<cola> my very educated mother just served us eight

[garran]

Last night on IRC we were talking about planetary mnemonics, and how because none of us actually uses them we don't need to worry about revising them. In my own case, I realized that instead of ever having actually rigorously learned the order, I just have among my accumulated knowledge of each individual planet some idea of its relative position, so that if I need the order I just reverse-engineer it from that.

This goes something like,

• Mercury: Between Venus and the sun
  
• Venus: Next to Earth in one direction
  
• Earth: Earth!
  
• Mars: Next to Earth in the other direction
  (Asteroids: Between Mars and Jupiter, separating the little planets from the gas giants.)
  
• Jupiter: Huge! Next to the asteroid belt
  
• Saturn: Next after Jupiter
  
• Uranus and Neptune: True love forever!
  
• Pluto: Icy sentry, far frontier
  

I do have the bad habit of picturing the planets all in a nice, orderly line, when in fact of course they're scattered erratically about their various orbits and sometimes Pluto's is actually inside of Neptune's (though that's not a problem anymore), and who knows exactly where they are relative to one another at any given moment? Possibly Rachel's dad.

So, anyway:

• Pluto: Icy sentry, far frontier

I always expected that, while I might one day need to give up thinking, "there are nine [local] planets", if I did it would be because I was revising it upward. Going back to eight is a little disorienting; like I was living not in my own future, but in the future as imagined by some early science fiction author whose then-plausible suppositions were made a little silly by later discoveries.

Comments

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Watson scolding Holmes for not knowing there are eight planets is suddenly nonanachronistic!

[masamage.livejournal.com]

Hee hee. http://astro.brewsters.net works, too.

[garran.livejournal.com]

That was actually where I went, but then when I copied from the address bar, I didn't notice that it had changed.


-Andy H.

[masamage.livejournal.com]

He blew his mind out in a star...

[garran.livejournal.com]

Seventeen points!


-Andy

[beccadesse.livejournal.com]

Oh, Rachel's dad. How do he be so smart?

PS Why do I miss the ninth planet so bad? My very excellent mother will always have just sent us nine pizzas!

[garran.livejournal.com]

Genetics, probably.

My very excellent mother will always have just sent us nine pizzas!

I see that you've discovered three new planets in the asteroid belt! After a long struggle I'm going to give up on thematic unity and vote to name them from three totally different mythologies:

• Wotan
  
• Arthur
  
• Hendrix

-Andy H.

[haibane-rachan.livejournal.com]

What's bothered me the most about this is that Pluto IS STILL A PLANET. It's been "demoted" to "dwarf planet". Read that and tell me how the hell everyone's getting "NO LONGER A PLANET OMFGFGFOMFOGMFMFFOFMG!!!!" from that, please.

"Dwarf planet" = PLANET by definition.

[garran.livejournal.com]

It's no longer officially one of the planets, those things we say are like the thing we live on, and that are generally considered to be 'the important things' in the solar system. (Never mind the enormous difference between Earth and a gas giant.) It is now instead an exemplar of some smaller and more numerous cousin category, which is kind of like having nine guys in a room for a while and then announcing that scientifically speaking we've decided that one of them is actually a chimpanzee.

Of course, it's just inexpert human taxonomy, and planets are a social construct, nothing about the actual Pluto has changed, etc. We can still land there and colonize all we want. (In fact, maybe this 'dwarf planet' business gives science fiction a whole new type of colony to write about!) But the change in its social standing and the way that it's regarded is real, and strange, and it probably reflects reality at least slightly better than the way we used to think, which is going to take me some getting used to.


-Garran