Pluto No Longer A Planet?

[Warmaker]

Fear not!

When I finish development of my "Super Laser" I will mount it aboard a space station, which will be called a "Death Star."

I will then threaten to blow up the Earth for $1 million and turn the solar system into a true 8-Planet System.

[Zentrandude]

Fear not!

When I finish development of my "Super Laser" I will mount it aboard a space station, which will be called a "Death Star."

I will then threaten to blow up the Earth for $1 million and turn the solar system into a true 8-Planet System.

Make sure you aim at kfed's house.

[JB0]

JBO, despite your lengthy post (or because of it?), I still lean towards chrono's side. Plus he's got a good point - why the rush? Is it based on the sudden increase of discovering objects in the solar system, or something else?

I still say it's not a rush.

But yah.

The rapid discovery of new Pluto-like objects since 1992 , and subsequent establishment of the Kuiper Belt as fact rather than hypothesis, has really made it necessary to actually define planet.

And while the IAU has tried to create a definition that keeps Pluto, they haven't managed to come up with a half-decent one that isn't special-cased to heck.

The best shot they had was defining a planet as any object in orbit around a star above a certain size. The drafts using that definition intentionally set the threshold at just below Pluto. That definition wasn't liked because it was rather arbitrary.

The last definition before the current one just set it as any object massive enough to pull itself into a roughly spherical shape, plus the clause about centers of gravity to block moons. It's a less arbitrary size, as it's based on a physical property instead of a random number, but it's also a really small size.

I'm really seeing it a lot like Ceres. They called it a planet, then discovered how much other stuff was there and how small it really was. Only Pluto sat there longer because it was harder to look at.

Had it's mass been accurately estimated at the time of discovery, it never would've entered planetary status in the first place.

[EXO]

Pluto was never a planet! It's a Death Star!!!

Any one of you move I'll execute every one of ya!

[JB0]

Pluto was never a planet! It's a Death Star!!!

Any one of you move I'll execute every one of ya!

That was the premise of Metal Storm.

[sketchley]

Personally, I like the definition whereby a planet is any object capable of making itself into a sphere (has gravity, and a rotation that doesn't rip itself apart,) and isn't a star.

Reasoning is simple: some people look at the solar system as ONLY nine planets (or eight) plus the sun, the moon, and an asteroid belt. Adding additional planets not only increases the perception of the variety of planets (gas, hot, cold, atmosphered, etc.,) but also opens awareness that there is more than the 9+ objects.

In the past half a year, I was floored by the number of large objects being discovered; and I was flabbergasted at the size of some of the objects that were already discovered but put into dismissive categories like 'asteroid' (Ceres comes to mind. That things huge!) It renewed my interests in space - especially local space.

Sure, you can debate this until one is blue in the face, but as this is my opinion...

[Sundown]

Personally, I like the definition whereby a planet is any object capable of making itself into a sphere (has gravity, and a rotation that doesn't rip itself apart,) and isn't a star.

Reasoning is simple: some people look at the solar system as ONLY nine planets (or eight) plus the sun, the moon, and an asteroid belt. Adding additional planets not only increases the perception of the variety of planets (gas, hot, cold, atmosphered, etc.,) but also opens awareness that there is more than the 9+ objects.

Problem here is that if we define "planet" as anything massive enough to be a sphere, we don't really add diversity or variety to the planet list as far as our solar system is concerned. We end up adding dozens, perhaps hundreds of small, roundish, otherwise boring rocks. Most planets, under this new definition, would be rather uninteresting compared to the nine (or eight) classical planets we're familiar with.

[Kin]

might as well call mars.. the "red moon" or moon of the sun. Is the sun / moon a planet?

[Zentrandude]

might as well call mars.. the "red moon" or moon of the sun. Is the sun / moon a planet?

Mercury you mean?

[sketchley]

Such is the fast majority of space: large, hot suns; orbited by spherical objects covered in craters; with very minute amounts of gas present in the mindnumbing distances between objects. Yes, I agree, that in those terms - space is very boring. Though, I look at every object as unique, and having it's own story to tell. In those terms, everything is interesting (including interstellar dust.)

