The Sun used to be considered a planet, along with the Moon.
What is more, there was a time when the Earth was not considered a planet.
Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
Pluto got screwed
- Thread starter Admiral Buzzkill
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The Sun used to be considered a planet, along with the Moon.
What is more, there was a time when the Earth was not considered a planet.
Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
That's only if you ever accepted what the "scientists" said. I have no problem, because Pluto is a planet. Deal with it.
^Science is about change. Deal with it. If you want to go on pretending there are exactly nine planets, then you might as well go on pretending Mars has canals and Venus is covered in rainforests. Letting go of old ideas is not a bad thing. Especially when the new ideas are so very interesting. Pluto as the archetypal KBO is a million times cooler than Pluto as the last and least of the planets.
That is ridiculous. You don't get to decide what is and isn't a planet. The scientific community made a decision regarding the classification of planets and other astronomical bodies. Just because we're calling it something else now doesn't mean it isn't there anymore. It's still Pluto. It just has a different label because it fits in more with the dwarf planets than it does with the regular planets.
That would be like me declaring that Brontosaurus is still a dinosaur just because paleontologists thought so when I was little. Science is about learning. The more we learn, the more we have to adapt.
I guarantee that there are no hard feelings between the scientists and Pluto.
Yes, this is my issue with the definition.
I love that you put "scientists" between quotes, as if members of the International Astronomical Union do not deserve the name. People that spent their lives studying celestial objects, expanding our knowledge of the cosmos and, you know, making a living out of doing science.Be careful with your quotes, or somebody will remember the hissy fit you threw about having "writer" under your name...
I have to wonder something about all the folks who get upset about Pluto being relabelled. Namely... did they even give a second thought to Pluto before that happened? Did they have any particular fondness or affinity for it? Was it in any way important to their everyday lives? I profoundly doubt it. So really, what are they defending? What do they have to lose by accepting the change? Their complaints aren't really about Pluto, just about their own resistance to novelty.
I think it's not about novelty per se, but about ownership. They feel Pluto (or anything else, really), "belongs" to them, and other people changed it without asking their permission before. It's not different from fanboys loudly complaining about changes in their favourite TV show. You see it too often on this very board.
Or maybe sometimes it's simply anti-intellectualism, but I don't think it's the case here.
Or maybe sometimes it's simply anti-intellectualism, but I don't think it's the case here.
I think it's a case of "______ raped my childhood!"
We grew up learning that there were 9 planets. That was a basic fact of life. It would be like the Math community suddenly declaring that they made a mistake, and that 1 plus 1 actually equals 3. Even if they had irrefutable proof, we would not accept it because that's not how things were when we were kids.
For example, in school I learned that there were 7 continents and 4 oceans. I assumed that was a globally accepted fact. Why wouldn't it be? It was only in the last year, through my interactions with people here from other countries, that I learned that some people learn totally different things. I had never heard of the "Southern Ocean" until a few months ago, but apparently people in other countries had been calling it that for a really long time.
We grew up learning that there were 9 planets. That was a basic fact of life. It would be like the Math community suddenly declaring that they made a mistake, and that 1 plus 1 actually equals 3. Even if they had irrefutable proof, we would not accept it because that's not how things were when we were kids.
For example, in school I learned that there were 7 continents and 4 oceans. I assumed that was a globally accepted fact. Why wouldn't it be? It was only in the last year, through my interactions with people here from other countries, that I learned that some people learn totally different things. I had never heard of the "Southern Ocean" until a few months ago, but apparently people in other countries had been calling it that for a really long time.
Thankfully, it was Pluto and not another planet, or you would have heard tearful cries of "astronomers raped my Uranus!"
Well, you can't make a decision about astronomical "canon"
but you can call things whatever you want. Pluto is the same thing that it was ten years ago, or a hundred years ago, or will be tomorrow. We're simply fussing over classification and nomenclature - and the reason that it's eternally mutable is that it's not real.
