Why do scientists change things they don't need to be changed?
i think i'm most irked when redditoids like that stake some level of ownership by saying "OUR understanding," as if they contributed or forge new understandings and breakthroughs in any way and aren't just parroting what their high priests tell them
>>16952021Not sure what the thing about Neptune is, but dinosaurs having feathers is just a question of fact. You could technically define "planet" as "the eight planets plus Pluto" but it would be an internally inconsistent definition.
>>16952021are you talking about le feathers? who gives a shit?and neptune? do you mean pluto? it still exists, the planet thing is just a stupid meme, you can call it anything you likeretard
>>16952021Every academic generation needs to spray their cat piss all the over the canon. If there's nothing to add, we just rearrange the furniture a bit, as with Pluto. Or reupholster it, like inventing an entirely new taxonym instead of just saying superkingdom or bleaching the wonderful old jewels AD and BC to the more notationally-awkward CE and BCE for no particular reason other than the fact that we enjoy the smell of our own cat piss. Some of this washes off in another generation or two; some stinks on a lot longer.
>>16952039You can understand something without being involved in that thing's discovery, you know?
>>16952066The Pluto thing is because people discovered a bunch of other objects like Pluto and at some point they realized that it's inconsistent to call Pluto a planet but not them. So it was either add all the dwarf planets to the list, or subtract Pluto.
>>16952075I'm not really against generational cat piss, as frivolous and narcissistic as much of it may be. It is what it is. But there are a ton of flaws that come with carving out Pluto, some of which should prove fatal in the long run, I reckon, such as the fact that Earth wouldn't even "clear" Pluto's "neighborhood" if you swapped it with Pluto.
>>16952152Are you denying the premise that Pluto is more relevantly similar to the other dwarf planets than to the main 8, or just being precise?
>>16952152>Earth wouldn't even "clear" Pluto's "neighborhood" if you swapped it with Pluto.???What makes you say that?
>>16952152Yeah, I am not a fan of the "clearing orbit" criteria myself; personally I would have gone with object is at least X diameter or something. Say more than 4000 km (Mercury is like 4800 km) to use a nice round number.
>>16952152>>16952190The point of neighborhood clearing takes into account the dynamics surrounding the formation of bodies: Planets are the bodies that manage to accrete enough mass within their particular formation area to gobble up all the other comparably-massed objects because two comparably-massed objects aren't going to be able to maintain stable orbits unless they collide and fuse or one migrates as a result of an interaction. Earth is what is left from a bunch of sub-Earth-sized bodies accreting and colliding and there are no sub-Earth-sized bodies remaining in our orbital path. Neptune is what is left from a bunch of sub-Neptune-sized bodies accreting and colliding and there are no sub-Neptune-sized bodies left in its orbital path. And so on the MBAs and KBOs aren't planets, they're the table scraps leftover from the dynamics of planet formation.Hell, Pluto would have been gobbled up or ejected from the solar system if it hadn't slipped into an orbital resonance with Neptune like a lot of the other KBOs.
>>16952021rape
I wish normalfags never discovered Touhou
>>16952021The inability to separate semantics from factual matters is shockingly common. I'd call it a trait of peak midwittery, but I feel like the average person should be able to do that.
>>16952021My gripe with scientists is that the public facing ones tend to be narcissistic cult leaders who bullshit relentlessly and harp about the dumbest fucking shit because slackjawed idiots in media positions will praise them endlessly for it.
Aside from the arbitrary definition of what is a planet it's true Pluto wasn't formed like the other planets and it's not even the only one of its category.It actually makes pluto more interesting.
