It's a planet somewhere else in the galaxy. There are still people alive today who were born into a world where we thought there was just one galaxy, and only nine planets anywhere.

We are like ants floating on a stick in the pacific, inferring New York's street plan from air currents.

This shit is awesome.

I don't believe you really are bored by this. Try affecting interest and enthusiasm - it generally works a lot better in life.

>There are still people alive today who were born into a world where we thought there was just one galaxy, and only nine planets anywhere.

It might be a pedantic quibble, but you have the timeline of these discoveries a little messed up. There are people alive today who were born in a world in which we thought there was only one galaxy, but they also thought there were only 8 planets at the time. Hubble proved there were other galaxies a few years before Pluto was discovered. You would have to go back to the 1850s to find anyone who thought there were more than 8 planets and only one galaxy. Back then dwarf planets and large asteroids were all categorized as planets which put us at over 20 planets before there was a reclassification.

Fantastic quibble - I stand corrected (I had Hubble in mind but did not know the 20+ planets part.)

Perfect pedantry :-)

It is always fun to bring up the 20 planets thing when people complain about Pluto not being a planet anymore. Lots of people have never even heard of fellow dwarf planet Ceres, but it spent almost as long as a full fledged planet as Pluto. The only reason most people defend Pluto's inclusion among planets and not Ceres is because Ceres was recategorized a century before most of us were born. It shows that the primary objection from laypeople is that we don't like when something we were taught as children changes.

>>> we don't like when something we were taught as children changes.

The first rule of politics is don't take on any workers that appear in children's books (nurses, farmers, pigs that build straw houses etc). But it does remind me also of Hans Rosling explaining that the facts we learnt as kids (which countries were poor and starving) are today out dated.

I guess if we can learn to let go of Pluto we can learn to accept the world as it really is.

> Lots of people have never even heard of fellow dwarf planet Ceres, but it spent almost as long as a full fledged planet as Pluto.

Well, if the original IAU proposal for the definition of planet had gone through in 2006, not only would Pluto still be a planet but people would be made aware of new planets Ceres, Eris, and others. It also would have highlighted how there's still much to discover in our solar system, since we wouldn't be able to firmly say how many planets there were. The IAU ended up taking the conservative approach in choosing a definition, one that preserved an overly simplistic view of our solar system in people's minds.

The value of the word "planet" is in signaling the importance of an object (IE, no one would care if these were called "Celestial body class A"/"Celestial body class B"/etc.). Saying "rogue planets are not planets" was a way of saying "these things aren't that important, you don't have to worry about remembering them." The ignorance most people have about celestial bodies like Ceres suggests that it was effective.

Worth noting that a "rogue planet" isn't defined in the adopted 2006 IAU definition of planet (which only deals with planets in our solar system, and relies on an orbit for its criteria).

I don't understand what the concept of a "rogue planet" is supposed to be. How do they differ from asteroids?

The difference between asteroid and planets is just mass. There are some specific rules that dictate the classifications, but the simplest explanation is just that asteroids are hunks of space rock and planets are bigger hunks of space rock.

The "rogue" in rogue planet means isolated similar to how a "rogue wave" doesn't belong to a pattern of other large waves. A rogue planet is a planet that isn't orbiting a star.

There are theoretically also rogue asteroids, but I have never seen that phrased used in that context. That might be because "rogue asteroid" is often used colloquially to describe an difficult to predict asteroid that might hit Earth. Another reason might be is that only asteroids we have ever officially observed are orbiting our sun. Asteroids are so relatively small that it is almost impossible to find one outside our solar system with our current tech. We would basically have to hope that a rogue asteroid just happens to fly through our solar system.

ʻOumuamua[1], which was discovered a few years ago was an interstellar object that might fight the definition of rogue asteroid. However there is still a lot of debate whether it was an asteroid, a comet, some other natural space object, or even potentially some artificial object made by intelligent life. That last theory isn't particularly well supported but it is fun to think about.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua

Asteroids orbit the Sun (or presumably other stars), but don't clear their orbital path, generally within the inner Solar system (within Jupiter's orbit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid

Rogue planets orbit no star. They are interstellar objects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet

Dwarf planets are another classification, and can include asteroids, but also other types of bodies (Pluto is often classified as an Kuiper belt object). "A dwarf planet is a planetary-mass object that does not dominate its region of space and is not a satellite."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet

I would call it planetaroid

Asteroids can already be round.

