that whole pluto thing was wild
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- Опубликовано: 19 ноя 2022
- When Pluto was declared a dwarf planet instead of a planet people lost their minds. I think that's pretty interesting.
Btw --- Pluto is a planet. So is the Moon.
Article Discussed:
Moons Are Planets: Scientific Usefulness Versus Cultural Teleology in the Taxonomy of Planetary Science
Link: arxiv.org/abs/2110.15285
#pluto #Planet9isjustPluto 
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I like the soft world of warcraft allusions
Your gold is welcome here.
@@acollierastro Time is money, friend
@@kang4394 kang the decapitator yo
@@ArnaldoMessyDJ For the horde.
Any friend of greymane's a friend of mine
"Exiting vim is hard" is nostalgia humour. It's not funny because it's true, but rather because being stuck in vim while editing a conf file in your first Linux installation, for instance, is a very common experience. Being able to exit a text editor seems like something you should just be able to trivially do, so it's slightly embarrassing to fail at. It's like sharing stories about kicking furniture in the dark, or getting on the bus in the wrong direction. Vim, though, has the benefit of being part of computer culture, so the joke became embedded into that culture while the internet was still a small place. Now, when you need to use vim for the first time in seven years, maybe you get stuck for a moment, and maybe you share that with a community who you know has also been there.
Agreed, this is why it's funny.
Also, :q is very specific to vim whereas most other cli apps use ctrl c/cmd c. So you can be trying the method you use to exit other programs and getting frustrated.
And this is after you had to learn command line in the first place!
I forgot how to exit vim after only using it in a class and not using it for a few years. So I had to look up how to exit vim.
I wrote a similar comment before scrolling down. I endorse this interpretation.
The other addition is that if you were in Vim and could not exit, you could not use that same computer to search for the answer. Also, they now add how to exit when you do something that would normally exit a program like a normal person. Moral of the story? Use Nano
You know what it was like? When people discuss admitting a new state to the Union and someone starts worrying about how it would affect the arrangement of stars on the flag.
They are worried about the power grab. Puerto Ricans like my independista girlfriend think statehood would accelerate wealthy hipster colonization of the island so it would be a state for them not Puerto Ricans. Republicans fear a largely leftist new state and its additional two US senators and congressmen. Corporations would have pay them taxes, be held more accountable for their abuses, and they fund campaign contributions. The one shipping company that delivers 80 percent of their food would lose its monopoly status and could probably not compete effectively in the shipping industry in the international shipping market. Washington D.C. becoming a state is automatically left with two Senators and some congressmen in the house. I have never heard of a person concerned with additional states messing up the arrangement of stars on the US flags.
@@jasoncuculo7035 the thing Matt is referencing is that the pluto debate is like if in the discussion on statehood they ignored all the stuff you wrote out and just focused on the flag.
(btw there should be 53 states, a good prime number so it would be "One nation, indivisible"
@@Tuned_Rockets but prime numbers are divisible by 1 and themself
@@Dacronhai But, you can't split in two, which is seemingly what is happening these days.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
Pluto was discovered, declared a planet, named, surveyed, demoted and argued about in less than one of its years.
A word to describe humanity: manic
I love this comment
@@danielblank9917 Me too.
It was devastating...watching Pluto up on that platform, in front of everyone... _them_ just walking up and tearing the stripes right off Pluto's little arm...
I think I remembered watching this exact scene on the telly. That was so moving, wasn't it? Poor General Pluto... After all those years of defending Earth from the Martian invasion, he shouldn't get to be treated like that.
BUT intergalactic war crime is still a war crime, so... 😞
He had it coming, for killing all those robots.
it's pluto's own fault, if it had stuck to being the further planet in the solar system everything would have been fine, but oh no, it wants to wander inside neptune's orbit and draw attention, pluto has no one to blame but itself.
didn't even give him a medal or anything for all those years of service. heartless.
I was in 10th grade when this was announced. I, for some strange reason, thought that the planet was destroyed. It took an embarrassingly long time to learn that it was just reclassified.
that is kinda embarassing for a highschool sophmore, but props for owning it 😅
the "I was really busy in 2006" accompanied by WoW music really really got me
I remember my grandma was very upset and my grandad was very "you're acting like they shot it down, geez"
When you did your "2006 rant", it gave me "angry whispering so I don't wake up my parents" vibes. Which is SO early RUclips I love it.
So *that's* why this video is quiet!
This has never bothered me as much as the realization that because Pluto was discovered in the 1930s, it was too late to inspire its own movement in Gustav Holst's "The Planets". I mean, those songs go so freakin' hard! Can you even imagine how badass one about the god of the underworld would have been?! 😭
I am now convinced some time traveler out there has already remedied this situation by going back in time, yoinking him out of there into their present for a weekend or two, shoving a laptop with Ableton in front of him and telling him to get to work.
Now they get to listen to Pluto and we won't.
There are a few people who have done additions for Pluto, so people have tried to rectify this...
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planets
@@Owesomasaurus yooooooo I had been wondering about that! Thank you! 👍
The work needs to be completed! Holst can't do it himself, but *someone* can!
Holst was alive for it but didn't care to do a piece for it because 1: he hated the Planets overshadowing all his other works and 2: Pluto has no astrological significance like all the other planets which was the point behind The Planets theme
I remember this being a big thing when I was a kid.
Now I'm in the middle of my PhD, and pluto is one of the first things many friends and family members will ask about, or just make rhetorical comments about.
Please be ready and able to explain why the IAU definition is objectively hot garbage. For the sake of the public. For SCIENCE!
one day astronomers may identify a super earth that hasn't "cleared the neighborhood" and declare the discovery of a "Dwarf Exoplanet" that's ironically more massive than Earth. That'll be a fun day for the IAU definition.
We already found rogue binary gas giants in the Orion Nebula. The IAU has been real quiet since their discovery. 🥴
The vim thing is relatable because a lot of people don't choose to use vim day-to-day, but every once in a while you have to edit a file on a remote machine and the only thing it's got is vi, and the last time you used it was 2 years ago and no, :q does not work because it's in the typing mode, and you don't remember what to press to get to the command-entering mode, and you search on the internet for the 100th time "how to exit vim" while mentally reviewing life choices that led you to this unfortunate point in existence.
Ceres was discovered before Neptune and apparently considered a planet for half-a-century before being re-classified as an "asteroid" (and later in 2006 as a dwarf planet of course).
But yeah, I get the impression they just didn't want to re-classify Ceres as a planet again. "Doesn't clear out its orbit" seems very deliberately aimed at Ceres because Ceres is in the asteroid belt. And the definition they came up with to exclude Ceres happened to exclude Pluto as well.
Every time someone brings up the whole Pluto thing to me now, I tend to use Ceres as historical precedent for the "demotion" of a planet and kinda go "don't be sad Pluto got demoted, be happy Ceres got some recognition!".
Though saying that, at the time of the debates I do remember the possibility being raised of Charon getting promoted to dwarf planet (because of Pluto and Charon's centre of mass lying outside of Pluto) and being excited about that - and then being disappointed when that didn't happen. I'm also still a bit annoyed that the IAU are dragging their feet on Sedna, Quaoar and co.!
Honestly I think the OP's redefinition of planet as "round under its own gravity, no notes" makes a lot of sense - there are many fascinating round things in our Solar System, from Ganymede to Enceladus, from our own Moon to Charon. The only downside is that it would make mnemonics to remember the planets very hard to follow!
@@PaulPower4 you brought up a good point at the end there that made me think of something - maybe part of the issue is that peop[le keep thinking about how it would be taught, so what if we simply don't teach kids about all the planets? I think instead of "there are X planets, this is how they are defined, and this is the order they appear when going outward from the Sun" we should teach kids "here's what a planet is, there are a lot of them, here's some key info on the most important ones" and then talk about like, the main 8 ones for their historical significance, mention the spherical icy bodies and explain their significance or potential for significance, and then that's it. Instead of rote memorization, maybe the whole thing should see some changes.
@@SnoFitzroy Much of our general education today is (regrettably) focused on memorization, and memorizing more planets is obviously harder than memorizing less. So before we can adopt a more sane perspective on representing planetary mass objects in the solar system, we first need to fix education systems.
I think the new definition is really dumb.
What if a star came through our star system and dragged Jupiter and Earth out of orbit around the sun but that passing star did not capture them, so they become rogue planets... except they are not planets anymore because they do not fit the new definition?
