Understanding the World
Wednesday, 19 Mar 2025
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I refuse to believe they have “taken” dinosaurs from me. Au contraire, I am delighted every time somebody knowledgeable and enthusiastic about paleontology serves me a *new* helping of dinosaurs. If people mean ‘they took Jurassic Park-style dino-kaiju from you’ they would be right but they are also just being bitter and refusing to look on the bright side of the cool things that genuine dinosaurs had going on.
Ok but they did take naptime from us
wtf happened about neptune
Pluto is not gone, it is now the leader of the dwarf planets, it’s got it’s own new team including fan favorite reject Ceres as well as a lot of cool new characters.
They took the four humors from you
The naptime thing is just a skill issue. Just had the most refreshing nap right now. Slow days at work are great for that
i have taken dinosaurs and will not give them back unless you can all memorise every geological period from the Phanerozoic from oldest to youngest
I would be pissed if I possessed dinosaurs and someone took them from me, ngl.
How did they take dinosaurs from me?
When I was a kid, they said dinosaurs were extinct. Now they say birds are therapod dinosaurs, and therefore dinosaurs are still alive. They gave me dinosaurs that I previously didn’t know I had.
They took the gender binary from you
I don’t know if this is a serious response to a joke, a joke response to a serious post, a joke response to a joke, or a serious response to a serious post.
It’s like pineapple on pizza. It’s supposedly a joke, and lots of people keep the controversy alive for the laughs, but some people take that shit SERIOUSLY. For some reason. Like, they go to WAR over it.
What happened to Neptune?
Taking nap time from me though that is an ever valid complaint.
Losing nap time was the thing I missed the most about growing up. ☹️
I was a dinosaur kid, and i always loved the spinosaurus, initially because if JP3, but i kind of just grew to really like it, and yet through all of its tumultuous history as a dinosaur, ive always loved it, because i don’t need it to be some le epic killing machine, i just find it neat, and nothing can take that away from me
That JP3 design is still sick af tho
The whole reason why you can trust science over anything else is *because* the scientific consensus regularly updates itself. Changing your mind based on new evidence is the most intellectually honest thing you can possibly do.
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/3063/)
Okay okay listen, the Pluto thing was fine, while I liked having this one little solid planet at the end of the solar system to bookend all the gas giants I can’t deny the categorization as dwarf planet makes the most sense. Many of the new dinosaur depictions are still awesome, just in a different way. But you CANNOT tell me that the new Neptune pictures weren’t disappointing. Like come ON, Uranus was already kinda bland but at least it has its funky axis going for it, having Neptune turn out to just be a second Uranus without even a cool quirk to match is just SO boring. Make Neptune blue again.
I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a jerk, but the Pluto thing in particular is actually a big issue in astronomy. The way they defined a “planet” in the 2006 vote is actually a super big problem. To put it in its basic terms, the new definition has three factors that constitute a planet:
Big enough to be a ball – its gravity must pull itself into a spherical shape (This one makes sense)
Must orbit the sun – and ONLY the sun. (Wow. Only eight planets in the entire UNIVERSE. We’re pretty special huh? Just us and nobody else.)
Must clear its orbit – “has “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit.” (This is that apparently declassifies Pluto. And it’s so infuriatingly vague.)
Leading up to the 2006 vote, there was a different definition that they were going to vote on instead. It had just two quantifiers:
Big enough to be a ball, and must orbit a star while not being a moon or another star. This definition makes sense. It’d include the “exoplanets” and with this definition, our solar system would have 12 total planets, including Pluto and some of the largest dwarf planets. But they threw it out literally the day before the vote happened, and made this new one instead that adds “Dwarf Planets”.
The whole situation is extremely controversial and it’s a lot more complicated than “they took away my favorite planet because they’re bullies” or “people are ignorant to science and fearful of change”.
I could go on and on about how there’s a bunch of other factors that make the 2006 IAU vote particularly frustrating, but I’ll probably do that later in an edit when I have more free time.
In short, it’s not Pluto, it’s the actual definition they made that sucks and should probably change. They already had one that was going to work perfectly fine and had a lot of support, but threw it out last second for no valid reason that I am currently aware of.
Granted, I am biased. I do work at the observatory that discovered Pluto, but I digress. I just dislike how much misinformation there is from both sides of the Pro-Pluto and Anti-Pluto camps. Thanks for reading.
I think Pluto is different from the other ones. We didn’t learn that Pluto isn’t actually a planet. As I understand it, we learned that there were far more planets than we previously knew, didn’t like that you can’t count them all on your fingers, and then started with the conclusion that Pluto shouldn’t be a planet and then contrived a definition to make it so. Sort of the opposite of the other ones.
