Neil deGrasse Tyson went on Bill Maher’s terrible show (that’s not good, I wish everyone would just starve that guy of air) and dismissed him quickly when he brought up Elon Musk’s plan to go to Mars. It makes no sense.
I have strong views on that. My read of the history of space exploration is such that we do big, expensive things only when it’s geopolitically expedient, such as we feel threatened by an enemy. And so for him to just say, let’s go to Mars because it’s the next thing to do. What is that venture capitalist meeting look like? ‘So, ELon, what do you want to do?’ ‘I want to go to Mars?’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘$1 trillion.’ ‘Is it safe?’ ‘No. People will probably die.’ ‘What’s the return on the investment?’ ‘Nothing.’ That’s a five minute meeting. And it doesn’t happen.
Tyson has offended Elon Musk! We need more of that. Musk fired back on Shitter.
Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. Also, I’m not going to ask any venture capitalists for money. I realize that it makes no sense as an investment. That’s why I’m gathering resources.
By “gathering resources,” of course, he means “plundering our investment in space research”. Sure, he doesn’t need venture capital money now, because he’s got his hooks into the federal government.
I am most aghast at that claim that Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness.
The arrogance of the man! He sees himself as vital to humanity when he’s actually a selfish, weird parasite with an ego that leads him to think all he has to do is build a bigger rocket and people will love him as a savior.
That was enough to entice another very stupid man, Piers Morgan, to bring Tyson on to his show. If there’s anything Morgan likes, it’s being able to pit high profile people against one another in a spectacle. His second favorite thing is to ladle out smarm for rich people, so he says I’ve got massive respect for you [Tyson], I also have a lot of respect for Musk. I also like the fact that he dares to dream very big.
Morgan sucks up painfully, talking about vacationing in the south of France with Musk and how he wants to protect humanity from total ecological collapse and the heat death of the sun. So Tyson launches an even longer discourse on how the whole Mars dream is impractical and wrong.
Tyson is laughing throughout, which baffles Morgan, who thinks he’s chuckling about the eventual destruction of humanity. No. He’s laughing at how ridiculous and how ignorant Morgan and Musk are. They don’t discuss Musk’s follow-up accusation.
The real problem is that Neil decided to grovel to the woke far left when he got hit with a #MeToo. You can avoid being canceled if you beg for forgiveness and push their nonsense ideology. The truth hurts.
It’s an all-purpose excuse: any criticism is met with an accusation of wokeness. He is not a clever or rational man. Also, you should realize that being in favor of equal rights for women is not antithetical to being in favor of science and exploration.
They had this discussion and focused only on the possibility of getting a spaceship to Mars, which we know is possible — it’s been done. Getting a crewed spaceship there is much, much harder, but like Tyson says, is entirely within the realm of possibility if you throw enough money at it. What they don’t discuss is the whole absurd idea of colonizing Mars, which I think is not possible in this era, and if it were, the effort would be better dedicated to supporting our existence on this precious jewel of a planet, Earth.
Maybe Morgan should read A City on Mars and learn something. That’s not as profitable as sucking up to billionaires, though.
Hmmm:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Would this apply to a Martian colony?
Worrying about the heat death of the sun? He has no idea whatsoever of the timescale has he!
It’s nice to see Neil deGrass Tyson’s rating is going up. It’s been a bit variable here in the past.
The heat death of the sun? WTF? Does he realise when that will happen and what the entire history of the human species is? And well no, a trillion won’t be enough. And there is no way he is going to accumulate a trillion either. And if consciousness doesn’t survive – who the fuck will care?
I think we should definitely take advantage of the rich abundance of life that has evolved on Mars, and rely on it for our long-term survival. Wait….
The massive arrogance and ignorance of the elongated muskrat is becoming commonplace in this society of crackpots. Money and religion seem to be two of the main supportive elements of the lunatics. The result is throwing massive amounts of money and fanaticism at projects to tilt at windmills (sometimes literally). It sounds like the muskrat foolishly wants to build cities he can control on mars, like the potemkin villages he is trying to build here. WTF
When Mr. Mollusk has no rational response he uses the right’s fallback excuse, The Woke Liberals. He also only focuses on getting to Mars, not the arduous undertakings needed for humans to thrive there. And of course, once a colony is established, so far from earth, what would stop them from claiming independence?
