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'Pluto Truthers' Are Pretty Sure That the NASA New Horizons Mission Was Faked
MarkWhittington writes: Forget about Apollo moon landing hoax theories. That is so 20th Century. Gizmodo reported that the "Pluto Truthers" have followed the astonishing images being sent back by NASA's New Horizons probe and have come to the conclusion that they are faked. After all, if the space agency could fake the entire moon landing, it would be child's play to fake a robotic probe to the edge of the Solar System.
Why - From memory, the 1970's movie "Capricorn One" was the first time I heard the meme, now get off my fake alien lawn..
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If you look around you'll find wackos of every kind.
Some of them are trolls, I'll bet, just out to make mischief. But I personally know three people who are officially diagnosed with schizophrenia, and talking to them is sometimes illuminating, albeit extremely frustrating. Their world view is just too different to relate to.
Delusional thinking isn't just for full blown schizophrenics, either. One woman I used to work with (and I thought was normal) told me one day about her encounter with a UFO and it's alien occupants. Wow, I did not expect that from her.
When I was a very young kid, I either had visual hallucinations or maybe I was dreaming and only thought I was awake, but my experience was that I saw some really weird stuff. Stuff that can't possibly be true, so I can't exclude myself from the delusional category, either. Thankfully nothing like that has happened since.
Of course it's arbitrary, it's a definition, all definitions are arbitrary. No one really wants to memorize dozens of names of mostly tiny objects when they're in science class learning about the solar system, especially when a bunch of them don't even have decent names, but some alphanumeric designation. So we limit the list to the ones that are large enough to be of real interest. Before, we thought it was sufficient to make the cutoff line be whether they had enough gravity to become mostly spherical. Now we find out that there's a bunch of bodies that meet that definition. So we change the definition to exclude those, and call those merely "dwarf planets". But Pluto isn't big enough to make the cut, so it gets grouped in with the other dwarfs.
So take your pick, do you want 8 "planets" and a bunch of "dwarf planets", or do you want dozens of "planets" to memorize the names of, most of them being little more than big asteroids?
And stop complaining about it being arbitrary. If you defined "planet" to be anything that orbits the Sun, there's countless objects that do that, including who knows how many in the asteroid belt, plus far more in the Kuiper Belt. So the previous definition was arbitrary too, because no one wanted to group Saturn, Jupiter, or even Earth in with a bunch of asteroids just because of their orbits.
There are, and always have been, only seven planets: Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. These are the Wanderers, known from the times before astronomy, before science, before even written history. Redefining "planet" in any other way is a corruption of the original concept: that some visible celestial bodies wander through the sky in predictable ways.
Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus did not make the cut: they are invisible without telescopes. Earth didn't make the cut either, since this one is unique for other reasons. Moon comes before Sun since its effects are much greater: look at the tides.
And that's the truth. Blpphlt.
Will