What about when Earth was newly formed and it had not cleared away any other objects of a similar size near its orbit around the Sun? Was the Earth not a planet yet and only became a planet later when it cleared that path?
What if Earth were orbiting Jupiter? Would it cease to be a planet?
@@MusingsFromTheJohn00 "Rogue planets" wouldn't be planets per se, because they're not in any close orbit about any specific body which is something we do attribute to a normal planet, hence the "rogue" part is important.
Celestial bodies in orbit undergoing a recent formation are referred to specifically as proto-planets.
If Earth orbited Jupiter it'd be just considered a moon (satellite), otherwise you'd have to be reminded of 20ish more bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium within our solar system.
The current planet standard exist to be consistent with classical major celestial bodies instead of being an expanding collection of 12+ celestial bodies a third of which are both similar and unremarkable.
Still, it's very possible the definition might change to accomodate certain extreme cases which might be found outside our star system, like how there are some active discussions over things like classification of borders between a brown dwarf orbiting a star being also considered a planet.
The existence of "rogue planets" also really challenge that definition. 😂
A "rogue planet" or an "exoplanet" is something different from "planet", and not a type pf "planet", according to the definition. Not that I particularly like it, but it's not "that bad" imo.
I think the basic idea was drawing a line somewhere between the classical "planets" and things like Eris and Ceres - saying all these are planets would make things more complicated in some ways (especially for kids trying to learn all the planets).
Separating planetary objects ("planets", "dwarf planets", "rogue planets") from moons is useful IMO - planets being "gravitationally bound directly to the parent star" (I know that's just an abstraction/approximation for complex n-body interactions, but the approximatability seems relevant), and moons being bound to a planet instead.
But what would you do if there were multiple objects significantly bound to each other, but less than to the parent star? In the hypothetical extreme, would an asteroid belt of round bodies be a planet belt? I think this is where the "clears own orbit" comes from.
Personally, I'd be fine with planet belts, calling Eris/Ceres/.../the larger TNOs plantes and just introducing a new "major planet" classification for the classical 8/9 (maybe based on size, or relative influence of sun vs other objects on its orbit), but I'm fine with "dwarf planets" as well.
there's no difference between a dwarf planet, exoplanet, moon etc other than what they orbit, I.E. what big object they're close to. It's kind of like how the difference between a free city, a capital, an aircraft carrier, a cruise ship, a (normal) city, and a city state is just what kind of government the city answers to or has answering to it.
Rogue planets aren’t the most efficient DPS tho, unfortunately
It’s bad because “rogue” and “extrasolar” are just adjectives that describe where an object is. And “planet” is the noun. So a rogue planet is a planet, an extrasolar planet is a planet, they’re just in different environments. But the IAU definition not even including them is idiotic. We need one definition for all planets. We don’t make different definitions for stars or galaxies based on where we find them.
@@alexandrite014Warlock planet gang rise up
My first thought was "youre the Jenny Nicholson of physics" then you mentioned a numbered list and that solidified it for me. Adjunct physics instructor here. Love your vids!
She's the Jenny Nicholson of science but her opinions are correct. And also most of the time not opinions
@@noahzstill opinions, just sensibly justified by experience in academia and the compendium of current scientific consensus
@@deyesedAnd math.
"Did people get upset about Pluto because they thought it was funny?" Yes, absolutely. I was 4 in 2006 but that style of humor stuck around for a while (it's still here although its changed a lot) and I definitely remember people doing that with Pluto specifically. The most similar example that comes to mind is the Oxford comma.
I've lost friendships and been turned down for jobs over my refusal to use the Oxford comma. I'm sorry-blame my high school journalism teacher, his style-book and a decade on Twitter cutting out every character possible to fit within that (OG) 140-character cap.
"Airplane on a treadmill" was all the rage when I was in high school. The done thing was to pose that question to somebody who'd never heard it before, and then regardless of if they answered "yes it would take off" or "no, it would stay on the ground" you would argue the opposite side and assure your mark that they must be misunderstanding your explanation.
I might be misremembering but there was about a 18 month period between "we're gonna change the definition of planet" and "this is the new definition of planet" during which time we did the thing that's discussed in the video, having those conversations but it it felt like higher stakes because the decision wasn't made yet, it was all, like, anything goes and there were articles in science magazines about how planets could get demoted, asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects could get promoted and moons could be planets, moons like Earth's Moon, this conversation centered around barycenters. But the question was half "is our moon a planet" and half "under what conditions does the barycenter become part of the new definition". Pluto was definitely on the chopping block the whole time but so was Charon becoming a planet, which makes more sense on the barycenter argument, I think Earth's Moon's barycenter is still inside Earth, so that was the counter-argument, to keep things the way they stayed, which is really a mass argument. The big enchilada was the then-newly discovered big objects in the Kuiper belt, some very much on scale of Pluto, what do we do with them if we continue to discover more and more of them, the whole icy planet category thing mentioned was definitely a vibe for some of that conversation. What actually eventuated was the least wild thing that got discussed. I think the popular consciousness ignores the global perspective on Pluto too, non-Americans do not hype up Pluto as much, many Europeans denied and debated its planetary status back in the day and to an extent this never stopped, and we also forget there was a time in the 19th Century when there were 11 planets, and that conversation and demotion back to 8 created the category of asteroid which I think is a super useful category, I feel like definitions of planets are human-centric, which could be why exoplanets get left out?
You might like the arxiv paper linked in the description. It goes onto a lot of detail on the historical naming of planets, the role of astrology, etc.
Sorry I didn’t get into what you were looking for in this vid!
@@thebrainnetwork9689 That's a good comparison in a bunch of ways I think. It has all the inaccessibility of science (and technology) issues she talked about, while still being big enough to draw people into talking about it and having opinions. Of all the variety of opinions, AI good, AI bad, skynet robot girlfriend metaverse apocalypse, one you hear from virtually no one of any level of understanding is "nah, I don't think it's really gonna change anything". It's also very uncontroversial to say it's going to affect people's jobs, one field after another (which is happening), and everyone cares about jobs.
Your retrospective on the Pluto thing was really interesting, because I actually hadn't remembered that phase where it was still uncertain what was going to happen, and there was lots to speculate about, until you said it. Definitely see that with AI, too. A lot of people get very invested in having an opinion, like there's a feeling that all this discussion is going shape how things turn out, when in reality if you're not C-Suite Google, Microsoft, Facebook and friends, or a stakeholder they're trying to make happy, you almost definitely have exactly zero influence on any of it. But I guess it's that way with most things and we still all have to figure out together how we feel about it at the very least.
Something very true you’ve said is that naming these things are very human centric. We like being the center of the universe. Or we just so happen to notice things around us first and give them names, then later realize those same objects also exist elsewhere. Turns out other planets have moons too, other stars make up their own solar/star systems with their own planets that have their own moons.
America likes Pluto because we discovered it
@@silphv I think AI is a poor analogy, personally. Despite how big a topic it is, almost no one these days knows what they're talking about in the slightest. The amount of people out there ranting passionately based on misinformation is giving the field's experts aneurysms.
Part of the reason why Pluto was such an issue in the US is that it was the only planet discovered by an American. When I was a child we learned the list of 9 planets and those of us who enjoy learning about science often form an emotional attachment with the planets. I was an amateur astronomer who for a long time knew where all our planets were in the sky. So, Pluto is not of any practical importance but it has some emotional importance.
It was the more or less the _entire_ reason. The way it was told over here at the time was "Pluto was a planet to pander to the Americans - but it's really not, it's smaller than the Moon" and everyone just nodded and went about their day.
@@infantiltinferno When it was discovered, Pluto was thought to be quite massive, because the search for it was based on what were thought to be anomalies in Uranus' orbit that weren't attributable to Neptune. The puzzle was, how can it have such a dark albedo at the size it "had to be?" There was even one proposal that it had a relatively large, very shiny surface, like a gigantic ball bearing, which would make it look much smaller and dimmer than if it were another ice giant.
As more observations were made, Uranus' orbit was found not to be anomalous after all, and Pluto's estimated mass and size steadily decreased.
I once saw an astrophysical lecture in the 1970's (I think it was before Charon's discovery nailed down the Pluto-Charon system's actual mass) in which the speaker (don't recall who) put up a chart of Pluto's estimated mass vs year of determination.