I’ve heard Tyson, as well as Brian Cox and others, talk repeatedly about the fact that humanity is on the verge of truly moving off planet. I think the folks in the space science community get it. They also get the enormity of the costs, and the risks to humans.
A NASA review of various estimates on the cost of a human mission to Mars…not a colonization, just a trip there and back like Apollo…puts it at $500B. That’s more than all of Musk’s resources. Also, that’s probably a conservative estimate that doesn’t factor in glitches like Apollo 1.
Furthermore, Musk is talking colonization to create an escape boat for a dying Earth. That’s a much bigger goal in comparison to a trip to Mars and back. To do that requires building enormous infrastructure on Mars and/or geo-engineering Mars. We’re not even sure what that means, if it’s possible, or what it costs. As I’ve heard Tyson say in several contexts, if we can geo-engineer Mars, then let’s apply that technology to geo-engineer Earth.
1) Musk would probably argue that the United States has no jurisdiction over his Mars city. Yet another reason not to follow Elon to Mars.
Musk is talking colonization to create
an escape boata scapegoat for a dying Earth. FTFYIf Elon wants to die on Mars, he’s welcome to. Buy a big enough rocket and leave the rest of the money to the public good.
One of the points I like to make is that if we can’t make a sealed environment work on Earth that will last at least a year without intervention, we have no business going to Mars. We need to prove we can camp in our own back yard before we go into a place far less livable than Death Valley. Of course, if we studied ecology enough to accomplish such a feat, we’d be much better equipped to fix Earth, rendering Mars moot.
Moving to a dead planet because we’re killing out living one is such a weird idea.
One of the biggest mistakes the Harris campaign made (after ignoring the genocide in Palestine and cozying up to Never Trump Republicans) was no longer calling weird people and their weird beliefs weird, and wanting to move from a dying planet to a dead planet is weird.
Really… apart from being an ignorant pillock, what does El Musko DO all day? Isn’t he supposed to be that hard-working, world-moving Galt-style zillionaire? When does he actually work I wonder (twittering all day does not count, natch).
Comparison to the moon:
The moon is much closer (< 400000 km) than Mars (> 75000000 km) and has a shallower gravity well. We have sent men to the moon. A total of 12 men, decades ago. The longest any person has spent on the moon is 75 hours. We do not have a stable, long-term inhabited colony there.
If Musk’s goal of “saving consciousness” is to happen, Mars would need to have not just a stable colony, but a breeding colony. That means at least a few thousand people.
Or perhaps we could just send an advance AI computer there and call it “conscious.” That would save a bunch of money.
That’s highly questionable. Musk does not have an engineering education. His college major was physics.
He does spend a lot of time tweeting. And claiming to support free speech in between banning people from X. And criticizing other people who work more than one job. And taking cracks at illegal immigrants. And flying from one place to another.
Elon Musk’s jets made 355 trips in 2024
I will never understand why people like Musk are so obsessed with “the survival of consciousness”. They would go as far to inflict massive amounts of suffering on millions of people if it meant a few of them could have a tiny chance to live a bit longer. Newsflash—if humans go extinct, and given all our best understandings of physics this is inevitable—literally no one will care. I fail to see the pressing concern of that
“The survival of consciousness?” What a pretentious asshat. Oh well, at least he’s admitting — as blatantly as possible without saying it outright — that he doesn’t give a shit about actual people, and only cares about some vague abstract ideal (that he probably doesn’t understand).
Grandiose dreams are nothing new.
According to Forbes: “$436.8B Real Time Net Worth as of 12/28/24”
(43.68% of a trillion)
He clearly leveraged his acquisition of the media company to sit at the right hand of power and inveigle himself into the halls of government,
PZ:
robro:
Recursive Rabbit:
Yes, yes, more like this, and louder.
Musk, you ludicrous anti-scientific Nazi dingus, if you were even vaguely serious about actually colonizing Mars, you would be working on building self-sustaining habitats in Antarctica and the Sahara and Gobi deserts as working models and proofs-of-concept. The fact that you’re not proves that you are a huckster with no idea what you’re even talking about.
