What is your favorite planet?
And why?
I'll tell mine after some others tell theirs. :) Have fun.
I like Pluto. Lots of reasons why. But it is and always will be a planet in my book. ๐
Earth. Reasonable temps plus a nice mix of water and land.
Kerbin!
It is the only one I can fly rockets from ;)
Canโt remember having been to any other, so difficult to pick a favorite without more information.
I do like this one we are on, but I donโt like what we are doing on it. That makes no sense to me and it feels like I should be off to my home world.
Neptune.
It's fierce and extreme
Nix wrote:
BuckingFastard(JN) wrote:
Neptune.It's fierce and extreme
Lol I was going to say Neptune too. Its so underrated. But I love Earth. I want everyone to move to Mars so I can have Earth to my self.
Everyone wouldn't fit on mars, it's a fair bit smaller than earth.
I was tied between Saturn and Neptune, the rings on Saturn are cool, but Neptune has more moons so that swayed it.
BuckingFastard(JN) wrote:
Nix wrote:
BuckingFastard(JN) wrote:
Neptune.It's fierce and extreme
Lol I was going to say Neptune too. Its so underrated. But I love Earth. I want everyone to move to Mars so I can have Earth to my self.
Everyone wouldn't fit on mars, it's a fair bit smaller than earth.
I was tied between Saturn and Neptune, the rings on Saturn are cool, but Neptune has more moons so that swayed it.
In that case I will select people who may stay.
Venus is my fourth favorite. It's mysterious and I think we could live in balloons in its atmosphere.
Mars is my third favorite. What's not to like about a planet solely inhabited by robots as far as we know?
Jupiter is my second favorite. I like to watch it with its four large moons in my telescope.
Earth is my favorite. I want to vacation on the Earth's moon so I can see earthrise.
Arda.
55 cancri e, aka "diamond planet". Though it's likely to be more of a letdown up close, the concept of touring planets with peculiar composition (albeit not necessarily complex) is fascinating.
Help me with: [quote]Test.
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I reserve my right to judge until I return from visiting all of them.
The journey continues...
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Wu-Tang Clan rapper Method Man once said the following about fellow member Inspectah Deck: โHeโs like that dude thatta sit back and watch you play yourself โฆ and see you sit and know you lyinโ, and heโll take you to court after that.โ
The same can probably be said of Mercury, the best planet in the solar system .
Mercury puts up with more crap than anyone else, so I stayed quiet while others incorrectly suggested that Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus were any better. Few pay any attention to it: Astronomers researching the tiny rock often see their results smothered by the hype surrounding far lamer bodies like Pluto and Europa. And Mercury fans have to put up with shade like this quote from Ross Andersen: โTiny thing, Sun-blasted and crater-pocked, more moon than planet.โ But Mercuryโs been the best planet all along. You just havenโt been paying any attention.
What's the Best Planet?
I get it. Mercury looks straight-up ragged. It lacks a real atmosphere, so thereโs nothing preventing asteroids from hitting the surface, and the planet has billions of years worth of craters to show for it. Its only shield is a so-called exosphere, a thin layer of atoms kicked up by the constant onslaught of radiation from the nearby Sun. Mercury was raised in the solar systemโs toughest neighborhood. Its temperature swings 600 degrees Celsius from day to night, negative-170 to positive-430 degrees.
Mercury once received the respect it deserved. The ancient Babylonians called it Nabou, ruler of the universe who woke the Sun up each morning, according to Robert G. Stromโs Mercury, The Elusive Planet. The Scandinavians and Teutonic people called it Odin and Wodenโgod of war, father of Thor. To them, it looked like a bright star that appeared sometimes just before dawn, sometimes just after sunset, heralding or retiring the Sun. Thatโs right, they named the planet after their best gods. The Greeks originally thought the planet was two stars and gave it two names, musical god Apollo for the morning appearance and his brother, messenger god Hermes in the evening. They eventually figured out the two stars were one, and stuck with Hermes. โMercuryโ is the Roman version of Hermes.
The planet took the messenger godโs name likely for the way it heralded the Sun. But Hermes was also a mischief maker, a trickster, and kind of a badass (he killed the hundred-eyed monster, Argos). As it turns out, the name is way more appropriate than the Greeks and Romans probably thought. If you look at Mercury the wrong way, it could tear apart the solar system.
