like … us. We have flowing water; Mars has flowing water. We have underground water; Mars has underground water. We have auroras in the night sky; so does Mars. In just the last five months, we and Mars have grown a whole lot closer, beyond our basic adjacency in the solar system. It’s reasonable to think that Matt Damon’s recent triumph of ingenuity and self-sufficiency over Martian inhospitality might soon come true.  Related: Gravity will rip Martian moon apart to form dust and rubble ring  The time has come, obviously, to tackle the problem of Mars’s moons. Or more specifically, their awkward names. The naming of celestial bodies is currently highly regulated, overseen by the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, a branch of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). But back before the IAU there was a wild and wooly era of naming essentially by whim, the whim of whoever was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.  In the case of Mars, that was Asaph Hall, the American astronomer who discovered the moons, cracked open a bottle of Champagne and decided on a pair of deities who embody panic/fear (Phobos) and terror/dread (Deimos).  These names strike very dark chords. Anyone at all familiar with epic poetry (the kind written here on Earth), knows what I mean. The words behind the names of the deities – phobos and deos (deimos is a poetic form of deos) – crop up hundreds of times in Homer’s Iliad, usually in depictions of brutal combat, explicit and grotesquely violent depictions in which, for example, a spear takes out an eye, the eye falls to the ground, the warrior topples onto his own eye. Whoa.  The words essentially form the infrastructure for the barbaric violence in the Iliad. And names matter. Is it really possible that we haven’t complained about the names? That no petitions are circulating demanding a softening of the names? We are basically implying, by doing nothing, that panic and terror are perfectly acceptable as appellations for our next-door neighbors in the sky.  If nothing else, we should be thinking of the children who will someday grow up to be Mars colonists. No one currently bats an eye when an adult leads a child out into the backyard to admire a planet orbited by panic and terror. These very children may one day exit from their habitat on yet another bright and balmy Martian morning, their hearts brimming with optimism, and look up at those pale moons. We’re doing nothing less than setting up those future colonists for failure – or interplanetary warfare.  Anyone whose heart happens to be brimming with optimism at the moment might envision the following scenario: the IAU, whose offices are in Paris, could be inspired by some stunning development at the soon-to-convene Paris Climate Conference. After all, addressing climate change is more difficult than a moon-name change. If Louis Vuitton is in on board for climate change, surely other major players would get behind an IAU-sponsored initiative that’s all about fixing a problem on an even larger scale – a chance for enlightened corporate involvement in, essentially, reconfiguring the solar system.  I am, however, not optimistic. The IAU hasn’t exactly been a paragon of enlightenment in naming recently-discovered objects (especially in regard to sensitivity to climate change). In 2002, it sanctioned the assignment of the name Typhon to an archipelago of tiny icy planets in the far reaches of the solar system. Typhon, of course, is the monster with 100 heads who was banished by Zeus to the underworld and became the source of destructive winds that wreak havoc on land and sea … basically, typhoons.  We really should be worrying not just about the colonists of the near-future, but the welfare of future generations. What about the future generations who stay home, here on Earth, soaking up Mars’s two moons’ baleful vibes?  Related: I always thought octopuses came from Mars. Maybe I'll be proved right now | Dave Bry  And apropos of baleful vibes, what about the damage we’ve done to the moons by naming them so unflatteringly? A new finding suggests that, in a mere 50m years, the larger of the moons will tear itself apart into zillions of chunks of orbiting rubble. A planetary geoscientist would argue that Phobos is feeling the strain of Martian gravity, but I wouldn’t be so sure. In the course of 50m years, Phobos will be soaking up a lot of baleful vibes. Do we really want future generations to be witnessing a nearby moon disintegrating into rubble and wondering, Did we do that?
Keeping Phobos and Deimos, which means ‘fear’ and ‘terror’, implies it’s totally cool to demonize our neighbor in the sky