I’m not even some big fan of Pluto, I have no nostalgia for it. At the time, I just figured the scientists knew what they were doing, and I didn’t really care. But when I grew older and learned about the new definition, I realized it’s kinda shit.
There are several issues with the definition, but just as a simple example of one of them, they decided to coin the term “dwarf planet” but then made it mutually exclusive with “planet.” If a dwarf planet isn’t a kind of planet, why does it have planet in the name? It’d be like if we decided that freight trains don’t count as a type of train, despite looking like a train and acting like a train.
Dinosaurs are straight up cooler with feathers, and Pluto being a dwarf planet is cool because now in addition to 8 planets we have like 10 dwarf planets, some of which are pretty interesting. Neptune being the same color as Uranus is a bit of a bummer but it still had giant storms visible from space and Triton
ok but i think we can all agree that the IAU redefinition of a planet from 2006 is pretty bad. for comparison, the definition of a star is something that’s massive enough to self-sustain fusion, the definition doesn’t rely on the surroundings of the star like it does for a planet (having to sweep out its orbit, not being a moon), just on the properties of the star itself. if you found a star with 0 things orbiting around it, for instance, it’d still be a star. the reason they included the orbit thing in the definition wasn’t even to exclude pluto, it was to exclude ceres, pluto just caught a stray. if they just defined planet as something that’s massive enough to be a spheroid but not massive enough to do fusion it’d make a lot more sense (yes, that’d mean the moon is a planet, just like ptolemy intended)
I don’t even get the reason to not accept that neptune is the same colour as uranus. Like for me it makes sense because they are very similar planets climate wise.
Ok but for real I want naptime back
As a millennial – as an age cohort we’re melodramatic as hell
> They took nap time from you
The fuck they did. Not on my fuckin watch.
Pluto was and will be always one of the gang
You dont nap anymore? You people are missing out!
I mean, my professor who does cosmology research is still annoyed about Pluto…
> They took naptime from you
Laughs in Spanish
Ok but like fr ***they fucking took nap time from us*** what the fuck is wrong with society. If I’m ever elected I’m bringing that shit back ASAP
I miss naptime. :c
I want my naptime back!
Ironically, they took some of the feathery dinosaurs away too. T-Rex was recently confirmed to have scaley skin
Well, no wonder they’re so grumpy! Poor fella just needs a nap lol
In general I agree, but I will actually push back on the Pluto thing, because the IAU’s definition of planet is profoundly stupid for a number of reasons.
1. The only reason Pluto is disqualified from being a planet is that there’s too much stuff in its general region of space. It is a planet in every other sense of the word. By this logic, if a planet in our solar system were to enter an unstable orbit and cross the path of another, both would cease to be planets. In fact, some projections show that just this may happen to Mercury in several billion years, so why not just go ahead and erase its planet status now?
2. Basically the only reason this distinction came about is because more Pluto-sized bodies were found, and people were worried that there were getting to be too many planets for people to keep track of. There are also too many animals for most people to keep track of, but you don’t see anyone complaining about that, or reclassifying lesser known species as “dwarf animals”.
3. This is the one that really irks me – “dwarf planet” is not a subcategory of planet, it is its own thing entirely. Despite meeting every criteria but one for being a planet, Pluto is, by the IAU’s definition, as far from being a planet as any random asteroid.
4. The IAU definition also states that a planet must orbit the sun. Perhaps a reasonable stipulation in the early 2000s, when we were uncertain if planets beyond our solar system even existed, but we have discovered literal thousands of exoplanets by now, and directly imaged several of them. But nope! Never mind that it’s the size of Jupiter, and suitably round, and there’s nothing else in it’s region of space, it’s not orbiting *our sun*, so it’s not a planet. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is moronic.
5. This definition was decided upon by the IAU, which stands for International Astronomical Union, an organization of astronomers. Astronomers, notably, are not planetary scientists, and are not required to be studied in things such as the formation or characteristics of planets. Why, then, do they get to be the final authority on what is or isn’t a planet over, oh, I dunno, the actual planetary scientists who have spent their lives actually studying these things? This makes as much sense as a local hiking club trying to change the definition of a mountain. Or, to use a more realistic and culturally relevant example, cishet male politicians passing laws on things that don’t affect them, like abortion or HRT.
TL;DR: Pluto is a planet, Eris is a planet, Ceres is a planet, the IAU is a bunch of idiots.
> they took pluto from you
That’s messed up.