Which just shows how shortsighted people can be. From antiquity until the Copernican Revolution, it was taught that there were seven "planets" including the Sun and Moon. From 1781 to 1801, it was taught that there were eight planets. Then Ceres was discovered and the number went up to nine, then ten when Pallas was found a year later. William Herschel said that he thought Ceres and Pallas were too small to be planets and coined the alternative term "asteroid," but most astronomers disagreed. Vesta and Juno were discovered soon thereafter and also called planets, so when the asteroid Astraea was found in 1845 and Neptune the year after that, it bumped the number of known "planets" up to fourteen. And the number kept going up as more asteroids were found. Starting in the 1850s, the asteroids began to be called "minor planets" (or kleine Planeten) but there was a lot of disagreement over whether they should be considered planets, and some catalogs "grandfathered in" Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, and Juno as planets or listed them as both planets and asteroids. The US Naval Observatory called them "small planets" until 1892, and the Greenwich Observatory didn't stop calling them planets until 1907.
http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astro...astronomical-information-center/minor-planets
So by then, it was pretty much universally accepted that there were eight planets, but then Pluto was found in 1930 and people made the same mistake they made with Ceres: they grossly overestimated its size and called it a planet, and then later (okay, a lot later) found out it was a lot smaller than they'd thought, but they were used to calling it a planet so they resisted changing it.
So this isn't like the number of continents or the square root of a hundred. It only reflected the current status quo of a process that had been going on for centuries as we continued to discover more. Okay, so there's been a gap of sixty-odd years between major discoveries and paradigm shifts, so people have had time to get used to the post-1930 status quo. But now that's done. Now we've entered an age where we're finding new planetary bodies all the time, both in Sol System and beyond. So things are going to be just as much in flux from now on as they were in the latter half of the 1800s. The discovery of the Solar System is not finished. If anything, it's barely begun. And it saddens me that people are blinding themselves to that amazing fact because they'd rather whine about something not being what they always thought it was -- especially when they never actually gave a damn about it until it was changed.
Saquist
Commodore
This. In astronomy classes, we knew this from way back: it was just a matter of time before it would be extended to formal classification. Because, let's remind it here, classification means nothing except for our ease of use. For its own characteristics, Pluto is better classified as a dwarf planet (even if I think the label is unfortunate) than as a full planet. I really can't understand why some people feel butthurt about it, except for a knee-jerk reaction against "ivory tower academicians" who dared to change a classification that was created by, oh wait, older ivory tower academicians. It's just too silly.
"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." Very appropriate to Pluto, too.
It's a tenable position, but not the solution to everything you think it is. Rocky planets are, well, rocks. Gas giants are essentially balls of hydrogen: composition-wise, they are more alike stars than other planets. Ice giants have a very hight percentage of water, which would make them comets in your idea. As you see, it's not easy to find a compromise between competing tugs for completeness and accuracy.
Then we'll change the definition again. It's not the end of the world. What's up with this resistance to change? This is science, people, not dogma: change is intrinsic to the scientific method. Leaps are made by improving the theory, or discarding it altogether for a better one. We should always strive for the theory that better fit with current data, without letting nostalgia come in the way of accuracy.
This is exactly as complicated as it needs to be given the current data. If you think you can do a better job, by all means, propose it to the science community and let's talk about it.Those guys make things more complicated than it has to be.You tell us as soon as you complete your PhD in astrophysics.
That is exactly what I've done to the best of my ability
One of the directors at the Johnson Space Center in answer to my proposal remarked on the oddity that composition was not a qualifying factor. He did note orbits may be a more arbitrary definition.
Oooo-kay.
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
^Err, is that a song lyric?
Saquist
Commodore
What can I say?
I never get tired of the tour. It's the benefit of living in the space city.
It's a song that glorifies ignorance, much like the post I was quoting.
You've never seen the meme "fucking magnets, how do they work"?
Who's the first guy, Kenny Baker?
^ Bill Barty. That shot is from UHF.