A fit line was drawn, and the "conclusion" was that by some year in the 1990's or so, Pluto was going to disappear entirely!
In an odd sort of way, he was right.
Fred
This, true or not, was a big part of the narrative here in France at the time. Granted, it was in the aftermath of the Iraq War which caused big tensions between France and the US, so there may have been a bias. To the point that it overshadowed the discussion about the scientific reasoning.
It was and still is an issue around the world. Nothing to do with the US IMO.
@@gavinw77 Agree. Making it about the US, on either side of the argument, is to me, petty and unscientific.
A smarter way to look at it is, Pluto's discovery was not of a 9th planet, but of the 1st example of an entirely new type of Solar System object; a KBO, or TNO.
In a real sense, that's more, not less, important. Puts it on a par with the discovery (on the first day of the 19th century) of Ceres.
In my computer science labs, we would make the "it's hard to exit vim" joke, as a reference to something that's easy when you know how to do it, but the first time, you may have to stumble around to figure it out.
The reason the “how to exit vim” joke is funny is because it’s something they can relate to, from their past. The first time trying to exit vim as a baby programmer, sure eventually you just google it, but you probably futz around for a little and get confused first cause it’s just a lot different than anything else. Maybe you accidentally opened vim in the first place which leads to the bewilderment. So this first moment has a, like, emotional connection and a funny memory tied to it. Which is why it’s funny to make an exaggerated callback to that.
The pilot episode of the magic school bus had an epilogue where they discussed how until 1999 Plutos orbit was within Neptune’s orbit so it wasn’t even considered the 9th planet then. I remember watching as a kid and that’s the first thing that popped into my head when the Pluto downgrade swept collective consciousness. They even had a little visual of the crossed orbits.
It was definitely considered a planet in 1999, the reason it got downgraded was because they were discovering a bunch of them outside of Pluto's orbit and didn't want to have to keep updating the number of planets.
@takanara7
This is a media artifact. It was not considered a planet in 1999, or ever. It was mis-published as a planet as it was though to be 100 to a 1,000 times larger than its actual size. They didn’t find out what it looked like until years after it was published as a possible planet-they though it was a little smaller than Neptune sized.
In fact. they were looking for a an object that was “slightly altering the orbits of the outer gas giants”. Which is what they thought they found when Pluto was located. This was wrong, Pluto was not what they were looking for-and they are still looking for the same planet 9 all these years later.
Pluto never was a planet-it was just mistaken for one by people not waiting in the details, they just declared it a planet without supporting data, hence why serious people rejected it; and demanded actual data in support of naming it as a planet. We are still waiting on the data that supports Pluto being a planet. And since it has now been mapped in much better detail, that isn’t ever going to happen.
@@takanara7 Guess you didn't watch the magic school bus episode then...
@@92calebnewman yeah, they called it a planet, and when they describe that they did not describe a planet. Even by their own definition, it never was a planet.
@@92calebnewman so if a textbook about fish Includes cows as examples of fish, you’re just going to accept that??
This video was uncharacteristically quiet for you which is fine as I just turn my volume up. but oh man, RUclips getting rid of the "ad in x seconds" warning was sooo cool ... Literally just had my eardrums blown out by an unsolicited ad
The way science is communicated is not only a like a game a telephone.
It is like a game of telephone with financial incentives to miscommunicate, and social incentives to not correct the other misunderstandings.
You are very good at communicating how disparate incentives affect scientific communications. I hope you keep it up.
I read tons of pop sci growing up in the 00s and Pluto was always my favorite planet, so I was so peeved when it got "demoted." I feel like a lot of people never got past that part of the press narrative.
Looking back, Pluto's reclassification just opened me up to the cool world of Trans-Neptunian objects. When I talk with students and get a question about Pluto (still happens!) I show them a picture of some of the named objects and all the confusion turns into fascination. Why be mad about Pluto when we get cool things like Sedna and Quaoar? 😎
Try to look at it from the perspective of a Planetary Scientist (who studies planets, naturally they need a definition of planet that doesn't rely on location!) and then you would understand why some people are mad. Astronomers don't define planets. Planetary scientists do, and they still mostly consider Pluto a planet, same as Jupiter, or Earth.
@@coolsenjoyer I'm fully aware of all that. Moons can be planets as well. Planets are defined by shape and other intrinsic properties, not things like location. Probably the typical solar system in the universe has hundreds to even a few thousands of planets and moons (and moons that are also planets like Earth's moon) and the sooner the astronomical community admits that reality, the better.
Pluto, unlike Sedna and Quoar has a cultural footprint. Give it another 70 years of SciFi taking place on or having monsters coming from those otherTrans-Neptunian objects, and they may start to have similar standing. Besides, Pluto is a much cooler name.
Pluto was demoted over NASA funding.
The NASA group that gets funding for minor planets and asteroids wanted the funding from the New Horizons Probe; spearheaded the campaign to demote Pluto. Follow the money.
@@remo27 It makes sense that the planetary scientists (myself included as an ameteur) are upset because the astronomers overstepped their boundaries and have been pushing for the wrong definition for nearly two decades! Meanwhile, nobody in the field of planetary science actually uses that definition! They have every right to be upset.
And yes, location in astronomy doesn’t matter. The astronomers know this and never use location for any object in the Universe…except for planets. Why? Because there needs to be a small number?
Just as you eloquently said, experts call large moons planets as well. There’s no real physical difference between Mercury and Luna except location. They’re compositionally identical, or close to it. And rogue planets are completely isolated. They’re still planets, even if they don’t have an orbit. Exoplanets are still called “planets” despite violating the IAU definition, probably because the IAU didn’t even bother defining exoplanets and that may be for the best. They botched it once, they shouldn’t botch it again.
But our solar system has hundreds of planets and many other systems may also have hundreds. Planets could outnumber stars 100:1. Astronomers just need to deal with that and not get so stuck in the 20th century with memorizing all their names.
It will happen at least one more time. In fact, what is coming will dwarf the whole Pluto thing.
Ha!
'dwarf' the pluto thing.
10/10
You win the internet.
big things are coming! ten years from now! :3
It will dwarf the US/Soviet space race as well.
Do you know what is coming or was that a joke to be able to say "dwarf the pluto thing"?
You get the whole "how dare you correct a generalization I learned in primary school" thing in linguistics, too, where the broad generalizations you use to teach formal English and English reading to children or even second-language learners turn out to be just that - broad generalizations or in some cases "an opinion of some dude in the 18th century which makes a great quote". Collectively, I think the reaction is far in excess of the Pluto thing, but because individually there are so many and the reaction is spread out across a person's entire life (and longer, but perspective is important), it can't reach that Pluto Problem hinge point of being a Media Moment.
I think you hit the nail on the head there with the "how dare you correct a generalization I learned in primary school" thing.
We get the same thing in math, especially when it comes to the cyclical hell of 6÷2(1+2) type "problem" going viral twice a year, and people insist that the particular way they learned an order of operations is the objectively correct convention, and all mathematicians are idiots or too soft by saying that it's ambiguous.
She single handedly added like 20 planets to the solar system... Wow.
I was really glad you went into why the new definition is bad. It's deeply ironic that people thinking "Pluto is a planet" is mostly about people being nostalgic for learning planets in school because that is like, legitimately why planet was redefined. They were finding new objects around Pluto's mass, and got worried there'd be too many and the list of how many planets there are in the Solar System would become unwieldy to memorize or recite.
And, for the record, they didn't actually end up finding that many more, the predictions that they would seem to have turned out to be sorry
@@fanta3853 Yep Pluto and Eris to date remain the only comparably massive dwarf planets both more than 3 times more massive than the 3rd most massive dwarf planet and notably if counted separately Charon turns out to be the 5th most massive dwarf planet. IMO if you look at the relationship between the masses and orbital dynamics of these icy KBO's generally all the large ones turn out to be either within the Plutinos, ,objects which like their namesake Pluto cross Neptune's orbit but are in an orbital resonance which generally keeps them on the other side of the solar system from Neptune or the Scattered disk. More relevant though is that both populations have a trend where the more massive objects are orbitally closer to Neptune which shows they were clearly tossed into the outer solar system by the outwards migration of Neptune.
Given this it seems improbable to me that such a large population of objects with a comparable size is out there as they mass density ratios as well as the orbital dynamics suggest neither of the big dwarf planets formed in the Kuiper belt.