@18 Owlmirror — He’s not the least bit interested in colonizing Mars. He only wants attention back here on Earth. Which is why he and fellow narcissist/bedfellow Trump are doomed to falling out sooner or later.
Scott Manley video:
FFS. Musk is such an idiot. It would be easier to build a city on the Moon or Antarctica than on Mars. Dude is doing way too many drugs because he has no idea about the practicalities. He just called Mars the next “New World”. The old New World already had plenty of people living in it before the white man got here. What a joke.
Ray, as my video shows, he’s been doing that for a quarter of a century now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_program#History
This is nothing new, and he maybe doesn’t know about practicalities, though he clearly knows how to get very rich, beginning around 1999. Not bad for an alleged druggie, eh?
(https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rich-elon-musk-during-every-130036338.html)
If humanity is going to invest the ridiculous amounts of money to build self-sustaining cities underground on Mars, maybe we should start here. Invest some money in asteroid defense and learn how to redirect them, then build self-sustaining cities there. Mars has enough of a gravity well to make it a really crap choice.
Of course, I think we should focus our efforts on building sustainable and peaceful civilizations right here on Earth and figuring out how to defend them against threats. This, by the way, is really really really easy. The single biggest threat reduction humanity could do is to stop spending trillions on nuclear weapons designed to make Earth uninhabitable. There! I just made humanity’s likely life-span on Earth vastly longer.
Idiot authoritarian jackasses like Musk seem to have trouble recognizing that the biggest danger to humanity is idiot authoritarian jackasses like Musk. Sending them on a one-way trip to Mars would help with that problem but that’s hideously expensive. Maybe we could get them to build carbon fiber habitats down where the Titanic is. Is that more or less hostile than Mars? Well, a cinderblock and a short length of chain and you can get there pretty quick.
Raging Bee@#6:
“The survival of consciousness?” What a pretentious asshat.
Yes, he doesn’t even know what consciousness is. (Neither do I!) But if that was out concern, we are most likely going to be blasting various forms of machine consciousnesses all over near-Earth space – and abandoning them to die, like we seem to do with our children. If AGIs are smarter and faster than humans, would that make them more worth saving? Their potential immortality is a big plus. They are also potentially free of human sins and flaws. If we really want to favor consciousness we should be building robot probes and not wasting our time on humans.
Perhaps someday machine intelligences will scoff at the idea that MI bootstrapped itself out of (eew! Ugh!) masses of meat and bacteria and originated in a biosphere.
Biosphere 2 was a sealed environment that was supposed to demonstrate an extraterrestrial colony was feasible. It failed. it was 4.3 acres in size. No way Muskrat can make a viable colony on Mars. Remember High Frontier? Orbiting space colonies? Never got close to working. Theodore Taylor’s Santa Claus machine? 1978. A plan to create automated factories on the Moon? Never got past the concept stage. Eric Drexler’s Nanotech machines that could build anything. Not even close 30 years later. John Von Neuman’s automated self replicating factories? 75 years on, not even close. Muskrat is like Dilbert’s Wally. “I’m more of a big idea man.” Question. If Muskrat sends some suckers to Mars we know will die, is that a federal crime, negligent homicide?
First, I enjoyed “A City On Mars”, written by the married couple behind ‘Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’.
.
I have posted this in the infinite thread before, here is a summary
.
A low-cost approach for providing enough water and other volatiles including a thicker atmosphere on Mars would take a couple of thousand years.
It includes nudging icy objects on elliptical orbits to make a gravity assist by Neptune when they reach perihelion. It would take mass like ca 4 100km kuiper belt objects (but it would be more practical with a million smaller objects). At the end you would have a (non-oxygen) atmosphere with a density like at the upper Himalayas, a ten-metre layer of silcate and iron rubble all over Mars, and a lot of water.
While you wait for the kuiper belt objects you build a superconducting orbital cable around Mars from metals from Phobos and run power through it providing a magnetic field that stops charged particles.
Now you can walk around on Mars with just an oxygen mask, without being fried by radiation (provided the atmosphere has a organic haze that absorbs UV as strongly as ozone would).
