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Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced on the choice of name; Sir David Attenborough has already received many honours and appears to have received this nomination because (1) he is famous as a broadcaster and (2) is popular as a person, seemingly being of a mild and pleasant character.

So they cleverly side-stepped the Boaty issue by picking a name to which people can't object without being accused of picking on a "nice" 90-year-old man. I don't think that's a good basis for a naming policy.

I'm sure there are many publicly-anonymous actual research scientists who could have received this honour instead and BIS / NERC could still have thrown the Boaty-as-ROV bone to the voters.

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To see your name on a large ship you need to be old. It's the sort of thing for people who are well into retirement, if not recently deceased. Pick someone younger and you may look foolish should they become involved in something later. Given the public nature of the naming, they also want to go with someone popular. So they want an older person, who the public knows, and that has a history of doing something for the environment. Nobody else covers those three areas like Attenborough.

> Pick someone younger and you may look foolish should they become involved in something later.

Old men develop new scandals. Joe Paterno. Bill Cosby. Various Catholic bishops and cardinals.

If you're worried about bad press, better pick people who have been dead for some time.

The dead aren't as popular. Most famous people die 10-20 years after the public stopped watching them. So it's hard to find someone dead but still currently famous. Attenborough is that rare breed of famous person who is still active and respected at 89. Kids and grandparents alike know his name. Even Cosby, with all his infamy, is not recognized by teenagers because he stepped off the main stage long ago.

You forget the biggest of those scandals, Jimmy Saville. His misdeeds weren't made public until after he passed away.

Chevron had a policy of naming ships after living executives - although it quietly renamed the Condoleeza Rice to something less political in 2001.

With respect to Attenborough, the RRS David Attenborough is a very unexciting choice and isn't going to do anything at all to raise the profile of environmental research.

Can't say I'm opposed to Chevron's idea here. I'm sure headlines like "Chevron CEO hits reef, spilling millions of crude and killing thousands of seals" might make them take safety a (tiny) bit more seriously. Nothing good happens with oil tankers etc.

That does sound like something an oil company would do. It seems like horrible internal pr. Employees, the people who work on the ship, might not appreciate it being named after the boss. I'd have gone with the names of lifelong or heroic employees.

It really isn't that important.

Purpose of ship is to research and bring awareness to the public. Attenborough did that - the awareness part that is.

Seems fitting.

They tried doing the same thing here with a replacement bridge. They didn't like the old name for historical/political reasons and tried to change it to a national hero name to make this clusterfuck of a project more inticing. The backlash was infinite and they backed down. Oh and they didn't get reelected for other various reasons.

They totally picked the new name because it would soften the blow, he's a national treasure after all.

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