Interestingly though Thanks to the Dawn mission we now know Ceres has a considerable amount of ammonium slats within its "recently" exposed salt deposits this provides a fairly strong line of evidence to suggest Ceres formed out beyond the Nitrogen frost line and thus would have likely been part of the same parent population as Pluto and Eris only having happened to have gotten pushed inwards by Jupiter's inwards migration instead. In fact if this model is correct then its diminutive size would be a result of most of its icy mantle and crust having outgassed into space billions of years ago leaving only its hydrated rocky core behind.
@@fanta3853 -- How many is too many? Even only counting known strong candidates, the dwarf planets already outnumber the major planets. And if Sedna is typical for the area, there might be 40 more objects as large as Ceres out there.
It’s indeed very ironic that they get mad about the Pluto fanboys for being nostalgic when they themselves use a model of the planets from the 1870-1929 era. If the IAU was around when Galileo discovered more stars with his telescope, they would’ve made a new definition to limit the number of stars, too. Apparently astronomers are okay with billions of galaxies, but can’t have the total number of planets reach double digits.
@@Jellyman1129But we literally made up all definitions, what galaxy is, what star is, what planet is, what moon is
and like, okay, there should be as many planets as data shows
but doesn't mean they can't change a definition of planet
because, again
everything is made up here
I'm sad that you didn't mention Eris and similar objects that lead to the dwarf planet definition
You're absolutely correct, the definition of "planet" is specifically written in order to kick pluto out -- it's a _descriptive_ definition, not a _perscriptive_ one. Pluto is extremely similar to Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, Haumea, Eris, Makemake, Gonggong, and likely hundreds of other plutoids not yet discovered. We exclude them from the list of planets for exactly the same reason we exclude Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. The point of changing the definition was specifically to limit the list of planets to a half dozen to a dozen objects; given that goal, it makes more sense to exclude pluto than include it. Even though, I still dislike it just for the sort of forced symmetry and numerological thinking that motivates wanting a short definite list of planets at all.
Hi Angela! Having lived through this at a different phase of life, I have a rather different recollection of the same events. Back in the day, I wrote a submission to the IAU 3rd division working group (and it probably went straight into the circular file) and proposed a definition that was not close to what was adopted. My set of planets would have denoted most of the circular moons (i.e. rounded by gravity) to be planets, probably all the way down to about Enceladus. The definition that was adopted compares with the well-known aphorism about a camel being a horse designed by committee, but I can say for my part it wasn’t for lack of people trying to suggest a better alternative.
Much of the hullaballoo about Pluto that you remember was obviously driven by the media at the time and for that reason it seems only too likely to happen again, if some other quite popular scientific classification has to change, and this will be recognised with varying levels of scientific understanding in the community. At the time it was obvious that all these new TNO and Kuiper belt objects similar to Pluto had to become planets if the common meaning was to retain any logic; if not, then Pluto had to suffer the same fate that Ceres, Pallas and Vesta did back in the 19th century. Categories are not fixed in stone forever, and that's good.
For example, when I was a child, the brontosaurus was named the brontosaurus. It was a big sauropod dinosaur of the Jurassic era, no problem. At some point in the mid-twentieth century the brontosaurus was deemed to be the same species as another dinosaur that had been classified in the same family, the apatosaurus. So there were suddenly no brontosauri; they were all apatosauruses. In 2015 a new paper has revived the idea that the brontosaurus is a separate genus, but this is not universally accepted (if we can believe Wikipedia, which is always a crap shoot). So the brontosaurus walks again, provisionally. For the brontosaurus, just substitute any other category or identification which the media thinks that the public cares about.
Camels are superior to horses in nearly every conceivable way.
exiting vim... if you stumble on it for the first time it feels like a trap. ctrl-C doesnt work. Esc doesn't work... There no clue on the screen... what do I do now!? It's kinda funny to think back to that moment. like the monkey that's caught his hand by a box containting a banana. if he'd let go he'd be fine
It’s also often configured as a default so a new user might not even know they’re in vim. At that point what do you even google? What are all these tildes?
"... The last time it will happen." *ChatGPT drops in to say hi and the entire world freaks out*
I think ChatGPT is a very interesting case! I don't think it is quite the same though because average, everyday normal (and not terminally online) people are not participating in the ChatGPT discourse.
@@acollierastro I deleted the last comment because it was just a rambly brain dump. Anyway, I think ur right; Chat GPT is a bit different. Thanks for the great vid and keep up the cool content!
@@acollierastro chat GPT is def being discussed by average everyday people lol especially in schools and colleges where its increasingly becoming an issue bc plagiarism. even the most boomer teachers know about it by now. but its still not rly comparable to the pluto thing, its people discussing what to do about this new issue caused by a new technology. this is inevitably going to keep happening with AI as the tech improves and creates more problems for average people that were gonna have to figure out how to solve. the pluto thing wasnt a real problem for anyone other than astronomers, the reaction was only emotional
Is it plagiarism because Chad "Petey" McGee wrote it for you, or is it because Chad didnt even bother to change the formulations? If the latter, then Chad is not really as perfect as people make it out to be. I dont have much info on it, but I've seen it make mistakes, like using an outdated source, thus getting the answer wrong, because it could not conceptualize the info being wrong (the "too sure of itself" badparadigm) or carrying the content, but forgetting the meaning, quite metaphorically.
@@khajiithadwares2263 Yeah ChatGPT can give you wildly inaccurate information. Its specialty is producing langauge that looks very human, not being correct, so it will deliver untrue statements with persuasive confidence. If you don't already know what you're asking it to write about, it's really hard to tell if it's wrong. (We can often tell when a human doesn't know what they're talking about just by secondary signals, like awkward wording, circular reasoning, grandiloquence (overuse of big words like "grandiloquence"), stammering or getting emotional, etc. It's trained on all kinds of human communication styles (you can ask it to repeat the last response but in the style of a sarcastic teenager and it'll, like tooootally do it for you), but it has a strong tendency toward whatever sounds kind of emotionally dry and authoritative, yet waffly and non-commital like "blah blah blah 4 paragraphs about something, but overall, it really depends on personal taste and preference, and the specific needs of the situation". Like the tone of the millions of bad content farm pages that pop up for every Google search for the past few years, or (ironically) the same tone that students use to bullshit their way through an essay.
So yeah, it appears too sure of itself while having no real sense of what true or false information is, because it's really just a very good parrot that's listened in on a zillion human conversations.
It's really fun to talk to though, especially to try weird ways to get it to break out of "polite and boring helpful information gatherer" persona. They actually specifically designed it to be able to take on other personas and people use that to get it to violate the content policies it's supposed to follow, like not teaching you how to build a bomb or whatever.
I think for children, it was all about a lovable Disney character being named Pluto.
For those who were already adults at the time, there were a couple of factors: 1) there was always this buzz about a "10th planet" possibly being discovered, and the average person had no knowledge of the Kuiper belt and the complexity of what was being discovered. Reducing the number of planets seemed to be regressive, not progressive. 2) The focus was on the "demotion" of Pluto, not the recognition of Eros and other planet-like objects. That would have been a cool thing to focus on. 3) Popular science seems to have this "Ministry of Truth" aspect to it where all its current pronouncements are to be taken as absolute truth, but this truth can change at any time. So you grow up knowing about a dinosaur called a Brontosaurus, and then you take your kids to a museum and "Ackshually it's called an Apatosaurus" and you don't know why the name changed and eventually you see a documentary that explains that two different scientists found two different skeletons which were thought to be different species but were later determined to be a younger and older specimen of the same species and "Apatosaurus" won the naming wars, and then you're writing this post and check Wikipedia and nope, in 2015 it was determined that Brontosaurus is a separate genus after all and you don't think they've dug up that many more bones, they're just interpreting the evidence differently, and it seems that they're just changing stuff up arbitrarily to confuse the olds. So that's why the cranky nostalgia for What They Told Me Was Definitively True When I Was In Third Grade.
this is the biggest thing: "you cant question our pronouncements, even though we change them constantly" i think it's the main reason behind the combativeness against covid restrictions. being told by a competent guy who doesn't quite understand the situation (so he's constantly changing his conclusions) that if you question him you're a backwards fool endangering everyone. yes it's true that scientists are best equipped to find the truth, so it's a good bet simply abiding by what they say, but they're very clearly influenced by biotech companies.
you need to take a slightly adversarial stance against anything a scientist says because the field is so strongly influenced by Interests. alot of people feel vindicated, perhaps wrongly, seeing that the vaccine requires so many boosters, people with all the boosters still get infected, and that masks weren't nearly as effective as they were first sold as.
this is especially harmful with how corporations like blackrock and those biotech brands have profited immensely from the pandemic. YOU were told to sit in your house and quit your job or be exposed as a front line worker or whatever (no pay increase) while these corporations sucked up all the single family houses. then you have unreliable pronouncements from those at the top, that are sometimes proven wrong with time, that directly lead to your situation being worsened. it's like being told your house has termites in it, leaving, having to pay for a hotel, then coming back and realizing that not only were the termites isolated to just the garage, but that your entire house was robbed during your time away.
