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I dunno, still might be aliens with this one.
(mander.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Science Memes
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Actually this is how we've been reconstructing dinosaurs. They're probably all very wrong.
I want to believe…
Then you have physcs and how much weight the bones can lift before breaking.
We need to bring back the chonkosaurs
T. rex may have had lips, for example
Luscious kissable lips?
Lusty Cretaceous Maid
😗
I dont care how scientifically accurate Dino's with bird feathers are, they will never be as cool as the Jurassic park dino of my childhood
IIRC the current theory is that many (likely most) had feathers but few of the large ones had actual wings beyond just a row of longer feathers on the forearms. The bodily structures that allow flight are absent on the vast majority of dinosaurs so it's thought they mostly used their arm feathers as rudders for better control when running (which the ostrich and other large flightless birds still use). However, it is thought that some smaller species likely did have wings which they used to glide much like a flying squirrel. Eventually they evolved larger chest muscles and a keel for attaching said large muscles, and at that point you could reasonably just call them birds, which are to this day a subset of dinosaurs.
Birds are dinosaurs because taxonomy as a field is fundamentally based on garbage pseudoscience
But even with more modern methods like cladistics and genetic analysis, birds are still found to be directly descended from contemporary dinosaurs.
And the taxonomic rule that any animal is also all of its ancestors is garbage science.
That's not "science," that's just an arbitrary convention that can help simplify communication of complex toppics. The genetic data that the convention is derived from is the science, in the form of a lineage of genetic relations between organisms and nothing else, because biology has exactly zero built-in categories or labels, and those are all human-made.
Exactly, it's not science. And it's not helpful either. It doesn't simplify communication. The representative conventions of taxonomy are not derived from evidence, they're derived from the irrelevant feelings of taxonomists hundreds of years ago who didn't understand how the world works. It's pseudoscience. Pointless tradition masquerading as a legitimate exploratory endeavour.
Spoken like someone who thinks Pluto should still be considered a Planet.
But you are right, Jurassic Park would be a completely different movie if Genaro was eaten my something that looked like an oversized quail.
Pluto will forever be a planet in our hearts...
Pluto is a planet
It'll always be a planet in our hearts.
And what about Ceres and Eris then? Planets too?
Yup!
Now, whether or not they meet a specific criteria for a specific standard used in a scientific field is not in debate. Obviously, the standard for what defines a planet in a given field of study is applicable in that field.
However, for the rest of us, we don't have to use that standard. See, using a language for something lile science is filled with this kind of thing when you use a living language that's why Latin is so often the default for situations where you need fixed definitions. Otherwise, you deal with this issue constantly.
Though, tbh, even that's no certain protection because people will borrow words, or misuse them just because we're essentially a bunch of parrots playing with sounds sometimes. Lol at what happened with words like idiot or moron. They used to have a fixed, certain meaning with a standard used to apply them. Now they're just insults.
The "planets" have existed in the public awareness with a much looser definition than what is used in scientific fields. Pretty much anything can be a planet in colloquial usage, so long as it orbits the sun. Now, I believe most people would insist on a lower size threshold where something is no longer a planet, but some other term. The problem is that there's not a consensus on that lower limit.
With ceres and eris in specific, most people that are aware they exist are gong to be into "space" in some way, maybe even professionally. That makes the usage of planet for them less common than for Pluto, but the more casual the interest in such things, the more likely they are to get lumped in as "the 10th planet" or 10th and 11th, depending on who is saying things.
But, for casual conversation, I'd say that all three are planets. I'd have to look up the standards again because I'm fucking old, but I would also be just fine with someone calling them dwarf planets, or planetoids, or whatever.
Seriously. Until someone is just outright ignoring common usage and making up definitions nobody else uses, this kind of thing is just part of the fun of being monkeys that make complex sounds. None of us are obligated to use jargon definitions in casual settings, and trying to force that is not only pointless, it's sometimes rude.
Everything's a planet!
I'm all for it, let's get more planets!
"Planet" in my book is anything that's too big to just be a large lumpy rock. Something with sufficient gravity to pull itself into the shape of a sphere.
The idea of planets needing to orbit in eliptical orbits on a plane, or clear their own paths is a bias from living in a stable planetary system, but much of the planetary systems and indeed much of the universe doesn't have the stability that exists in this local area, it's especially the case in younger planetary systems as well as much older ones.
Also many planets in the universe don't even have stars, they are rogue, scattered throughout the darkness between the stars.
It's starting to look like rogue planets are the more common ones and us stellar orbiters are the weirdos
Just goes to show how much the universe is a chaotic and cruel place, hopefully we won't end up joining them in the cold dark void in our future.
The book All Yesterdays explores this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Yesterdays
Just purchased. Now it will languish in my iBooks library with other illustrated books until some time in the distant future…
It's a while ago. Now they're probably pretty accurate.