451
Real (mander.xyz)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz 2 points 9 hours ago

Every other planetary surface you’ve seen is rocky dirt, icy dirt, straight-up ice, cratery dirt, or opaque gas clouds

Wait this is so true, and I've never even thought about it. Space photography has a lot of pictures from the Moon, Mars, and Venus (I've never seen those Titan photos, so thank you for the link), but there are no "real" photos of a planet with oceans. That might be where the "uncanny valley" kicks in, with my brain going "this doesn't look quite right". I do get a similar feeling when I see AIgen videos, so you might be onto something!

Venus is difficult to photograph for the same reason as Titan, thick opaque atmosphere. We've got radar imagery of Venus, plus the Soviets landed some probes and took a few pictures of the actual hell that surface level Venus is.

We can actually get a pretty good look at Mars from here; This is a picture of Mars taken with Hubble. We have active missions in orbit and on the surface of Mars as well so we can look at it as close as we want.

Meanwhile, this is the best Hubble could do with Pluto. And that's still inside our own solar system, we're not getting any photos of the surface of Earth mass planets around other stars.

this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
451 points (98.9% liked)

Science Memes

19816 readers
2900 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS