he problem is that the current definition makes no sense and is, frankly, bad.

You haven’t said why though, I have received zero good arguments why reclassifying a ball of ice and rock that crosses other planetary orbits harms science, it’s a dumb hill to even point at, much less die on.

Pluto is a wonderful, amazing and beautiful world. I will never forget the awe I felt when I saw the first images when New Horizons blasted past it, the colors and textures and vivid landscapes and variety and hazy atmosphere layers, an utter treat, literally brought tears to my eyes that I got to see something I thought I would never see in my lifetime.

All that said, it’s fine it’s been reclassified, it takes nothing away from the world and the dwarf planets are ALL interesting and worth admiring.

Okay you googled what classifies a planet and saw the line about mercury, I am familiar but not sure how that makes any of this “unscientific.” Mercury mostly fits the criteria, pluto definitely does not.

I’m just confused how anyone has a problem with this, nothing is perfect, nothing has hard boundaries but we have to draw lines somewhere or we have solar system models where when we say “planet” we include 90 other objects that are very far removed from each other, besides being “somewhat roundish.”

I’m perfectly fine with 400 astronomers deciding to draw a line somewhere, they’re ones doing the goddamn work. I’m sure there’s a share of people seeking attention pretending to be outraged, but why give those voices power? If you’re an astronomer doing planetary science, you need to define different kinds of bodies, they’re not doing it to make people comfortable, and it shouldn’t make you uncomfortable, if it does that’s really, really weird. From the outside it screams some kind of issues with authority.

Yes, you are right it changes nothing in how we live, so I’m baffled why there’s always one out a hundred people just angry that people doing science changed something in the way they do work.

I don’t think the original user I was asking actually has logical steps as much as a desperate need to get negative attention online, but thank you for the good faith attempt.

How is that unscientific though? We need to create definitions and classifications, and it makes more sense to create that definition in the simplest place possible. IE: it’s simpler to consider Pluto a dwarf planet along with many, many other dwarf planets, than create a new solar-system model that has 50 more actual planets.

And lets say that we went with the 50+ planet solar-system model… what would be the delineation point there? What standard should we use to preserve that number 50? What if we find 50 more small bodies in the coming years? Where does it end?

The reclassification of Pluto made more sense than just saying we don’t have a clearly defined solar system. Planetary science requires the terminology so we can say what we’re looking at. Planets? Dwarf planets? Trojans? trans-neptunian objects? There is a LOT of stuff out there, we can’t call it ALL planets. So where would you have drawn the line that makes it “more scientific?”

edit: sorry, i thought you were the person who first posted that this was “unscientific,” but the argument stands.

There is a fantastic array of worldlets out there. I am so excited for Lucy and getting first glimpses of worlds we’ve never seen like the Trojans dragged along by Jupiter. We are so fortunate to be in an age where we get to see these sights. I feel like it’s easy to forget just how amazing this entire thing is, that we’re seeing the surface of places beyond Earth… and so far most of them have been unique and surprising in some way.

Oh? Do explain, and pretend I don’t actually know a lot about planetary science.

Edit: Looked at user history and .ml suffix. I shouldn’t be surprised at this kind of take, nor hold my breath for a smart answer.

Depends on the origin of the neutrino. The really old ones leftover from the beginning of the universe are so low-energy that they’re like, a millionth of an electron volt. Very not-hot.

A supernova-originated neutrino can have over 30 mega-electron-volts. For a single particle, that’s pretty hot. You still wouldn’t feel it if it hit you though.

Anyone who complains about this are the same people who whinged about the change of Pluto’s status as a planet.

In that, they are clinging to nostalgia instead of embracing a new, wondrous truth. Feathers and fur on dinosaurs shows an entirely new way of imagining the world before us, just like Pluto’s downgrade was simply because we found potentially thousands of more Pluto’s.

I think a lot of people broadly are insecure about change right now. Stability feels precious, and this nostalgic retreat is being leveraged by anti-science groups.

What the fucking fuck was this.

The good news is Dourif is such a good actor and played such an iconic character in that role, that I doubt anyone is going to connect him to the apt-term that is already spreading through public lexicon.

I feel strongly part of why he’s even more “shrieky” and unhinged than normal is because the GOP broadly has NO plan right now for when Trump keels over. They tried so desperately hard to parade JD Vance around to get him ready to take the reigns, but so far MAGA haaates him, he talks like a politician, he has all that inhuman proceduralism that made people embrace Trump’s open hatred and malice.

So Miller is slowly realizing once Trump dies, which could be any moment, that he’s going to potentially face charges, and all the comparisons to people who met their end on a rope are likely dancing around in the back of that huge, empty skull.

A lot of conservatives have wanted Greenland for a long time as some throwback to US imperialism and very outdated cold-war era defensive posturing.