Two thousand years is nothing in geological terms, yet I doubt Musk et al would accept such a wait.
If you add even more kuiper belt mass you can even create shallow seas in the depressions. But now you may need to separate the volatiles from the solid rubble before dropping it on the world.
Machine intelligence may enjoy Mars the way it is, but as Earth has metals and other useful stuff concentrated in ore bodies (only available on planets with tectonic processes) there are reasons to look after Earth. Even if you are a robot.
We’ve tried each spinning space mote
and reckoned its true worth;
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.
—Robert A. Heinlein
JM– what do you mean “alleged druggie”??? Musk went on a video podcast and performatively smoked weed around the same time he introduced compulsory drug testing (including for marijuana) for his employees.
shermanj and Hex–
Musk’s psychology is very basic. [1] He wants to put a colony on Mars so that he will be famous forever, even if that colony fails and everyone dies. [2] Protecting the future of consciousness is just a variation on effective altruism, i.e. a way for billionaires to justify whatever they want.
chrislawson, be aware there is another commenter here whose ‘nym is “JM”.
I know, probably unlikely to be confusing, but still.
—
As for the term, perhaps my own idiosyncrasy and age (I knew actual druggies); by the term, I intend to indicate a heavy chronic user, not just someone merely performative indulging.
Kinda like ‘alcoholic’ might be used for someone who has for the last quarter-century been functional, bibulous as they may be.
[I personally reckon he’s into plastic surgery and ozempic, but that’s mostly pattern-matching and also irrelevant; I add this because people somehow sometimes imagine I try to defend him]
Definitely NOT a big fan of NdG Tyson here. In my view he’s a wanna be and inferior copy of Carl Sagan who who vastly was better as a scientist and writer / presenter. He parasitised Sagan’s old Cosmos show overwriting it with his personal version which isn’t as good and done instead of coming up with his own more original work. Emulate Tyson but don’t just copy please Tyson! Hé’s also said some werid things about vegetarians in a Colbert interview here and then there’s the sexual assault claims against him :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson#Sexual_misconduct_allegations
Then there was Tyson’s weird, mean-spirited and unscientific crusade against Pluto which has eventually resulted in an absurdly flawed current definition of planet which excludes exoplanets, means that planets on a collision course cease to be planets and mean that Earth would stop being a planet if it orbited far enough away from our star among other issues.
So Musk actually thinks that the heat death of the sun will affect Earth, but won’t affect Mars. Isn’t he the same guy who said that repeatedly nuking Mars would make the climate more like Earth’s? Yes, he is! https://youtu.be/OvTJeTbqKKY
@ ^ HidariMak : In fairness, when our sun ballooons into a Red Giant star in about 5 billion years time it will very likely consume our Earth but NOT Mars. There have been SF idea suggestions that nuking the martian polar caps might melt them creating a more habitable atmosphere although there is the obvs issue of the extra radioactivity among oher things making that problematic.
@28. Steve Morrison : Interesting Heinlein quote. I’ve read a lot of his books as a kid and don’t recall that one. Which of his books or short stories was that from please?
@25. cheerfulcharlie : “Remember High Frontier? Orbiting space colonies? Never got close to working.”
Never actually attempted – yet :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
Remember reading about them and thinking they were an awesoem idea and still do. Basically supersized space stations like the fictional Babylon 5 which whislt currently SF may one day become reality. Justlike martian colonies, space elevators and interstellar travel insome form. Big, grand, imaginative dreams but apparently unlike some here I’ve no objection to those.
Remember that people thought flying heavier than air craft was imposible once as well as space travel, Moon landings, the sort of things SpaceX has already achieved and more.
&
Source : https://mdharrismd.com/2014/05/27/quotations-aviation-and-space/
Just because one, toxic evil billionaire nazi dreams big doesn’t mean that all such dreams are bad. Just because we haven’t yet done something doesn’t mean it cannot be done and isn’t worth trying to do. An old adage about babies and bathwater being ejected springs to mind here. Along with Clarke’s Laws :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
Humanity can create and build and fly some absolutely fantastic things when we put on minds and efforts to it. When we prioritise them over other things like killing & persecuting each other en masse.