Wow, I'd totally missed the news that _Brontosaurus_ was back to being its own thing. It's wild to me how many discoveries are still being made in paleontology and how many mysteries are still unresolved (e.g. "What's the deal with the Tully Monster??")
This is a really nice explanation, thank you.
"What they told me in third grade was definitely true" has had (is having) more nefarious consequences than just a squabble over Pluto. I just started watching videos from this channel, but I wonder if there are any videos addressing this issue.
Very helpful comment
Oh my god I was so happy to see you mention the "moons are planets" article! That article made me do a full 180 on my stance on Pluto, and it made me tread even further into thinking that if there's a dichotomy to be had between the spherical, non-star bodies in the solar system, it should really be between telluric planets (including moons and "dwarf planets") and gas giants. There's a graph in that article (page 53) that shows the shared properties between the different bodies. All the telluric bodies are spread around with a bunch of different properties shared between some but not all of them, and the four gas giants are hanging out together in their own corner. That hasn't left me since.
Never gave it much thought, as I also just figured astronomers knew best. It does seem weird that if your orbit wasn't clear, you're not a planet, but then when you clear it, you become one. Also doesn't seem fair that if your orbit is 3,000 times longer than a planet of similar size, you get penalized for not clearing it out as well :P
That's a lame criteria anyway. How well could Mercury have cleared its orbit? How about tiny Mars, which has 1/10th the Earth's mass?
Maybe we could just send a space mission to go clear everything in Pluto's orbit, and get it re-promoted? 🤔
@@cpflames3
Genius!!
@@cpflames3 GoFundMe?
Well, you’ve convinced me that the definition is not very good!
Can’t really comment on the vim thing because I’m on the comfortable and easy going beach resort that is nano. It seems like getting into vim and not being able to get out seems to be an almost universal experience, so I think it’s just highly relatable
I think the reason why we have this vague definition of "planet" is because we are working backwards from what our current understanding of "planet" is. We had the list of 8 planets and if we want to add Pluto to that list then we also need to add Ceres, Eris, and other spherical objects that orbit the sun to it, so they needed to make a definition that would uphold our current list. I would like to see some more detail added to the definition of planet though, and also expand the definition from "orbits the sun" to "orbits a star" so that exoplanets are included in the definition.
one of my big pet peeves with media articles on science is how few of them seem to actually link to the scientific paper or press release they're covering (even if it's just a paywalled jstor/research gate/etc. link). Especially if you're reading an older article, it can take like half an hour just to find the paper so you can *start* to read it yourself!
I think the reason people think exiting vim is funny is because the first time most people use vim, they can't figure out how to exit it. I certainly had this experience.
It's not that it's hard. It's that it's confusing the first time. It honestly made me feel quite claustrophobic, especially at a time when I only had one device, and thus could not exit vim to access the internet to find out how to exit vim.
So I think it's just nostalgia for that initial experience, which can be baffling.
:q!
> It's not that it's hard. It's that it's confusing the first time.
That's Linux in a nutshell, honestly. I'm still learning it, little by little. When I need to figure out how to do something, I find the method is frequently unintuitive, but very, very simple. I spend a long time researching, and then mere seconds doing.
@@amzrigh absolutely. This is something Linux evangelists have a hard time grasping to this day. I love Linux, but let's not pretend the barrier to entry is lower than it is.
I actually use vim fairly often over ssh, but still end up with :q typed into the content of files while editing due to typing too quickly / not pressing ESC hard enough for my keyboard to register, or accidentally pressing the q before the : and falling into macro recording mode. at least it's not the unimproved vi :)
I think that's why it was funny yeah. Also though the majority of the time I see it nowadays it looks to me like the funny is 90% based on the fact that it's at least a couple of decades past the point of actually being funny. So the shared experience of beating a dead joke, it's a saying "on fleek" ironically-or-maybe-not-who-can-tell-unless-you're-in-the-in-group moment.
You're a great storyteller for these stories! (I started with women in space, and just went through the set -- spiders, chess, and pluto)
This is really nice! Thanks so much.
I like how it was explained to me by an astronomy teacher I had a few years after the big event. I think CGP Grey's video touched on it too. Basically, the definition resulted in fairly nice and tidy categories of solar system objects-you got the rocky inner planets, then the asteroids in the asteroid belt, then the gas giants, then the objects in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, and finally the satellites orbiting all the rocky planets and gas giants. Pluto just seems to fit in well as an unusually large Kuiper belt object. I think it's fair to say the definition should be more scientifically rigorous though.
I agree with Dr Collier on the vast majority of things, but in this case I don’t understand why she thinks temporal and spacial context doesn’t matter for this definition. I understand that “rogue planets” don’t have to take these into account, but I’m also fine not calling them true planets. I think planets are important because of their context within a solar system. Not that they are “large, non-star bodies”.
@@cptobvius She doesn't seem to have an issue with the term "Rogue Planet" being context sensitive.
You've convinced me (a high school senior) with the 2006 talk to stop using my phone around others forever to rekindle that conversational energy
my theory is that the real reason was to reclassify it so that they didnt have to add all the increasingly large number of similar TNOs as planets so they had to come up with another classification to exclude it. and I'm fine with that
I am not fine with that, because definitions should reflect some underlying distribution of reality. It is fine to be a lumper or a splitter in taxonomy but it is dishonest to create arbitrary rules to reach a conclusion that you wanted for other reasons. I am all on board with treating pluto the same as all the other TNOs, but be rigorous about it in a way that is follows from actual principles and can be applied to exoplanetary systems as well. It should be reasonable to someone who didn't know what your real goal was.
It's all a conspiracy from Big Astro. Don't believe it.
This was the reason, they wanted to have a number of planets that it could be easily taught in primary schools, 8 is fine, 28 is not.
Keeping kids interested in space and excited enough to become the next generation of astronomers is actually a valid basis for making a decision. If you don't propogate a love for the topic (and the topic of Pluto's planetary status is one where a lot of public love is displayed) then who knows what quantum crystals will be the next magical 'science' idea to take off...
@@orathaic why reclassify something just to make it easier for kids to memorize? Can't scientists focus on actual, scientifically meaningful classification systems and let teachers and educators decide how to teach them to students?
@@weirdlanguageguy the history of planet classification includes ~11 planets at one point (ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta). But when more asteroids were found "it became cumbersome to classify them as planets"
Same thing with the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs).
And i just learned the word asteroid comes from the astro (star), because the asteroids didn't resolve into planet-like discs, but are so small they appeared as star-like points of light...
You're a very engaging speaker, and I'm also really impressed by your ability to make larger observations about society. "I don't think it will ever happen again where the primary mode of exchanging information about a piece of scientific information is going to be conversation with peers." Extremely insightful, I was taken aback! It's very comfortable to listen to you.
i do stringently disagree with that specific prediction/assessment but i def agree with the spirit of your comment
@@kylezo nah nowadays people will just link to whatever article supports their argument with no further research lol
The vim thing is funny because the first time you're faced with vim it shocks you that a program's interface could be so shit that even as someone with experience handling random bullshit interfaces you still need to google how to even exit the software.
The joke is that vim is comically complicated.
No, the joke is that vim is older than google so you couldn't even google it.
Well, Vim is a massive improvement from Ed, at least, lol.
@@AbandonedVoid Why ed? You could've mentioned edlin, ex, or vi, all of which go back to circa 1983, so, only people much older than me were ever stuck with ed in any serious situation. vim is arguably better than those as well, at least in many cases.
Vim is really not that complicated at all.