[DeathHammer]

Please Delete Thanks

Edited February 9, 2010 by DeathHammer

[Seven]

The disincentives we have are pretty monumental and nothing worth hiding.

There's nothing to hide really. First of all, manned interplanetary space travel is too costly and there aren't many incentives to travel to the other planets. Unmanned interplanetary probes are already too costly for many government administrations when balanced against things that the masses care more about like education, job security, etc. The endeavour to create more complex and more costly manned spacecraft would be even harder to justify. Beyond catering to the idealistic goals of exploration, there's not much for an administration to gain by sending astronauts to Mars or to orbit a gas giant.

Interplanetary travel would be done for the sake of knowledge with no applicable rewards. They still have to worry about the strain on the human passengers in regards to the deterioration of muscle and bone mass and the effects of cosmic radiation over extended time. The engine technology isn't there yet either, which leads me to the other problem, time. It would take up to a decade to travel to the outer planets. It took the Voyager probes many years before they reached the outer planets, with the benefit of gravity assist. Outside of the time factor, you have to deal with fuel. The faster you want to go, the more fuel you need, the more fuel you need, the heavier your craft gets, the heavier your craft is, the slower it goes.

Don't even get me started on interstellar travel. The closest star is like 70 light years away. It would take 70 years to reach that star travelling at the speed of light. How long do you think it would take with our current technology? What would mankind gain from such an expensive endeavour?

Even radio astronomers take a passive approach to probing deep space for ET. There's no point to sending radio transmissions, because by the time anyone listening hears the message, the answer would take many many years to come back. So they just listen in the hope that some signal eventually makes it way to Earth.

So really, there's nothing to hide. The universe is just too damn vast, we aren't smart enough to break the laws of physics yet, we have no way of getting anywhere of consequence, and nowhere of consequence to go anyways.

Edited September 14, 2006 by Seven

[sketchley]

Hmmm... this sounds like some of the arguements that Christopher Columbus faced when he was going around Europe trying to find sponsors for his little expedition...

[Sundown]

Hmmm... this sounds like some of the arguements that Christopher Columbus faced when he was going around Europe trying to find sponsors for his little expedition...

Maybe the Queen of Spain will be willing to lend us a faster than light starcraft.

[JB0]

I'm not sure, in the grand scheme of things, it will make any difference at all.

It's pretty obvious to me that the government, US and all the others as well, are keeping lots of things under wraps from the general public. Maybe no one is out there exploring space because there are disincentives out there, publically known or otherwise, to do so. Sometimes, in life, it's just better not to know.

The biggest disicentive is it's really expensive and there's not an immediate financial payoff. We went to the moon to beat the dirty commie russians. After that, we were hoping there was some way to exploit it via mining.

What we found was it's an incredibly hostile environment, sending people and equipment up is very expensive, and it's not easily exploited with conventional technology. All of which made it far cheaper to continue to buy stuff from terrestrial sources.

It also takes a long time to get anywhere.

The Voyager probes, the fastest man-made objects, took a year and a half "just" to get to Jupiter.

Same for close relatives Pioneer 10 and 11.

The Voyagers took 2 years to get to Saturn. Pioneer 11, the first probe to visit Saturn, took SIX years to get there.*

It will take New Horizons 9 years to reach Pluto, and will take it about a year to reach Jupiter*.

All 5 devices were built as light as possible, and the Voyagers and Pioneers were timed for a closest-approach scenario, which isn't feasable most of the time(in fact, Pluto was inside Neptune's orbit for their flights).

A manned mission would be exponentially slower due to the much greater mass it has to haul.

To illustrate:

New Horizons reached lunar orbit in 9 hours.

Apollo 11 took 3 days.

And the Apollos were about as small as you could possibly make them, as well as riding a much bigger rocket.

The further you go, the slower things get, due to the fact that you have to carry more consumables.

*If you're wondering why the Voyagers wind up so much faster than the Pioneers when they start out fairly close, and why the New Horizons is slower when it will reach Jupiter faster...

The V'gers used Jupiter's gravity as a "slingshot" to accelerate, while Pioneer 11 used a SINGLE slingshot off Jupiter to direct itself towards Saturn and Pioneer 10 made no use of the slingshot maneuver.