Are you sure about this? A google search indicates Pluto was discovered in 1930 and Hubble was launched in 1990.

Sorry, I could have phrased that better to avoid the confusion. I was talking about Edwin Hubble the person who the telescope is named after. He showed that other galaxies existed in 1925. [1]

[1] - https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/january-1-1925...

In the sense that it's detection of an object that's hard to detect, of which few are known, and that exists under unusual conditions, it's cool indeed.

But from the point of view of people who find planets interesting primarily for their potential to harbor life, I would suspect that rogue planets are particularly inhospitable and thus not all that interesting.

But ... Space 1999!!! :-)

I went to Joderell bank (before covid) with my kids, Id been there myself as a kid a few times in the early 90s.

We saw the display on exoplanets - it has a counter of the thousands that had been discovered. When I was my kids age that counter was on zero, it’s amazing how much has been done in 30 years.

More like ants in the pacific realizing there’s another giant rock in the horizon they’ll probably never reach, and likely has nothing worth looking at even if they do reach

I don't understand that attitude - truly. Yes humanity might never get to another solar system, but then I am never going to walk on the Moon - it still looks beautiful in the night sky and the dream of getting there drove half of all science for centuries.

We can make this ant colony better today.

How does investing tons of valuable money and man hours into investigating said probably pointless rock make our any colony better today?

>>> A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey's on the moon)

Gil Scott-Heron is right - but also not. I was reminded of this watching First Man - and I realised that if 1960s USA had not funded a Moonshot, then would it have looked at itself and said "Hey our police force is used to keep 1/5th of our population in poverty through violence and our financial policies do the same. Let's fix that"?

The thing about the space race was not how much money it got but how it was allowed to define problems using measurements to the millimetre and then solve them at the edge of what was technically possible.

They were free of politics because no one had ever done it before.

But politics is itself how we decide what the problem is.

The concept that the US could have spent the moon money on fixing its self is ... a stretch.

But to give in to that line of thinking is to abandon all hope.

Not spending money on space is not the same as spending it on fixing our deepest problems.

Until we can convincingly show we agree on what our problems actually are, I am reluctant to think we can spend billions fixing them.

Instead let's fire spaghetti at the walls on local levels - maybe we can find solutions local interventions first.

> Gil Scott-Heron is right - but also not. I was reminded of this watching First Man - and I realised that if 1960s USA had not funded a Moonshot, then would it have looked at itself and said "Hey our police force is used to keep 1/5th of our population in poverty through violence and our financial policies do the same. Let's fix that"?

Well, we have 2020s America as a comparison. Whether or not you think we’ve recognized the problem, it certainly hasn’t been solved to the extent that e.g. we actually flew people to the moon and back.

> Until we can convincingly show we agree on what our problems actually are, I am reluctant to think we can spend billions fixing them.

So instead spend billions staring at dead rocks? Going to the moon had tremendous political and strategic value during wartime - the same conditions don’t exist in the world today.

All of science is worth pursuing because we never know what we will discover and how it will turn out to be useful. Vast arrays of our current advanced technology and industry depend on discoveries at first thought to be completely useless or mere curiosities. There is of course a reasonable debate to be had about the extent to which various endeavours should be funded, but history has shown time and again you can’t pick and choose up front which avenues of investigation will eventually turn out to be important.

For example wandering interstellar objects might seem irrelevant to human life, but we literally discovered one flying through our solar system just a few years ago. It now seems this is a very regular occurrence. These things are shooting past our planet all the time. Maybe not so irrelevant after all. Maybe it would be nice to know more about them, their relative abundance, properties and behaviour, since we live down range in their shooting gallery.

Yep so let’s keep throwing many multiples of billions at pointless crapshoots like CERN hoping the cure to some debilitating cancer magically pops out as a byproduct

If it's so uninteresting to you, why participate in the discussion?

To comment on how uninteresting it is, obviously?

We used to think the composition of the Sun would never be known because there was no way to take a sample. Now, because of spectroscopy, we know the composition of the Sun and all the planets. We’re pretty clever when we put our minds to something.

Smallest one ever found.