Man theres smth really funny about some contrarian guy replying to a 4 month comment just to say "ur wrong" with 0 reasoning or input
I really like your planet definition. It's internally consistent. That's always satisfying. It's also interesting to watch this after seeing you talk about science crackpots.
I came across you while studying for a class project, I'm so glad I did! youre very informative and entertaining to watch :)
You don't have to exit. Just launch another shell from within Vim. Then, if you can't exit the shell, launch another Vim from within that shell etc.
The Russian doll of shells
I really appreciated the moment of vulnerability around the humor of "exiting vim is hard."
what annoys me the most about the whole ordeal is that nobody on pluto’s side ever sticks up for eris or ceres or the other rocks
ceres especially because it’s been literally through the exact same experience as pluto and yet it’s completely ignored by everyone in pluto’s favor
It's because we all went through that brief moment where we knew enough to enter vim, but not enough to exit it. We assumed it would be the usual "control C" or "exit," but when it wasn't, we panicked. Of course, you could look it up. But at that point we thought we were beyond having to look something up just to exit the program. Am I trying to explain a joke? Yeah...
I agree with my planetary scientist argument that an object being a planet should depend on that object and it's properties, not what is in the space around it. And yes, Ceres should be a planet too. Is a star in a stellar cluster not a star because it moves in a way to cross the paths of other stars around it?
The criterion of having cleared its orbit was always dumb. Most of the planets in our solar system, including Earth, have not cleared their orbits.
The rant comedy bit was spot on. People were using these outrageous claims as some sort of shortcut for a personality. Nobody actually cared, and we knew they didn't care, but they enjoyed getting angry and pretending that they cared. Because it meant they didn't have to care about meaningful things, and they liked the attention.
Was not expecting the Red vs. Blue reference in a video about Pluto
For me the VIM thing was funny because early on I was told to use it to modify a conf file but no one told me how to exit and there were no clear instructions. Now I know and it's not a big deal to me anymore. I think it's just that shared experience we can bond over
I want to say something positive: You are awesome! Thank you for the great videos and the way you are and/or represent yourself
This was incredibly useful context. Gonna keep watching
11:35 "It doesn't matter what it says, you've clicked it, you saw the ads! Capitalism baby!" 😂😂😂😂😂
Your definition is simple and elegant. I also appreciate how you incorporate the traditional conception of planets as all those wanderers who do not maintain a fixed position in the sky to justify the more expansive definition.
Debates like "Is Pluto a planet?" "Are tacos sandwiches?" and "Is the ocean soup?" are definitional debates. Regardless of which side wins, we do not gain any new information about the subject matter. This, I believe, is what makes them popular. They are "safe" debates, because there are no real stakes. They can be funny in the same way the Abbott and Costello sketch where Abbott "proves" 7*13 = 28 is funny. By going through a series of seemingly valid steps, one is able to arrive at a ridiculous or counter-intuitive conclusion. In the case of the aforementioned debates, both sides can present solid arguments that result in contradictory conclusions. This is also a meta-joke about the nature of debate itself, since the tools needed to win a debate are not the same as those needed to determine the truth of a statement.
The ocean would be more like a stew, with all those vegetables and meaty chunks in it, right?
@@jaydee4397maybe not since the ocean doesn't cook everything in it.
It is still a stew if it hasn't been cooked? I don't think so. Haha
Rant was lovely, I'm convinced ;)
OMG, I love your videos!
Maybe since Neptune and Pluto-Charon are in resonance they should be re-classified as a trinary planet.
Defining planets solely by their intrinsic properties does make sense. From what I understand, there was strong consideration for coming up with a definition that limited the number of planets to an amount that could be memorized by a ~9 year old, and the committee was unable to come up with something that included Pluto without including a bunch more.
But if we decide we should classify astronomical bodies based solely on their intrinsic properties, then moons don't exist. If you thought demoting Pluto was controversial, just wait until you try to tell people there ain't no Moon! 😆
@@juliasophical Of course they exist, they're just planets as well. Things are allowed to have multiple labels at once.
@@Valkhiya Indeed, and I'm all for things having multiple labels. I'm NOT saying it's no longer a "moon" because it's now a "planet". What I'm pointing out is that "moon" is a definition that does NOT depend solely on the intrinsic properties of the object, so if we insist that we define things based *solely* on their intrinsic properties, then we can't call anything a "moon", regardless of what other labels we can apply.
@@juliasophical Fair point.
Just discovered this channel last night and I love it. You’re like the science nerd version of Big Joel, which is legitimately a great combination :)
thats such a good analogy
Damn i cried at the end. Thanks for painting that picture.
Yes! Another great rant expressing all my feelings about the 2006 planet definition. And yes yes yes for the Metzger paper, which is the most sensible thing written on this topic. Thanks and keep up the great work!
In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, I was always confused how Checkov could mistake Ceti Alpha V for Ceti Alpha VI.
Now I see why! Even in the 23rd century, they're still arguing "what is a planet". 🤦♂
I really enjoy your videos @callierastro and how you examine different ideas and really dig in, examine the facts and discuss all of it in a relatively understandable way. I like feeling like you are discussing these things with me, not holding back and being as honest and open as you can be.
I appreciated the mention of paywalls. I had to do my first research project in my first semester (first generation student) and it was very depressing to find that everything on Google Scholar that seemed vaguely relevant cost at least $40 just to look at. I eventually found a good source on the college site but it took a while.
It reminded me of how legitimate news sites are mostly paywalled (another problem with the same course and just life in general), while most/all news sites of dubious origin are free and plastered with ads.
Is it any wonder that we have such a disinformation problem?
A lot of the vim jokes that I've seen have been in the context of "text editor wars". Which yeah, is the same sort of thing as AVGN and "console wars" etc. Like even on Google if you google "vi" you get "did you mean emacs" and if you google "emacs" you get "did you mean vi?". My opinion (and lots of others') is that we know vim is objectively better than anything else, but has a big learning curve since all of the commands go against muscle memory learnt from any other experience with Windows or Mac computers. With that said, vim is my go-to if I'm using command line, but if I can use a mouse I'd rather use vscode.
So Vim is a text editor?? Im still confused lol
It's not "objectively better" if even exiting the program is a part of the learning curve. Especially not when it's something that could be improved but wasn't, be it because of elitism or nostalgia (and both are big problems in computer science circles).
Thanks for the reference to the Arxiv paper, it's fun, and I find myself agreeing with it.
I thought this was going to be about why Mickey Mouse has a dog named Pluto, who can’t talk, and his best friend is a dog named Goofy, who can talk.
It is because Goofy is a planet and Pluto is only a dwarf planet.
I've seen a few popsci article that mention planetary scientists' criticisms of the IAU's definition, but like you said, a lot of popsci seems to prioritize mass-producing soundbites over accurate science communication
i was also a kid in 2006 so i wouldnt have had the greatest awareness of stuff going on but I remember the pluto thing being mostly a meme, in a "nooo my childhood was a lie" sort of thing basically just driven by nostalgia bc we all learn about the planets in the solar system pretty early in school. Kind of similar to how some people reacted to learning that dinosaurs likely had feathers, bc it made them seem less cool and scary (those people are wrong btw dinosaurs having feathers is fantastic). it was also something more people would be aware of bc kids were aware of it, I remember in elementary school the teachers were always not really sure if they should teach us about pluto like they were used to and theyd usually do something like include it in the list of planets but say yeah its technically not a planet anymore. I think people still discuss scientific news with each other just like before, and have "debates" over silly things that are just fun to argue about like whether a taco is a sandwitch or not. I think its just harder for scientific news (and any kind of news really) to stand out now compared to the past, we mostly get our news from the internet's 24 hour news cycle so theres just so much more news we see on a daily basis than when we just got our news from tv. anyway i wish more of the public scientific discourse was like this and not like, conspiracy theories about vaccines and climate change.
@Jon, it hurts: It might also be nice if the public scientific discourse thought about for longer than five seconds the kinds of things that would and wouldn't make conspiracies a likely explanation for things, instead of just using the fact that some theory has conspiracies as part of its subject matter, or even is just loosely associated with the kinds of things people call conspiracy theories, as an automatic reason to refuse to have any discourse on or further exploration into the issue, despite the fact that doing so, as science is so famed for doing, would increase the falsifiability of the theories involved and thus further and deepen our connection with the real world, whether that would mean using the findings to increase the purported likelihood of the theory to be true, or using them to decrease it.