@34 HidariMak — The ultimate fate of the sun is to become a white dwarf — giving off residual heat effectively forever (trillions of years, given a universe that’s open and flat). Before that, it will balloon into a red giant that’s expected to swallow the orbits of the inner three planets. Earth will become a cinder. Won’t matter by then, of course, since the planet will have long since gone into runaway greenhouse mode with its oceans boiled away as the sun marches up the main sequence line toward the RG branch. This “heat death of the sun” crap sounds like some kind of pot-induced hallucination to me.
StevoR: I’ve always been fascinated by O’Neill colonies too; but I’m starting to suspect that an O’Neill colony might be more feasible than building settlements on the Moon or Mars — both because O’Neill colonies can be built closer to Earth and would thus be easier to get to than Mars; and because the Sunward hub of such a cylinder could serve as a better shield against solar radiation (with mirrors reflecting only visible light through large windows on the sides of the cylinder) than anything we could build over a ground settlement on any planet.
Also, a cylinder’s rotation could be adjusted to give people the gravity that’s most healthy for them, rather than being stuck with Mars’s or the Moon’s much weaker gravity.
[um, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Hills_of_Earth ]
Another idea comes from Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars” trilogy (plus a couple of adjacent novels taking place on Earth, Venus and elsewhere): hollow out an asteroid, refine its raw materials into whatever usable/salable stuff one can, then set the asteroid spinning so people can live on its inner surface like they would in an O’Neill cylinder — in just about any sort of artificial environment they might want to tailor for themselves. You’d lose the sunlight reflected in through big windows, but you’d also thereby be able to travel about the Solar System without depending on that sunlight.
A NASA review of various estimates on the cost of a human mission to Mars…not a colonization, just a trip there and back like Apollo…puts it at $500B.
“Like Apollo?” Does that mean three or more people crammed together in a capsule even tighter than an airline’s coach seating? For…how many MONTHS?!
we might actually go to Mars and set up colonies but not very soon. Like a lot of dreamers and fools Musk does not see the complications as an impediment nor the difficulty of solving all those details as anything he sees the end result in it’s perfection. He is no Wright brother nor Edison who recognized the complications and excepted all the work needed to get it right. Look at his “genius” idea to rescue those scouts trapped in a cave a few years ago. He got all but hurt when his idea was ridiculed as completely impractical given the actual conditions of the dam cave.
this Mars idea is not much more then a concept. It might be one of the reasons he latched on to Trump thinking he could get Trump to do what he wants by kissing his ass maybe he can but the track record is not that good with Trump’s ideas nor his execution. For all the hype I do not think Trump is going to have such a great time going forward nor will he have a lot of power for very long
there are a whole lot of details to be worked out with what ever we do both here on earth and in the solar system and beyond many with only a hint of what they might be forget about solutions and facing reality for some seems to be impossible or at least very difficult.
@ 40 Raging Bee
Lol, no. “There and back like Apollo” doesn’t mean “in a tiny conical capsule”. It means going then coming back. Credible (given the money) designs have been worked on for literally decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Design_Reference_Mission
@ 33 StevorR
These criticisms are of course ludicrous. Neil did a new “Cosmos” at the behest of Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and co-creator of the original. He’d had multiple books and TV series prior to that (which is why Druyan approached him in the first place), and the new “Cosmos” was not in any way trying to be a replica of the original, but take the spirit of the original and do its own original show, with different episodes about different topics than were done in 1980.
Anyway, I don’t know whether you’ll love this or hate it; offering it for your consideration anyway…
@ 28. John Morales : Ah, thanks. I don’t remember reading that one
@36 Dennis K — I suspect that the sun becoming a white dwarf will still have a significant impact on Mars though. I’ve seen speculation of it getting to be too warm for life with the water (both potable and non-potable) evaporating off the planet and out of the atmosphere. There’s also the matter of the planet being dead and unable to retain any atmosphere, plus the toxicity of what is there, on top of all of the factors which would make getting 10,000 powerful Earth nukes up to Mars highly unlikely, and all of the reasons why the polar nuking of Mars won’t create a functioning atmosphere.