Konstantin Batygin, the Caltech professor of Planet Nine fame and fellow Mercury fan, explains that as far back as the 1600s, Isaac Newton pondered a question that astrophysicists still wonder aboutโwhether our solar system is immutable, whether the planets will orbit the Sun forever or fly away eventually. โIf the solar system really interacts with the universal law of gravitation where planets pull on each other, intuitively such a system canโt be indefinitely stable. It must fall apart,โ said Batygin. He entered the centuries-old argument with calculations showing thereโs a one-percent chance that eventually, the other planetsโ gravitational influence will send Mercury shooting out of the solar system, or maybe even crashing into Earth. Which other planet has the distinction of having a small, but measurable probability that it will literally destroy us?
โItโs like a gangsta thatโs chillinโ next to the Sun,โ said Batygin. โIt looks harmless because itโs kind of smallโฆ but it has some bullets up its sleeve.โ
Mercury taketh away, but it can also giveth: Mercury helped confirm Albert Einsteinโs general relativity, the modern theory of gravity. Its eccentric orbit processes 43 arcseconds per century, meaning that rather than returning to the same spot every year, its orbit traces out a Spirograph around the Sun. Before general relativity, the only thing that could have explained this eccentric behavior would have been another planetโs gravity, an imaginary planet that Neptune predictor Urbain Le Verrier called Vulcan. Mercury, forever the Inspectah, took Le Verrier to court and Vulcan got the death penalty. Einsteinโs theory of general relativity perfectly explained Mercuryโs 43 arcsecond procession. I donโt see any other planets playing such a pivotal role in a theory as important as relativity.
Speaking of gravity, Mercuryโs elongated orbit locks it into a unique trip around the Sunโone Mercury year equals one-and-a-half Mercury days. Thereโs only one New Yearโs Eve every two Mercury years, but who can blame it? Iโd also need a break if the night of New Yearโs eve lasted two-thirds of a year.
Despite these revelations, Mercury has maintained an air of mystery, especially compared to our rocky neighbors. Scientists have successfully sent two dozen probes to fly by, orbit or land on Venus, another two dozen to Mars and just two, Mariner 10 and MESSENGER, the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging mission, to Mercury. Trying to stick a ship into Mercuryโs orbit is difficult: MESSENGER needed to fly by Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury three times so it wouldnโt fly into the Sun, said Sean Solomon, a professor at Columbia University and MESSENGERโs principal investigator. No one has ever dropped a lander on the planet, since the lack of a true atmosphere provides little cushioning to slow an approaching craft. Even orbiting the planet is a challenge, thanks to the Sunโs gravitational tug.
But when scientists do manage to send spacecraft to Mercury, they find a stranger planet than they could ever have imagined.
Mercuryโs the gangsta planet. Itโs gonna take more than a couple of probes to reveal its deepest secrets.
When Mariner 10 arrived at Mercury 40 years ago, it found that the little rock, unlike Mars and Venus, generates its own internal magnetic field. Mercury also has plate tectonics like the Earth, but rather than many plates, it has one massive plate cracking and contracting above its liquid outer core. โThat puts Mercury in a special place with the Earth,โ said Tom Watters, senior scientist at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. โThe two bodies are tectonically active today with active magnetic fields ... thereโs no evidence that either Mars or Venus have active tectonics.โ
Thereโs a reason for Mercuryโs magnetic field. Its iron innards take up over 80 percent of its radius, or more than 60 percent of its volume. The Earthโs core, for comparison, only takes up a little over half its radius, less than a third of its volume. That means Mercury is a dense metal sphereโa lot more metal than rock, said Solomon. So scientists wondered: How do planet formation processes create a mostly metal ball? They had a few theories: Maybe Mercury formed in a metal-rich region around the Sun, or maybe the early Sun blasted some outer layer of rock away. Or, the most badass theory, maybe Mercury was once the size of Mars and took a major wallop from some giant unknown visitor, stripping away part of its diameter. None of these theories turned out to be correct. When MESSENGER arrived, the planet revealed way more volatile elements, those with low boiling-points like sulfur or potassium, than scientists expected to see. Any of the above scenarios would have vaporized these materials off of the planet, and yet they remained.
Jebus actually wrote something that made sense for a change, I think. Even though I came here to vote for my home planet I was swayed by his dissertation. I vote for Mercury, I'm sold.
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DocteurRalph wrote:
Jebus actually wrote something that made sense for a change, I think. Even though I came here to vote for my home planet I was swayed by his dissertation. I vote for Mercury, I'm sold.
He does make quite the salesman. Wonder if he wants to someday sell mushroom juice to all them gay toads visiting the Commonwealth?
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