Columbus fleet arrive at the Americas, circa 1492, colorized.
Probably 地球 (Dì qiú) if you're looking for what most native speakers call it, or Земля (Zemlya) - if you're looking for where is most likely for them to land.
Now we have a problem, we don't even know what to call our planet, sorta - one may argue that most languages call our planet with the capitalized word analogous to ground or soil - that being inherited from the Holy Roman Empire, where various dialects of German along with other languages were spoken, from the word Erde - meaning Earth was used, and as French, Italian, Polish, Czechs and Dutch got apart they kind of kept it that way.
The Greeks and Romans had Gaia and Tellus (hence where we got Telluric planets) to represent the Earth, but also the well known Terra.
While looking for answers I stumbled upon some rather interesting suggestions, some already well known (not including the opening of this post):
Terra
Latin, as well how Italian and Portuguese currently name it.
Domus
Latin, meaning home.
Sol III
Indicates the Latin name of our star and the position from it our planet finds itself.
Origin
Quite poetic, I mean, is where we've born.
Dhéǵhōm
Proto-Indo-European, meaning the Broad One, Mother Earth, or House of the Mortals depending on who you ask.
Pangea
Greek, meaning All of Earth.
EArth
500,99 USD to check this translation.
Earth... Is though thing to resolve, because, it is a name from a time the world resumed itself to the ground, and anything above were deemed supernatural, not that any of us at that time could have figured out that early we were in a rock floating in space around a star, and that other stars had Earth's of their own - when we were too busy finding food or waging war.
Personally, I find the idea of renaming our planet quite silly. The same way we dubbed a planet light years away Kepler 22b or Trappist-1 e, alien astronomers and explorers would already have a catchy name for our little blue planet - references to their great persons and their own gods, and pop culture.
However, the question stands out if the alien explorers DO CARE about what we call our planet.
If both give each other time to study each other's language, maybe we could arrive at a consensus about it.
Ex; like they would refer to our among them as Blue Planet, and we would refer to theirs as Green Moon, until we have properly figured out each other.
None of those words will make any sense if they do speak musical notes, or sign language, or worse, it could mean something obscene for them - just imagine telling them our place is called Pangea, and it actually means Rape to them (if they do have such a concept).
Or the contrary, if an alien homeplanet is called Nostrils or Lemon.
When thinking about that, is way simpler to stick with the concept of Us and Them, the Terrans, Klingons and Vulcans, like we do separate countries, when actually their societies may and would be as complex as ours, with their own Nazi Germanies, and Russias, and Canadas.
We as humans never been a monocultural species, and the last century until today is the closest everybody in this planet got to ever be united in someway, and there is still native populations not contacted for half a millennia since Europeans landed in the New World...
We still wage wars against each other, we steal land, we have political parties and different religions and worldviews all around, that just won't let us to be mono cultural as far humanity is concerned, in many scenarios is way more easy to just accept your workers can't eat pork and go on with life and building stuff than starting a thousand year war to absorb their people - and that's still not accounting for racism and xenophobic people.
One funny (or not) thought experiment you can do is to try imagine the world if aliens had come in WWII and helped Nazi Germany to win and 'unify' the world, or helped USSR to spread communism - if they did recognize the world's major powers at the time as rulers of the world, what would modern day Earth look like? What if this occurred back in the 1800s when Europe divided Africa?
Now, what if the Klingon we love to see as the enemy is only one of a dozen or even hundred klingon peoples that got into space, knowing their society is as much varied as ours, would you blow their planet up to help the Federation?.
The Cold War is a good demonstration that the world doesn't exactly need to be united as a planet to explore space.
Again, into the consensus, I think names should be given in neutral territory, I mean, doesn't mean something utterly mundane or obscene for one or both main languages of the parts - or, one must accept the other's culture regardless of sounding, at least, to a certain extent.
A PLACE CALLED EARTH
Or maybe we don't need to worry much about it, because if hundreds of civilizations and peoples isolated from one another have told us is Regression to the Mean, maybe there would be a huge tendency to call the world "soil" in some manner. And if that is true out of mankind, it means that if an alien could answer in perfect English what's their homeplanet's name - they would answer, Earth.
SAMPLE PIECE OF LORE
The protagonists find themselves in a barren alien planet the natives call Hokushoku, later on, they find out that is not the actual name of their planet, but a nick given in an ancient dead language so their alien friends could call them by - the Place of all Hoku. It's like Earth was called Domuhominum or Anthropédaphos.
- M.O Valent, 25/02/2020
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