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by Nevermark
785 days ago
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I agree, distinguishing between the importance of things is helpful. But changing “planet” to not include Pluto just created unending inconsistency. There is nothing that screamed “not planet” about Pluto until some scientists preconceptions and emotional investment about the numbers of planets got challenged. People now have to learn by rote that Pluto is not a planet. Because “scientists say so”, not because they are actually becoming sensitive to debris fields. The link between orbital debris and planetary size isn’t even going to hold with future discoveries. So the new restrictive regular language-unfriendly definition isn’t even going to be stable. Ridiculous. |
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> People now have to learn by rote that Pluto is not a planet. Because “scientists say so”, not because they are actually becoming sensitive to debris fields.
Even the other dwarfs we know of so far seem to make it a different category to me. Pluto is a lot more like them than it's like even Mercury.
https://planetseducation.com/dwarf-planets/
> The link between orbital debris and planetary size isn’t even going to hold with future discoveries. So the new restrictive regular language-unfriendly definition isn’t even going to be stable.
Are you saying that we're going to find huge planets that haven't cleared their neighborhoods? That sounds unlikely.