Earth. Humans moved around, walked around and naturally and slowly decided to settle themselves in a piece of land. For that piece of land they were able to kill other animals and other humans, just to protect it, they gathered with other humans forming a group to fight another group of humans for a piece of land, wars that are still occurring for this very same reason.

We buy a piece of land from an individual or a government representing a group of individuals with the notion that someone owns that piece of land. We extend this concept to the size of a country and eventually the planet. We have this naive idea that we actually own the planet, that some piece of land can actually belong to us just because we agreed with other humans that such piece of land belongs to us (“mine, mine, mine…”).

NASA states in its website that they do not longer give names to stars and other stars, they just give them a number, they do not deny the possibility of it ever happening in the future but it is not something that they do now. You can however pay a company that has a database of stars and map of the cosmos to name a star, which is a contract between two private parties, in the exact same way if you give me £20 and we agree that the sun has now your name instead. This would be an agreement between you and me which does not necessarily mean accepted by the rest of the population and certainly nothing gave us the authority nor the right to give a name to the sun. I do not judge if you do want to go ahead with naming a star and here is a blog that talks about it www.nameastarnasa.com


You can also visit the International Astronomical Union’s website, here they explain precisely this “The IAU frequently receives requests from individuals who want to buy stars or name stars after other persons.  Some commercial enterprises purport to offer such services for a fee.  However, such “names” have no formal or official validity whatever: A few bright stars have ancient, traditional Arabic names, but otherwise stars have just catalogue numbers and positions on the sky.  Similar rules on “buying” names apply to star clusters and galaxies as well.  For bodies in the Solar System , special procedures for assigning official names apply (see the IAU theme “Naming Astronomical Objects“), but in no case are commercial transactions involved.“

I believe that nobody has the right to tell another person where this person can and cannot go and where can and cannot live. The world belongs to no one, the world is not ours, we agree between us that a specific location is our home but this does not give us the right to say to someone that is not allowed to live in some part of the world just because we say so.

A true democracy cannot be such if not all of its individuals are part of it. We shall all be free or none of us will.

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You may also want to read: No Man’s Land