A long history of scientific misnomers

This is actually a very nice little read about the Fermi Paradox, but perhaps my favourite bit is this :

Many – if not most – concepts in astronomy are misnomers; in an ancient science that has always possessed so much dynamism, it is perhaps to be expected. Let me offer just a few examples most people would emphatically not agree to as correct. Apparent, absolute, visual and other MAGNITUDES of celestial bodies, especially stars, are not really magnitudes (the word meaning bigness or size); all stars were point-like sources until very recently. There is no Ocean of Storms or Sea of Tranquillity, since LUNAR MARIA are not seas, in spite of being thus named. PLANETARY NEBULAE have nothing whatsoever to do with planets; NOVA (and especially SUPERNOVA) is not, contrary to its Latin meaning since the time of Tycho, a new star, but an old one. The usage of METALS (and derivatives like METALLICITY) to denote carbon or oxygen or sulphur is likely to make any physical chemist cry, since they exhibit no metallic properties whatsoever. EARLY- and LATE-TYPE GALAXIES form neither chronological nor evolutionary sequence and therefore are neither early nor late.

And, of course, cosmology is rife with such misnomers. The celebrated HUBBLE CONSTANT is variable in most cosmological models, including the realistic one. VOIDS are not really devoid of matter, and the EPOCH OF RECOMBINATION did not, in contrast to laboratory plasmas, mean recombining of electrons and nuclei, since they had never been together in the first place. A Gray-like project of excising misnomers would have to insist on renaming it the epoch of combination – not an appealing proposal to most cosmologists. The ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE has nothing to do with man (ἄνθρωπος), but deals instead with the observation-selection effects common to any observer. Speaking about paradoxes, OLBERS’ PARADOX can hardly bear scrutiny, since Digges, Kepler, Halley, and Cheseaux have all had better claim on it than H. W. Olbers.

I agree with everything written here about Fermi, in particular :

The locution "Fermi’s paradox“ should not – if we wish to have a substantive discussion of ideas and not just a scholastic discussion about words – be used literally for Fermi’s lunchtime remarks, whose exact content is anyway unknown with certainty, but as synonymous with the more general and precise Great Silence paradox (Brin 1983; Dirkovid 2009). The Great Silence paradox has nothing in particular to do with exploration or conquest, and even less with any form of human psychology or history; it does not necessarily have anything to do with the feasibility of interstellar travel either. Instead, the Great Silence paradox has to do with the general detectability of other intelligent species.

The lack of any detectable activities or manifestations or traces of extraterrestrial civilizations in our past light cone is incompatible with the multiplicity of such civilizations and conventional assumptions about their capacities.

My only small amendment would be that perhaps the notion of interstellar travel and expansion is the most important aspect of the paradox. I can accept that isolated civilisations would be exceedingly hard to detect, but not galaxy-spanning empires. I know, there's a whole bunch of sort-of possible reasons why we're not part of a Great Galactic Empire, but I just don't find any of them at all convincing.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09801