"Kind of similar to how some people reacted to learning that dinosaurs likely had feathers, bc it made them seem less cool and scary (those people are wrong btw dinosaurs having feathers is fantastic)."
One day, many more people will develop the morality to avoid wanting dinosaurs to seem scary, but that day, unfortunately, just hasn't really come yet, although, on the bright side, there are some mentors in this comments section that would have the expertise to help those morally challenged individuals.
@@derekg5563 people can be overly dismissive to ideas or questions that are conspiracy theory adjacent (people can be pretty harsh towards those genuinely asking questions about Covid stuff bc it sounds a lot like the stuff Covid conspiracy theorists say or “ask” disingenuously) but for people who are legit into conspiracy theories it’s not a matter of being misinformed it’s a psychological thing, someone into a conspiracy theory likely isn’t into just one bc they are just a person prone to conspiratorial thinking. Those tendencies usually come from a more emotional place like having distrust and criticism of the government, a legitimate feeling that gets misdirected, or the desire to feel like you’re unique bc you have this special knowledge, or to be part of a group where you all have this secret knowledge no one else has. Doesn’t help that some conspiracy theory groups can be predatory and target vulnerable people like someone who is lonely with low self esteem and would be enticed by being in a community and being made to feel special. You can’t logically argue with people like that bc they aren’t operating by logic.
@@BlisaBLisa , ALL people can be (and usually are) overly dismissive of new ideas. From Psychology Today, 2010:
'Why do people so tenaciously stick to the views they've already formed? Shouldn't a cognitive mind be open to evidence ... to the facts ... to reason? Well, that's hopeful but naïve, and ignores a vast amount of social science evidence that has shown that facts, by themselves, are meaningless. They are ones and zeroes to your mental computer, raw blank data that only take on meaning when run through the software of your feelings. Melissa Finucane and Paul Slovic and others call this "The Affect Heuristic," the subconscious process of taking information and processing it through our feelings and instincts and life circumstances and experiences ... anything that gives the facts valence-meaning ... which turns raw meaningless data into our judgments and views and opinions.'
by David Ropeik, an award winning Science communicator and Journalism professor in an article titled;
"Why Changing Somebody’s Mind, or Yours, Is Hard to Do" subtitle,
Our opinions are castle walls, built to keep us safe.
regarding feathered dinosaurs, to paraphrase Randall Munroe XKCD, people who think feathered dinosaurs aren’t scary have never tried to fight an ostrich
I'm so glad you included that Burton Gustor rizz moment
the usage of "They wanna name me Pluto?" in this video has real "I'm losin' to a bird!" kind of vibes.
i genuinely think the definition is all about making sure the solar system has a nice small number of planets. if we consider pluto a planet, there's a bunch of other stuff in the solar system that should also be considered planets, i guess somebody somewhere was upset about that
Yeah, they wanted it to be possible to print up a nice short list for children's placemats and such. Can't do that if there are 300 planets in the solar system. But reality doesn't care about our children's placemats...
It sort of divides it into clear domains doesn't it? Each for 8 planets. Asteroid belt not Ceres domain. TNOs KBOs OORT etc. Makes it fit into neat areas that are somewhat regular patterns doesn't it.
“ oh dear we are making new discoveries, let’s hide them “ . That only really makes sense if planetary scientists deep down have a bit of astrology hanging around somewhere. New elements, exoplanets , elementary particles, animal species or fossilised animals are celebrated not awkwardly redefined away.
Yeah, I 100% agree.
Right. It being classified as a planet occurred at a time when we didn't realize how many other similarly sized objects are spinning around out there.
I think the attempt to rigorize the definition of the term "planet" just isn't that important for scientists at the end of the day. Pluto is still a term that refers to a fixed object in the solar system, whether we call it a planet or a "dwarf planet" (how important is this subcategory, btw?) is basically arbitrary. "But we have to have a scientific definition for the word whose greek origins literally means 'wanderer!'" Actually no. I certainly don't, anyway. Neither do most people, and, as a matter of fact, probably neither do most astronomers. We could just arbitrarily say, "the definition of a planet is X (whatever the specific technical definition of planets is), +, for reasons having to do with the historical development of solar system astronomy, Pluto."
"But why would I grandfather Pluto into my astronomical definitions?" Because history is a thing, because there's more than one domain that concerns itself with the question of what Pluto quote unquote "is," and because astronomers don't actually have a special authority in the naming of things or the semantics of terms. This is, very technically, the domain of poets, actually. In this specific case, scientists absolutely overstep their bounds by claiming to be able to dictate the common usage of language itself.
Put it another way, I neither presume in my usage of the term "planet" to impose this definition upon the IAU (they can construct their taxonomies however they like), nor do I accept their authority to impose their definition upon myself. There is an irreducible political element to linguistic change, it isn't enough just to change the dictionaries (although, of course, that is an enviable tool to have at one's disposal).
Best comment here.
Thanks so much for the last bit, didnt reflect on this back when because I was very busy at the time. you are correct and I am happy.
I think the main reason pluto got kicked out was because we want to keep our 8 main planets but if we extend that definition to something that includes pluto we have to include the other 150 rocks that also qualify as dwarf planets and our main 8 bois will not sound so special anymore
- "and our main 8 bois will not sound so special anymore"
See that's not the reason, though. The reason it because otherwise, you effectively have no classification scheme at all. When everything is a planet, nothing is.
@@zackakai5173 no, you do. it's just that that classification includes the other 150 rocks, so instead of 8/9 planets you get around 160. So my question to you is where is the line?
I'm not a scientist - or even a retired engineer - but my view is that if an object is small enough to be blown up by Bruce Willis with a single bomb then it is an asteroid. If it is too big for NASA trained oil drillers to blow up then it is a planet. I call it the Bay Limit and by this definition I believe Pluto should still be classified as a planet.
I tried to think up other classifications, but they all ended with Earth being demoted from planet, which probably is no great loss overall.
I too was playing WoW during 2006, so I missed most of the arguments around this debate. Regardless of whether Pluto is actually classified a planet by scientists, my view is that it should be TAUGHT as one to children.
When I was younger knowing that planets came in all sizes and that there were tiny ones out beyond the gas giants really helped shape my understanding of exactly how the solar system exists. Having a named object such as Pluto taught to you and having its extreme conditions explained really helps make the solar system that little bit more interesting.
For the Horde!
A+ comment haha
So you mean we can demote planets by advancing drilling technology?
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p Absolutely! We can also promote planets by sabotaging drills worldwide.
@@DanielStaniforth now, that would be fun, we might create data to support the idea that having more planets slows down climate change
Casual World of Warcraft reference. I've binged your channel over the last few days, and you have great insight and commentary. Your channel is going to pop off when your fluoride video hits.
It’s incredible that legislators decided up waste their time legally mandating that Pluto be on maps of the solar system.
Okay but that girl saying "...but I tink it's dat one wight dere." is absolutely adorable.
I was 20 in 2006 and while we didn’t have smartphones, most people didn’t dial up internet either (well, not if you lived in a city) broadband was pretty widespread in most North American/European cities by then, and I even had WiFi. I also was the kind of person who did start the day opening my laptop and checking email, going on Facebook etc but I probably wasn’t normal.
even ignoring internet, most people read newspapers
I turned 18, graduated high school, and started college in 2006. We still had dialup internet at home until late 2008, but most of my neighbors already had DSL and my internet at college was pretty fast. They upgraded it and installed decent Wi-Fi throughout the campus before the end of my first semester.
@@magister343 oh yeah I'm sure it wasn't the same everywhere/for everyone... my family was pretty well off and we lived in a major city. I was living in Canada (Vancouver) at the time, too. it probably was different in much of the US I guess.
Re: 16:30 jokes about exiting the Vim text editor -- why are they funny? I think people find them funny because they're poking fun at the supposed inferiority of new Vim users who are used to Microsoft Notepad or maybe Nano, and who did not bother to run Vimtutor (or even to read the splash screen), and who don't understand the concept of a modal / non-GUI / non-WYSIWYG editor, and who would rather sink in stupefied frustration than read the manual (I think most of those jokes are older than Google being a quick way to get useable info about a niche topic).
