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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

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.

nxmnxm99 6y ago
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
- fuhrysteve 6y ago
  If it's so uninteresting to you, why participate in the discussion?
  - nxmnxm99 6y ago
    To comment on how uninteresting it is, obviously?
- mturmon 6y ago
  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.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  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.
  - nxmnxm99 6y ago
    How does investing tons of valuable money and man hours into investigating said probably pointless rock make our any colony better today?
    - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
      >>> 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.
      - nxmnxm99 6y ago
        > 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.
      - rlanday 6y ago
        > 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.
microtherion 6y ago
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.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  But ... Space 1999!!! :-)
slg 6y ago
>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.
- markkanof 6y ago
  Are you sure about this? A google search indicates Pluto was discovered in 1930 and Hubble was launched in 1990.
  - slg 6y ago
    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-the-day-we-discovered-the-universe https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/january-1-1925...
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Fantastic quibble - I stand corrected (I had Hubble in mind but did not know the 20+ planets part.) Perfect pedantry :-)
  - slg 6y ago
    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.
iso947 6y ago
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.

nxmnxm99 6y ago

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

fuhrysteve 6y ago
If it's so uninteresting to you, why participate in the discussion?
- nxmnxm99 6y ago
  To comment on how uninteresting it is, obviously?
mturmon 6y ago
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.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
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.
- nxmnxm99 6y ago
  How does investing tons of valuable money and man hours into investigating said probably pointless rock make our any colony better today?
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    >>> 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.
    - nxmnxm99 6y ago
      > 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.
    - rlanday 6y ago
      > 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.

microtherion 6y ago

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.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago
But ... Space 1999!!! :-)

slg 6y ago

>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.

markkanof 6y ago
Are you sure about this? A google search indicates Pluto was discovered in 1930 and Hubble was launched in 1990.
- slg 6y ago
  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-the-day-we-discovered-the-universe https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/january-1-1925...
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Fantastic quibble - I stand corrected (I had Hubble in mind but did not know the 20+ planets part.) Perfect pedantry :-)
- slg 6y ago
  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.

iso947 6y ago

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.