I don't have any guess what will eventually happen if we do really meet other intelligent beings someday, but I will bet anything that the naming situation will be a whole lot more complex than "Vulcans from the planet Vulcan." We don't even have a single name for Earth; that's the English name. "Human" is English, too. We may call them by the name we find convenient, just as we use "Germany" rather than Deutschland and "Japan" instead of Nippon, in other words the names the people who actually live there use.vison wrote:Have you ever noticed that on TV or in the movies, the people who live on the Planet Vulcan are called Vulcans but people who live on Earth are usually called "humans", not "Earthers" or "Terrans"? Does the word "human" then mean only US, or can it be expanded in meaning to include all such beings anywhere?
The more basic science fiction, which includes pretty much all TV science fiction, tends to have absurdly simple naming conventions. A lot of it overlooks the fact that there would most likely be different countries, each with its own language(s) and name, just as we have here, and that the people would describe each other by many different names based on differences we might not understand or even be able to see. What if they distinguished "races" by scent rather than color, for example?
Uh. Er. Maybe this should be split off.
<sneaks off guiltily>
edited to add quote