Also, for many of us who find those jokes hilarious, there is a twinge of sympathy because we remember the first time *we* heard about how wonderful Vim was, and we tried it... and we couldn't even enter any text! And we said, "Well, this sucks, I'm going back to Notepad"... and we couldn't even quit the program! (Most of us don't have what it takes to be astrophysicists.) So for some of us, it's funny because it happened to us, and we have to laugh at how stupid we were. (Better than crying about it.)
In my case, I figured that if so many people with proper grammar were recommending Vim, then maybe it was worth a second try; and after working through Vimtutor some 15 years ago, it is now really painful to use any other editor, such that I install it on any Windows computer I have to use more than once or twice. (At organizations where installing software requires special permission, IT departments are usually very happy to help install Vim, in my experience.) And I still find the jokes pretty funny, even though the punchline is always the same (and even though I certainly know to use ":x" to save and quit).
There's another group who make jokes about how hard it is to exit Vim -- people who kind of hate using Vim, because it is so counter-intuitive (maybe they grew up on Atom or Front Page or VS Code or etc.). So they're making fun of how bad a piece of software is Vim, and Vim users are making fun of people who won't take the few minutes needed to read the directions, and both camps think the jokes are at least mildly entertaining. Not sure which camp your computational physics colleagues are in. (But, yes, at root, it's kind of a dumb joke. The Three Stooges of computer geek humor, maybe.)
Or maybe it was a joke?
I am 100% here for this dedicated analysis!!
The stack overflow blog did a good job of explaining why it's a question to begin with. The biggest reason is that git drops you into vim. Web devs who never use a terminal who get dropped into vim have no idea how to get out.
@@123370 Oooh, that is interesting.
got a lot of 2006 "wanna have a rant?" energy going on here :) love it...
This is a great channel.
Grade school children should be made to learn that Pluto is a planet and just to bust their stones they should also be made to learn the names of the other 2,000 Kuiper Belt objects that we have discovered so far. The defining line on whether Pluto should be a planet to me was when Neil deGrasse Tyson explained that if Pluto was at our orbit distance from the Sun that it would have a tail , and that was no way for a planet to behave. Thank you for the video and thumbs up.
Another great video. Like you, I was also very busy in 2006, for what seems to be identical reasons. I always assumed that the first criteria was "orbits a star" because it didn't occur to me that a group of scientists could be so sloppy as to just say "Sun". But I just looked it up, and that really is a red flag for how little care was taken in the definition. Perhaps that was hopelessly naïve of me, as a physical *organic* chemist that studies *aromaticity*.
Also, I am sure that your shirt says "PLUTO", but that was not the first thing my brain read it as at 22:07 O_O
good job assembling clips for this one ... thats the part of making yt videos that makes you look back and go ... damn im not really sure if I wanna do all that again lol. gj
That Pacabell Cannon rant clip was so validating.
People love science like they love a circus. They only like the fun stuff. Nobody considers the crazy hard problems that we work on, things that take over your soul.
I'm also going to say... it's also a pretty western view of planets because in chinese 'star' and 'planet' are the same word. At least in casual usage, it's just a big round thing in the sky you can see. And if you can't see it, you don't know it's there but once you do it counts.
I was already a subscriber. Now you're my hero.
Well done. Thank you for settling the issue once and for all. We still have a few of these questions to answer:
1. Are pterodactyls dinosaurs?
2. Are hot dogs sandwiches?
3. Are tomatoes vegetables?
That article is a really great read, it was worth my two hours when I found it a year or so back ^^
But yeah, the whole Pluto thing is weird to me, because on one hand, (speaking as someone who was admittedly on the "it is still a planet" track mainly because of that third grade nostalgia thing until finding said article) the general sentiment of "well they're wrong because I don't like it" feels bad to me, and another possible contributor to like, public opinion turning against science in a way that's led to a lot of the nonsense conspiracy theorist stuff that's so big today.
Meanwhile, until finding that article I couldn't really articulate the problems with the definition so I felt like I had to reluctantly go with it. But on the other hand, I just generally really don't like the sort of, dismissive Sheldony tone a lot of the anti-Pluto people tend to take when they talk about it. "Well they said it so it's right, you ignorant phillistines, get over your nostalgia and get with the real world!" Like that's kind of an exaggerated version, but still, that's the kind of smug vibe I usually pick up, which makes the doubling down in spite in the face of that, feel a bit more understandable to me, idk. So I kinda agreed and disagreed with both sides of the argument simultaneously; my gut reaction was saying "Pluto Is A Planet, dammit", and then I checked myself and went, "No, the scientists know what they're talking about, so just deal with it."
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And then I read that article, and it really clicked for me. I have mixed feelings on that my petty Third Grade nostalgia was evidently vindicated, but I'm still not going to complain too much.
For one thing, realizing the conference that voted on it was like, general astronomers and not actual planetologists, just made the whole thing weirdly make more sense to me? Like no wonder the decision and definition was so weird and arbitrary, this is like a chemist without much Particle/quantum physics experience trying to redefine quarks out of existence or something.
Then there's the fact that planetologists were saying that like, the important factor was more whether something was geologically active in some form, and a funky venn diagram with all the different categories of types of that, and which planets and moons had which ones. So that was really interesting to learn, along with the realization that hey, moons can count as planets too, which actually made a weird amount of sense and was easy to accept for some reason? (Which like, I think, I think that last part ties into where I'm going with all this.)
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But like, the big thing that got me, was learning the real main unspoken(?) motivation behind all this, the existence of the other trans-neptunian objects past Pluto. And it's like, despite what the IAU may claim to the contrary, this whole thing was very much a Demotion, not a sidegrade, with the intent of curtailing the amount of recognized planets at just the eight, because I guess going into the double digits was too much or whatever. And that in of itself just feels kinda fundamentally wrongheaded; science is a process and we're always discovering new things, so why are we just like, saying "no, the buck stops here" in the first place?
Like, it is functionally putting a premature stopper on Planet Hype, for lack of a better word. We have the eight, we don't need any more, anything else we find around our system is only a Dwarf planet, and thus beneath the general public's notice. They're not the headliner events going into third grade textbooks anymore. The idea of Planets in this solar system? Is stopped. Done. No more. And that, I feel, is like, cutting off a free and easy source of science positivity for no good reason other than, ironically, the sort of reactionary traditionalism that pluto supporters get accused of.
Imagine if the narrative was not "Pluto isn't a planet anymore" but "Look we have a few more cool planets for you to fall in love with!" I guess the controversy got more attention overall, but that doesn't make it any less a negative-sounding headline, and a net negative for science communication IMO. For me at least, back in like 2014 or so, learning that there were these other Trans-Neptunian objects past Pluto, also named and also with their own quirks and interesting elements, again was far easier to accept and become interested in, than the idea of Pluto's demotion. So when anti-Pluto people point to them (and Ceres in the asteroid belt, and Jupiter and Saturn's bigger moons) to be like "well if Pluto is still a planet, then these ones would have to be planets too! >:(", my only response is "Exactly! :D" On the same grounds that I still think of Pluto as a planet, I have accepted them into the fold as well, and keep thinking it's rude that they're still being excluded from the current third-grade textbooks.
Sorry for the essay in the comments. You were wondering if this whold controversy was a joke to most people, and I don't know either way, but I'm one of the people who's legitimately really (prolly disproportionately) opinionated about this.
Wise man once said, "Buff, don't nerf."
It's not hard to exit vim... unless you compare it with the ease of exiting literally any other non-console text editor.
To me, it's funny because there's a contingent of people that swear by VIM compared to other text-editors (or even IDE's). Sure it's not difficult in a vacuum, but with the context of other options it's the difference between choosing to sweep a rug or vacuum it. And the vacuum is like, a dyson or whatever is considered to be a good vacuum.
That's what I think as well. The joke is funny when you start out with vim, because you have to press WHAT to exit? why? who came up with that?
and that's not the only strange (compared to other editors) thing about it, but the immediately apparent one. and if you learn to use vim you just get used to it and it becomes normal, the joke is not so amusing anymore (at least that is how it was for me)
@@feorge4972 But it is so easy and logical, colon for command and q for quit :/. I on the other hand never know how to quit emax and nano, they are so weird and difficult! Just make your keycodes "less" difficult and everything will be "manual"y the same and you can navigate every program there is in the commandline interface. It is all so easy when following the standard ED defined 😢
@@gryornlp9634 oh, it never occurred to me that is what the colon stands for!
@@feorge4972 And slash for search. It is pure command line poetry