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Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

theguardian.com

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Re: Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

#181

Post by Timon3 »

odyssey7 wrote: post #53

The problem is that the word “planet” refers both to cultural symbols — mythology, gods, archetypes, and the heavens — and to objects of scientific study. Those are different domains, and one of them is cultural heritage, and the other is irritating when it tries to infringe on the first one. There’s no need for a god complex. Stop picking and choosing which planets are real. Scientists can create their own, more pre…

Why would a change today be such a violation of a sacred concept, when Pluto was added not even a century ago? If anything, it seems like the scientists back then had a god complex, and this would be rectifying their mistake.

Re: Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

#182

Post by aceofspades19 »

waterheater wrote: post #167
aceofspades19 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how could you be alive and not have observed that the earth is curved? Why does a mountain, building or ship disappear over the horizon if the earth is not curved? That alone should be sufficient evidence to believe that the scientific consensus on this is likely to be true. I have not observed directly that a human will die after 3 days without water but having experienced thirst & dehydration in limited amounts…

>But how could you be alive and not have observed that the earth is curved? I know someone who is almost 40 years old that has never left his hometown. He's a reasonable person who holds gainful employment, but from our conversations, he's never been in a skyscraper, flown on an airplane, taken a road trip into the mountains, or even hiked up a large hill, for that matter. He also lives in a land-locked city, so he's…

> With all due respect, many people like him do exist in the world, and perhaps you're not acquainted with people like him.

Fair enough.

> Basically, he believes in the truthfulness of large institutions, which really is why you and I believe the earth is round; that is, we haven't actually performed a bona fide experiment

I guess to a certain extent, but also knowing that I could perform such an experiment and come up with reproducible results. As well as the lack of any credible alternative theory that holds up to any sort of scientific rigor.

> One fact that stands out to me is that we all use some amount of faith to accept that the earth is round, though perhaps not quite a leap's worth.

I would say that it's not really faith when its reproducible. For example, there is a small amount of faith that my brakes will slow down my car when approaching a corner, but I can test the brakes to know they should work, I can perform experiments with similar mechanisms to prove the basic physics, that all would have reproducible outcomes. So while there is a small amount of faith that some catastrophic failure won't happen, I would say its categorically different to believing things with almost no evidence. There is no reproducible experiment (at least that I know of) that you can even read about that proves the earth is flat.

Re: Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

#183

Post by Timon3 »

derbOac wrote: post #96
bryanlarsen wrote: post #22

The main objection to calling Pluto a planet appears to be that if Pluto is a planet then up to about 200 other objects should also be called planets, that the list would be of unknown size and regularly changing. That's an objection? No, that's a benefit! I think it'd be awesome to be regularly discovering new planets.

That's sort of what bothered me the most at the time. It seemed like the argument was that it was "emotional" or something to keep Pluto a planet when there might be so many of them. But I never understood why it was less "emotional" to insist that a planet be a certain size or that there should be a certain number of planets.

It is emotional reasoning to want Pluto to be an exception to an otherwise universal definition, because the reason for the exception are the emotions of some people.

Picking any arbitrary generic definition and applying it universally is less emotional, because there is no emotional reasoning necessary to explain why any object is or isn't a planet.

Re: Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

#184

Post by Timon3 »

waterheater wrote: post #171
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are absolutely crazy. There is no defending it. It is something that makes stupid people feel smart. There are easy, verifiable experiments that can be done and they refuse to accept the outcome.

Have you ever called someone crazy, only for them to stop dead in their tracks and say, "wow, you're completely right, how could I have been so blind?" I haven't, and you probably haven't, though if you have, I'd love to hear that story. As I said, they're skeptical of authority and need to run the experiment themselves; some will even flip on flat-earthers who run the experiment and change their minds. Only those wh…

There are many, many, many examples of exactly that happening: they run experiments, the experiments prove them wrong, and they instantly declare the experiment to be wrong. You can easily find them on YouTube, IIRC a flat earth documentary on Netflix also features exactly this at the very end.

There are of course people like grifters in the community who don't believe their own words, but the believers won't reason themselves out of this position they didn't reason themselves into.

