> There is nothing that screamed “not planet” about Pluto until some scientists preconceptions and emotional investment about the numbers of planets got challenged.
> People now have to learn by rote that Pluto is not a planet. Because “scientists say so”, not because they are actually becoming sensitive to debris fields.
Even the other dwarfs we know of so far seem to make it a different category to me. Pluto is a lot more like them than it's like even Mercury.
> The link between orbital debris and planetary size isn’t even going to hold with future discoveries. So the new restrictive regular language-unfriendly definition isn’t even going to be stable.
Are you saying that we're going to find huge planets that haven't cleared their neighborhoods? That sounds unlikely.
> People now have to learn by rote that Pluto is not a planet. Because “scientists say so”, not because they are actually becoming sensitive to debris fields.
Even the other dwarfs we know of so far seem to make it a different category to me. Pluto is a lot more like them than it's like even Mercury.
https://planetseducation.com/dwarf-planets/
> The link between orbital debris and planetary size isn’t even going to hold with future discoveries. So the new restrictive regular language-unfriendly definition isn’t even going to be stable.
Are you saying that we're going to find huge planets that haven't cleared their neighborhoods? That sounds unlikely.