Stephen Miller threw the idea at Trump and wormtongued it as some idea that claiming the country would be some monument to Trump’s legacy that would outlive all the scandals, and that’s all the old turd wants, he just wants adoration and cheering crowds, that’s his entire ethical framework.

What does Miller want from it? No idea, he’s utterly, inhumanly insane. He’s just literally an Elliot Rodgers in a suit who managed to get way too much power.

After swimming around all of this for way too long, I’m also entirely convinced that anyone who connects with or espouses pro-natalism is just hung up on some sexual kink. Almost strictly. And I know it’s hyperbolic but I’ve gone way harder and deeper trying to dismantle those weirdos than I have here, and it’s so deeply connected to the trad-wife cosplay kink thing and conservative-masked race-play fantasy that the entire online pro-natalist sphere is just a hookup app at this point.

I think you’re putting a lot of work going to bat for, and feeling contentious for people who are, and I say this a little respect, largely crazy.

The vast majority of people who feel the way you do, do not identify as anti-anything and just live their lives and either change their minds later or they don’t.

Anti-natalists are, as a self-identifying group, really bad lol. I’m sorry but they’re deeply stuck up their own ass, personally and as a human value system. Just do whatever for whatever reasons and don’t wear a uniform, once you do you end up doing really weird things.

it’s how self-important shut-ins talk about their PC setup to make it sound important.

Do i believe that we must all stop procreating? no. Do i believe that there are cases in which it is actively irresponsible and negligent to bring a child into the world? Absolutely, yes.

Okay then you’re not really anti-natalist, you’re just mad at people who are irresponsible, which is relatable.

That’s all fine and well as an internal idea why you don’t want to have kids, but when anti-natalism became a “thing” that started attracting like-minds it became another group of insane people online pushing their anti-society ideals, and if we’re going to go out quietly into the night, we should do it with the least amount of harm, and I would rather we put that energy into taking better care of the people we already have.

If society collapses, it will be even more suffering and more harm to more people and if populations collapse, so will society. I am deeply involved in logistics and nobody really gets how much suffering a population collapse could be for billions of people.

All that aside, I still think it’s a narrow perspective, because unless you know something I don’t, we don’t know if there’s an alternative to existing and experiencing things, I mean… you’re going to die, and you will be dead forever. If you’re a teacher you should know the basic ideas about the universe and how everything appears to be probabilistic in nature. Eventually, after all the stars die and a number of years pass that make time meaningless, it will eventually all happen again. In some form or another. The universe will always be experiencing itself, not having kids now just means that conscious experience is going to express somewhere else, some distant configuration. It happened once already, and few things in nature are singular.

You are fantastically, amazingly lucky you exist in this form and in this time and space, because odds are much better that you would have been a short-lived small animal, to live desperately and die horribly. That seems to be the far more likely state for the conscious experience. You (not you specifically, but singular sense of self broadly) will likely go through quintillions of reformations where you just are crustacean that gets cronched by some predator or a primate who suffers horribly and dies after her family is murdered by another tribe. We don’t know if the alternative to this is better, odds are it isn’t, we don’t know if you are actually deciding if you’re bringing in a new life or only changing the shape of your own conscious experience in this universe. We don’t even know if you have a choice at all, and are not just post-hoc rationalizing decisions you’ve already made.

Anti-natalism has a noble idea behind it, but like so many “ism’s” it’s extremely human-biased in it’s foundational beliefs and I don’t assume to know enough to make it a “thing” in my life or endorse it because it feels dumb. Not in a “you’re dumb for believing it” way, but “we’re all dumb, this doesn’t help with that” kind of way.

I’m not saying we should breed like rabbits (but we do need to work to keep population levels from causing a mass starvation and migration crisis) but I’m also not saying the opposite. This is a neutral issue to me because the cosmic perspective makes it silly. Do you know for sure if you’re actually reducing suffering? Or just reducing your own guilt? For all we know, this is as good is as it gets.

And lastly, mostly, the idea quickly attracts people who just hate children and that’s something we need to fight with all our might as a species.

I’ve always thought if they actually believed what they said they would be against all animal life as well. If existing is such misery and we need to like, end experiencing the universe broadly or whatever their main idea is, then definitionally we would also need to end all animal life, they have existed far longer, are also sentient largely, and suffered far worse than any humans over any stretch of time.

But for some reason they get real shifty when you start trying to dismantle their ideology.

It’s almost like it has more to do with their parents than wanting a better world.

I was going to comment that this comic is going to draw in antinatalist weirdos but I am beaten to the punch. Lemmy has a weird overgrown community of people who are exactly as hateful as the densest MAGA blockheads but in entirely different directions, it’s wild how easily hate seeps into people about the oddest things.

Hey, the world is beautiful, do what the other user suggested and go out and experience it.