The point being that those who know astrophysics far better than I do, knew that Musk’s idea wouldn’t work before he suggested it, and multiple interviews with top astrophysicists since then have stated plainly why it wouldn’t work. And as Neil deGrasse Tyson has pointed out, it would be far easier to correct the conditions ruining Earth’s atmosphere than it would be to create a whole new one on a planet such as Mars. Nuking Mars is about as logically and scientifically sound as a flat Earth.
Seriously off-topic now so I’ll stop, but just for the benefit of StevoR:
@43, Silentbob : Thanks for that link too – will check it out later.
Maybe so but even still. I reckon she shoulda chosen Brian Cox instead. Sigh.
Tangential but thinking Musk’s Martian plans and FWIW Elon Musk’s Abandoned Plan To Grow Plants On Mars – Mars Oasis by Scott Manley, fifteen minutes in length.
@45. HidariMak : Umm, you mean after or before mars has been affected by our daytime stars evolutionintoa white dwarf stellar remnant?
evolution into a ^
When you watch Tyson’s videos, you may notice that he laughs and smiles a lot. Apparently he has a cheerful personality.
StevoR @33: I don’t care if you call Pluto a planet or not, but there’s nothing weird or unscientific about the models which calculate dynamical dominance. For example, Soter’s parameter μ = M/m. M is the candidate body’s mass, and m is the combined mass of all other bodies in its orbital zone.
The least dominant of the eight according to this scheme, is Mars (see the table below the linked section), which ‘only’ accounts for 99.98% of the total mass in its orbital zone. Pluto accounts for about 7% of the mass in its orbital zone. So, as with the other models, there is a clear, large gap between the eight and other bodies. How you respond to that gap is up to you, but it is there.
BTW, I don’t get your comment about exoplanets. Whether they would be classified as planets or dwarfs (by those who care) in their system would depend on the content and dynamics of that star system.
And yeah, an Earth-sized planet orbiting at a huge distance may not qualify. So what?
@45 HidariMak — Exactly. Between all the pot-smoking and the fluffing of Donald Trump’s comb-over, Musk is simply grifting even dumber investors of which there appears to be no shortage.
Marcus @24
<
blockquote>Yes, he doesn’t even know what consciousness is. (Neither do I!)
Nobody really does but one thing I’m confident in is that it is tied to our brains and not something that can be uploaded to a machine. At best maybe we can upload our memories to a computer and make it think it’s us, complete with subroutines that would emulate the various chemicals that affect our brains on a daily basis and have various effects on our thoughts and moods, but we’d still die.
@48 StevoR — I remember seeing a few discussions online (this was years ago) about Mars getting a lot more heat from the sun as a white dwarf, than Earth is getting now. This would be during the peak of the sun’s expansion, before settling down to temperatures just a bit warmer on Mars than it is now. But by then, any water anywhere on the surface or near the surface on the entire planet of Mars would be evaporated out to space.
The ongoing belief being promoted by Musk to nuke Mars shows that he not only doesn’t have the answer, he doesn’t even have anything near the right questions, relying on science that doesn’t exist to do what won’t work.
@51. Rob Grigjanis
The whole thing is a superfluous needless answer to a problem that shouldn’t be there. The orbital clearance issue is unscientific because the definition of planet shouldn’t depend on whether or not its orbit is clear or intersects another object or not. Soter’s parameter is analogous in my view to epicycles added to make strictly circular orbits work.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle)
If Earth and Mars are suddenly put on collision courses, then logically their orbits aren’t clear and thus they stop being planets. It sounds absurd because the implications of the orbital clearance criterion are absurd and thus it shouldn’t apply. Occam’s Razor and al avoiding needless complexities etc ..
The IAU definition fails because it excludes all other planets outside our solar system,
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet#Final_definition
Bolding added.
Defining our solar system as unique in being the only system to have IAU defined planets violates the Copernican principle / principle of mediocrity. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle )
The whole IAU definition also pretty explicitly came about to prevent the addition of a lot of ice dwarf planets from counting as planets in other words to define away themost numerous calss of planets rather than face their existence as a new class of planet alongside earth-like rocky / terrestrial planets, gas giants, ice giants etc .. so it was using motivated illogic and deliberately set up to reduce the number of them as if that makes them and their planetary nature go away. Apparently because schoolkids wouldn’t be able to cope with noting that our solar system contains many more worlds like and including Pluto rather than just 9 planets -an inherently unscientific idea that NdG Tyson should have opposed NOT supported.