New Horizons will use a single slingshot to accelerate itself towards Pluto, but lacking the slingshot off of Saturn, and V'ger 2's Uranus and Neptune shouts, ends up being slower even though it starts out faster.

Pioneer 11 also had to double back across the solar system to reach Saturn, which was on the opposite side of the sun from Jupiter for the point where the 11 flew by. That added a lot of time.

The Voyagers had a trajectory much closer to a straight-line run, as Jupiter and Saturn were more conveniently aligned for their flyby. ALL the gas giants for Voyager 2. They COULD have even done a Pluto flyby, but chose instead to do a more detailed look at Neptune. To be fair, they expected Voyager 3 to visit Pluto. They didn't know NASA's glory days were ending.

[Seven]

The biggest disicentive is it's really expensive and there's not an immediate financial payoff. We went to the moon to beat the dirty commie russians. After that, we were hoping there was some way to exploit it via mining.

What we found was it's an incredibly hostile environment, sending people and equipment up is very expensive, and it's not easily exploited with conventional technology. All of which made it far cheaper to continue to buy stuff from terrestrial sources.

It also takes a long time to get anywhere.

The Voyager probes, the fastest man-made objects, took a year and a half "just" to get to Jupiter.

Same for close relatives Pioneer 10 and 11.

The Voyagers took 2 years to get to Saturn. Pioneer 11, the first probe to visit Saturn, took SIX years to get there.*

It will take New Horizons 9 years to reach Pluto, and will take it about a year to reach Jupiter*.

All 5 devices were built as light as possible, and the Voyagers and Pioneers were timed for a closest-approach scenario, which isn't feasable most of the time(in fact, Pluto was inside Neptune's orbit for their flights).

A manned mission would be exponentially slower due to the much greater mass it has to haul.

To illustrate:

New Horizons reached lunar orbit in 9 hours.

Apollo 11 took 3 days.

And the Apollos were about as small as you could possibly make them, as well as riding a much bigger rocket.

The further you go, the slower things get, due to the fact that you have to carry more consumables.

*If you're wondering why the Voyagers wind up so much faster than the Pioneers when they start out fairly close, and why the New Horizons is slower when it will reach Jupiter faster...

The V'gers used Jupiter's gravity as a "slingshot" to accelerate, while Pioneer 11 used a SINGLE slingshot off Jupiter to direct itself towards Saturn and Pioneer 10 made no use of the slingshot maneuver.

New Horizons will use a single slingshot to accelerate itself towards Pluto, but lacking the slingshot off of Saturn, and V'ger 2's Uranus and Neptune shouts, ends up being slower even though it starts out faster.

Pioneer 11 also had to double back across the solar system to reach Saturn, which was on the opposite side of the sun from Jupiter for the point where the 11 flew by. That added a lot of time.

The Voyagers had a trajectory much closer to a straight-line run, as Jupiter and Saturn were more conveniently aligned for their flyby. ALL the gas giants for Voyager 2. They COULD have even done a Pluto flyby, but chose instead to do a more detailed look at Neptune. To be fair, they expected Voyager 3 to visit Pluto. They didn't know NASA's glory days were ending.

Didn't I just say all that?

[JB0]

Didn't I just say all that?

Indeed.

But between distractions, fact-checking, and whatnot, your post wasn't up there when I initially started mine, despite the >half-hour timestamp diffrence. So I hadn't seen it.

[Seven]

Indeed.

But between distractions, fact-checking, and whatnot, your post wasn't up there when I initially started mine, despite the >half-hour timestamp diffrence. So I hadn't seen it.

No problem man, great minds think alike.

I do think it is funny when people speak about government conspiracies when talking about extraterrestial life and space travel. As if the government can control the laws of physics.

Not that I don't like the idea of mankind spreading out in the cosmos, but all the optimism in the world couldn't get us to Barnard's Star in less than a lifetime.

I was watching this documentary called Space Race, which is about the race between the USA and Soviet Union to get to space and to the moon, and its an intriguing series. What makes it good is that it finally tells what was going on in the Soviet space program, since much of the US space program is already well known and documented. I recommend it for anyone that's into this subject.

Another great manga that covers a fictional generational account of humankind exploring and colonizing worlds far from Sol is 2001 Nights. It's a great work of hard sci-fi. I only wish there were more manga like it.