Re: Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

#185

Post by joquarky »

adrian_b wrote: post #17

> “One of the biggest flaws with the IAU definition is that you can have the same object in two different orbits,” says Kornfeld. “In one, it’s considered a planet, and in the other, it’s not considered a planet.” No, there is no flaw in this, and moreover there is nothing new in this. This is how it has always been, it is not something invented recently. In the Solar System, there are 3 Mercury-sized satellites and…

What I don't get in this is why is it wrong to leave off the "dwarf" adjective? We drop adjectives all the time once the specific subject is identified.

Re: Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

#186

Post by waterheater »

aceofspades19 wrote: post #182
waterheater wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But how could you be alive and not have observed that the earth is curved? I know someone who is almost 40 years old that has never left his hometown. He's a reasonable person who holds gainful employment, but from our conversations, he's never been in a skyscraper, flown on an airplane, taken a road trip into the mountains, or even hiked up a large hill, for that matter. He also lives in a land-locked city, so he's…

> With all due respect, many people like him do exist in the world, and perhaps you're not acquainted with people like him. Fair enough. > Basically, he believes in the truthfulness of large institutions, which really is why you and I believe the earth is round; that is, we haven't actually performed a bona fide experiment I guess to a certain extent, but also knowing that I could perform such an experiment and come…

>So while there is a small amount of faith that some catastrophic failure won't happen, I would say its categorically different to believing things with almost no evidence.

Evidence is the key. I don't know where you stand on the Gettier problem debate (is all knowledge just JTBs?), but the Gettier problem and black swan events show that all the evidence can point to one thing, yet something else might actually happen. So, did you really know, or did you just believe? I guess flat-earthers just reject what 99.9% of people accept as knowledge and hold it instead as competing belief with whatever alternative system quacks well enough to pass as a duck in their squinting eyes.

Re: Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

#187

Post by kanemcgrath »

I really think dwarf planet is a fine classification. Pluto is a planet, just a really small one. Same with Eris and the other planets in the Kuiper Belt. I don’t know why the planet count of our solar system is seemingly such a Religious number. It seems as if it is the focus of why we should define what a planet is.

When I think of what a planet is, I think of a destination. Somewhere that maybe in the far future we could visit one day. I think the definition for a planet should be a body with sufficient gravity that we could reasonably orbit and land on. And we can have as many sub-classifications as we want from nano-planet to Mega-planet.

Re: Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

#188

Post by nephihaha »

wpollock wrote: post #163
nephihaha wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "fish" is a case in point. Traditionally, the term means a creature which lives underwater, which would include whales and dolphins, and indeed used to, despite being mammals. It gets worse. Whales and dolphins are more closely related to certain fish than those fish are related to some other fish. (As are we by the way.) There are also some fish, such as lungfish or certain eels which can spend more time ou…

Your point is fishy. But if the IAU definition changes to "a body orbiting a star", we can rename them to "paparazzi".

That was quite funny. I think my point is that terms are not always as precise as people think they are.

As others have stated, there appears to be some kind of spectrum. Some of the inner planets have more in common with the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in some regards, than they do with Jupiter and Saturn themselves. For a start they have a surface that can be landed on. (Maybe not so much in the case of Venus or Io!!!)

Pluto's most obvious problem is that it is too similar in size to a large number of other objects. But it does have some resemblances to planets and larger moons. I'm not keen on the phrase "dwarf planet" because it makes me think of objects that are much smaller than Pluto is.

Re: Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

#189

Post by nephihaha »

p-e-w wrote: post #128
nephihaha wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uranus and Neptune don't have a long human heritage either. Neither appears to have been known to the Babylonians.

Uranus has been observed since antiquity, but wasn’t recognized as a planet.

Herschel put Uranus on the map, so to speak. It is barely visible and never played a large part in ancient astrology/astronomy (I use both terms here as they were not separate at the time.)

Re: Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting

#190

Post by nephihaha »

pdonis wrote: post #149
Dylan16807 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Earth is closer but I don't think there's any good argument to say it's actually a binary system. Notably the Earth-Moon barycenter stays inside the Earth, and the Sun-Jupiter barycenter doesn't stay inside the Sun. But barycenters are too easy to get outside of objects anyway.

As I understand it, one suggested "double planet" definition was that the barycenter would have to be outside both objects. Earth-Moon doesn't (quite) satisfy that condition, but for example, Pluto-Charon does.

The Earth-Moon system is certainly anomalous within our Solar System. There is no such equivalent among the three other rocky planets, and while there are large moons around the other planets, the planets themselves are far larger.
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