The orbital clearance thing raises otherwise avoidable questions of how clear an orbit needs to be considered clear, what that means and how they should be defined rather than more simply and clearly (pun unintentional) saying that a planet is an astronomical body that is gravitationally self-rounded, never self-luminous from core nuclear fusion and not directly orbiting another body and thus not a comet or asteroid, star or brown dwarf and not a moon of another planet respectively as my preferred definition would be.
Note that my definition ^ also avoids the issues of whether the planet is orbiting our Sun, another star or, indeed, nothing at all. So planets inour solar system, exoplanets and rogue planets are all included. A broader, more inclusive and simple defintion that is vastly better than the IAU one avoiding its flaws and absurdities as noted in #55 isn’t it?
StevoR @55:
Bloody hell, mate, read the definition you linked to. It is explicitly talking about bodies in the Solar system. We don’t know enough about other stars’ systems to begin to classify their bodies.
You’re just stating a personal preference. There is nothing ‘unscientific’ about noting that there are eight bodies in the Solar system which have indeed largely cleared their orbits. And it’s not as though there is some continuum with an arbitrary dividing line. The eight bodies each constitute at least 99.98% (in the case of Mars) of the mass in their respective orbital zones. The next highest (in Soter’s scheme), after the eight, is Ceres, at about 25%, then Pluto at about 7%.
As I said earlier, I don’t care if people call Pluto a planet or a dwarf planet (many scientists still use ‘planet’). But stop pretending that there is no well-defined dynamical difference between the eight and the rest. Comparing a real dynamical parameter to an epicycle is just absurdly dishonest.
Minor correction to #57: “…Ceres, at about 25%, then Eris at about 9%, then Pluto at about 7%”.
Me @57:
Not quite true, as it turns out. There are theoretical models (unlike Soter’s scheme, which is based solely on empirical Solar system data) which can classify Solar system bodies and exoplanets based on their mass, orbit, and their host star’s mass. Most (if not all) known exoplanets would qualify as ‘neighbourhood clearers’ according to Margot’s model. See the last paragraph in the linked section of;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet#Criticisms_and_alternatives_to_IAU_definition
@ Rob Grigjanis #57 -59.
Um, that was exactly my point! That a planet should have a definition that applies outside just one planetary system and exoplanets are also planets. That we need a broad and inclusive definition that works for a wholeraneg of objects ina whole raneg of orbits.
Like the Plutoi-Neptune analogue #45364 noted by Ken Croswell here :
Source : http://kencroswell.com/HD45364.html
So (probly) Gas Giants but orbits, not exactly clear. Of entire other planets not just comets or asteroids
There is nothing ‘unscientific’ about noting that there are eight bodies in the Solar system which have indeed largely cleared their orbits. And it’s not as though there is some continuum with an arbitrary dividing line.
Except it is rather arbnitrary as wellas superfluous. The whole point of my point is that orbital celarance shouldn’t be adertterminative factor in whether or not something is a planet or not. Becasue for reasons outlined earlier in # 55 &56 it leads toabsurdities where if two planets are on a collision courese or end up sharing an orbit or whatever, they both stop being planets which makes nosense and that if you have an obit like Pluto at one distanc eand with no other objects its a planet but if you move it into another orbit it isn’t a planet. Its a bit like saying a dog stops being a dog if its found in a desert rather than an urban home. Its an extrinsic factor that is very separate from planet-ness.
It is neither needed nor wanted nor helpful and it is much simpler and more elegant and more reasonable if that wholeorbital clearance criterion is remioved
PS. The arbitrary nature of the orbital clearance is shown by the fact that it works only now. At one timepoint in an evolving system – or at least one that has evolved and will evolve and change in the future too. I guess at one point a planet had an orbit that was just not quiiiite clear enough and then a particular asteroid or other planet got just far enough away and suddenly became a planet even though nothing about the planet itself had changed.