Edited September 15, 2006 by Seven

[DeathHammer]

Please Delete Thanks

Edited February 9, 2010 by DeathHammer

[JB0]

No one knows what the world governments have discovered, not discovered or reverse engineered in terms of alien technology, if any exists at all.

Reverse-engineering alien technology isn't that easy.

You can't just hand a caveman a nuclear reactor and say "Here. Fire sucks."

There'd be massive tech leaps while you figured out the easy parts and worked up from there.

And the desire to conceal real technological advance has social and political issues as well. If the US had the technology to make a compact car engine run on tap water, would they want that knowledge revealed? Entire industries would collapse.

Good grief, the water car?

It CAN be done, for the record. It's just not practical due to the mass of the catalyst required to split the water apart. That and water doesn't carry a whole lot of energy relative to other fuels.

Other more realistic attempts, like natural gas, have failed because gasoline has a massive existing infrastructure that alternatives don't. You can't pull up to any street corner in the world and fill up with a couple gallons of CNG.

No one wants to build the refueling facilities until the vehicles are there, and no one wants to build the vehicles until the refueling facilities are there.

Government COULD mandate the addition of natural gas pumps to existing stations, but it'd put a lot of them out of business. Recent years have also seen a very hands-off government in terms of business.

What about organized religion? Can you imagine the implications regarding organized religion if alien life was revealed to the general public? The impact on education? Military spending? It would cause a worldwide ripple effect and most of it wouldn't be very good.

Religion's easy. You can justify other inhabited planets as easily as you can a planet that's a few billion years old instead of a few thousand.

Education isn't greatly affected.

I can see military spending jumping. Especially space defense programs. The fact that we agreed to not put weapons in space and never revisited that agreement says a lot about how many aliens we know.

I mean, who knows if humans are even welcome to travel deep into space. If I was an alien and I saw what humans have done to each other, I wouldn't want them in my neighborhood either. Sorry, but if the universe was a giant neighborhood, Earth is the Section 8 housing development that's grinding down the property value in the cosmos. It's entirely possible that aliens have already talked to world leaders and told them that humans are persona non grata.

Or that we're doing pretty good and most aliens take their cold wars hot.

It's highly odd that humanity as a whole considers itself inherently superior to everything else on Earth and inherently inferior to everything off Earth.

Also worth noting that the odds of finding another inhabited world are infintessimal.

There's just too many stars out there to check.

I'm not saying all of this is happening or would definitely happen, I'm just saying anything is possible. Even innovation that defies our current understanding of science and the laws of physics.

Indeed.

We actually KNOW our current laws of physics are fundamentally broken. No one likes to talk about it, but...

I've never felt that any government disinformation or concealment of technology or alien encounters was a conspiracy. I just saw it as common sense. I fundamentally believe that most humans are dumbasses who are predisposed to destroy each other in the most ludicrous way possible. I am personally glad that if there is something to know or hide, that the average person, particularly the average American, doesn't actually know anything at all about it.

No coverup needed. You can rig plenty of nice, deadly toys with stuff in your average garage, drug store, and/or Home Depot. Simple bleach + ammonia = good clean homicide for the whole building. A wine bottle, rag, and match is even more fun, as it involves fire.

Individuals are just too smart, stupid, or apathetic to do it.

Nations have too strong a sense of self-preservation.

Sure the US could run around nuking people in a power grab. But the rest of the world would rush us pretty fast, and there's limits to how quickly we can vaporize stuff. We can take anybody in a fight, but not everybody. And past experience tells us that spies can and will sneak any "superweapon" details out of the nation, so our enemies will be very close behind us.

We've also got a lot of really fun conventional techs that don't get used.

Any idiot nation with a rocket can gain high levels of firepower cheaply.

Step 1. Put a satellite in orbit with some rods made of a dense material like tungsten or depleted uranium.

Step 2. Shoot rods at target.

Step 3. Wait for rods to land on target after accelerating at a rate of 9.8 meters per second per second for the entire trip down from orbit.

Step 4. Smash stuff good.

Of course, you have to either have defenses for your satellites or convince everyone they're comm devices. Otherwise people start shooting at them, and they blow up easy.