This is no new argument and we talk to a guy who has been defending evolution and explaining the facts about the evidence for plesiosaurs and how even finding a live one wouldn’t falisify evolution – for more than twenty years.

Brown’s claim that the whole thing is over and that there are only a few holdouts in the scientific community and the general public who do not accept the IAU’s planet definition is just plain wrong and smacks of denial.

Um? Plural of anecdote isn’t data.

And anyway, science isn’t decided by vote.

The”plutokiller” thing, along with Brown’s obsessive talk about nails and coffins regarding Pluto and how he singlehandedly “reshaped the solar system” is just plain over the top. Why doesn’t he use the name “3planetdiscoverer” instead?

Infra-red light photo looking like the glow you see from ultra-Violet lights. Trippy.

No clouds on Titan for ages? I read that thinking – what do you call that orange stuff that hides the surface? Then – Oh yeah, haze!

Will it rain on Titan soon?

I picture oily blobs of methane rain drifting slowly from the sky,
trickling over slush-ice pebbles, creeks flow soft and with sound carried in the Titan’s zephyrs.

I see a landscape of Titan “drought”* changed with the fifteen year long seasons to a landscape of Titan’s “flooding rains”* with black filling lakes so chill that water is like granite and liquid methane bubbles slowly to the flat slick surface where long, languid waves with no whitecaps cross the pitch-black surface of these darkest, most distant lakes of all. **

And I am awed.

Thankyou Mike Brown & the BA for posting this.

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* Allusion to the Australia national poem “I love a Sunburnt country” by Dorothea Mackellar. If you’re curious, see :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Country

** There’s an idea for a painting for those Experience the Planets artists.

PS. I also think again of reading Stephen Baxter’s ‘Titan’ an excellent, evocative and scientifically plausible if rather gloomy and pessimistic novel. Worth a read if you haven’t already – I’m trying now to recall how accurate it is -but it does seem close. Baxter had tholin “gumbo” slush and ethane lakes on Titan which were stunning in abittersweet way although he took too long to get there IMHO.

I think – & I certainly hope – that Pluto’s “death” will not be permanent – that Pluto & Ceres will regain their planetary status and be joined in planetary ranks by Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Sedna & maybe a few others.

I think of Mike Brown not as Pluto-killer but Eris-finder.

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Planets : the more, the merrier!

Basically, it was one of those automated replies that say “I’m out of the country and will respond when I get back”, except that the email it was a response to was from years and years ago (when the Pluto thing had only just happened).

I’m just curious about how big of a hiccup it was.

Still, I can emphathize with Titan, and imagine I myself would be mortified if visible clouds and precipitation resulted. No wonder Titan withheld its outburst all of these years while it was being closely watched. As Titan was eventually overcome by the inevitable, it learned the lesson that holding back pressure can often make things worse.

Titan, it’s okay — we understand.