Note that in the early system there were multiple colliding planets. Earth’s Moon-forming Big Splash aside, it is thought we may have had an earlier generation of Super-Earths that smashed together and then ended up falling into our sun. See :
https://www.science.org/content/article/jupiter-destroyed-super-earths-our-early-solar-system
In the later stages of our solar system’s evolution there’s a chance that Mercury will shift its orbit into one that collides with Venus or Earth and causes chaos in the inner solar system. See :
https://www.space.com/6824-long-shot-planet-hit-earth-distant-future.html
Would that stop Earth, Mercury, Venus from being planets because their orbits stop being “clear?” Again, exactly how “clear” is clear anyhow again – a question that ONLY and unnecessarily arises if you adopt orbital clearance as something determinative for planets which is, again, why we shouldn’t do so.
So when you say :
That applies only for these current era and configuration of our solar system and why should that be special and set the rules? (Again, note the Copernican principle linked in # 55.) Why not note that planets also existed in past and future aeons in different situations including ones where orbits were NOT clear – and, yet, despite orbits not being clear planets were still planets?
If Earth was suddenly on a collision course with, say, Mercury would it stop being a planet? Would Mercury then stop being a planet? Would both stop being planets?
If we put Earth out in a more cluttered and distant area of our solar system with more similar objects and more space to clear would that stop it being a planet?
The IAU definition says the answer to those questions is “Yes!” and I think that shows how absurd and illogical it is.
Most NOT all. Of the ones we’ve discovered so far which raises the question of sample bias especially given most planets could well in fact be ice dwarfs and rogue planets which are a lot harder to discover but quite possibly much more common. In our own solar system we have planets that can roughly be divided into the large and gassy (X4), the small and rocky (x4) and the small & icy (x 10 plus more to be found – exact number like exact number of exoplanets rising with new discoveries.) Why should we rule planets out of being planets just because they are small and numerous? Is that really scientific or reasonable? Stars are mostly small red dwarf stars – we observe that they are small and numerous but we don’t thereby say they aren’t stars. Nor do we say a star with an unclear orbit stops being a star or a comet with an unclear orbit stops being a comet – until it impacts a planet and wipes out dinos or whatever anyhow!
If dwarf stars are still stars why should dwarf planets not still be planets?
Yes because quite a few scientists disagree with the IAU definition including Alan Stern, Ken Croswell, Dr. Mark Sykes* and hundreds more. Because the IAU got things badly wrong on this.
I disagree and think those are definitely analogous. Epicycles were used to pretend there was something special and necessary about planets needing strictly circular orbits and by, I’d say pretty close comparison, Soter’s parameters, Margot’s model, are devised to try and show there’s something special and necessary about planets needing clear orbits. Seems reasonable to me and dunno why you don’t see that.
Clarity fix for #60.
So (probly) Gas Giants but orbits, not exactly clear. Of entire other planets not just comets or asteroids
Except it is rather arbitrary as well as superfluous. The whole point of my point is that orbital clearance shouldn’t be a determinative factor in whether or not something is a planet or not. Because for reasons outlined earlier in # 55 &56 it leads to absurdities where if two planets are on a collision courses or end up sharing an orbit or whatever, they both stop being planets which makes no sense and that if you have an obit like Pluto at one distance and with no other objects it’s a planet but if you move it into another orbit it isn’t a planet! It’s a bit like saying a dog stops being a dog if it’s found in a desert rather than an urban home. It’s an extrinsic factor that is very separate from planet-ness. Just as where a dog is heading and whether its path has stuff in front of it has nothing to do with it being a dog or not.
The absurd orbital clearance criterion is neither needed nor wanted nor helpful and it is much simpler, more elegant and more reasonable if that whole orbital clearance part of the IAU definition is removed.
. * Dr. Mark Sykes, Director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona who organised a petition against the IAU definition which was signed by more than 300 professional planetary scientists and astronomers in less than 5 days. See :
https://spacenews.com/planetary-scientists-and-astronomers-oppose-new-planet-definition/
StevoR: You’re obviously emotionally invested in this, so I’ll just wish you luck.
BTW, I did you a solid and signed the protest petition myself. It says there are 413 signatories, but it doesn’t seem to require any qualifications to sign. I’m certainly not a member of the IAU.