You don't want them to have a actual sustainable place to live like Pluto. They could become a crazy overpowered country overnight. Which then try to force they crazy laws on us. Or worse.... Drive on the right side of the car... Heathens, I tell ya.
Imagine if orbital launch costs were like.... 0.0000... something for aussies. They'd be able to build kilometers long space ships and just give them a nudge and they'd be on their way to Earth's orbit because their gravity is negligible and the escape velocity is so low that you have to take care while walking down the street that you don't end up escaping Pluto's gravity. Also they could simply send miners to the Oort Cloud which is practically infinite source of platinum group metals, hydrogen fuel etc.
wearing a suit made entirely of lead, protects you from background radiation, and just might give you enough mass -not- to end up breaking orbit with too vigorous a step.
Yea, standing on Pluto is pretty much the same as if you were not on it. No magnetic field and no atmosphere to offer serious protection. Might as well be on EVA 1 AU away from it, not much difference - main difference is that you have this body of matter on one side of you so at least on the surface you should have like 40%+ reduction in radiation since Pluto itself doesn't radiate much and probably doesn't really reflect that much radiation. Luckily the escape velocity is 1.212 km/s so I was wrong above, you don't just jump off of it. Instead you jump really high. Surface gravity is 0.063g or 0.62m/s^2. It would be both really cool and really annoying to make a jump - you'd see really far away and the flight would be quite a long one. On the other hand while you're in air there's no atmosphere so you can't use wings or aerodynamics to control your flight and it will take so long to fall back down. Which had me thinking, it *might* be possible to grab a couple of fire extinguishers, jump as high as you can and then at the apogee of your jump you can simply use short bursts from the fire extinguishers. Given that the gravity is so low, even if you couldn't break orbit you would at least be able to fly pretty long like this. Which is why a species living on low-G world will develop space flight a lot faster with a lot less intelligence, way smaller economy and so. Just, the issue lies with developing sufficient intelligent species on a planet that can't hold on to it's atmosphere and which might lack magnetic field as well, but as a rule just having a smaller Earth like planet would make it considerably easier to develop both flight and spaceflight.
New Image from New Horizons Shows Pluto, Charon in Near-True Color http://www.sci-news.com/space/science-new-horizons-pluto-charon-near-true-color-03058.html
Imagine if someone proposed that every country together dedicated 2% of their military budget to space programs. That would mean an increase of 180bn $ in space programs budgets. For comparison, for USA that would mean 12bn $ addition to Nasa's 18bn $ budget. It would also mark the beginning of a space program for many countries. Note that Nasa has twice the combined budget of ESA and Roscosmos to begin with. The current total space exploration spending is at 40bn $. The addition of 36bn $ would be a massive boost.
http://www.quora.com/How-can-Pluto-...net-if-its-not-a-planet/answer/Robert-Frost-1 Digging up this old thing because I saw it explained perfectly in a simple way. Quote: How can Pluto be called a "dwarf planet" if it's not a planet? Robert Frost, Instructor and Flight Controller at NASA Robert has 330+ answers and 67 endorsements in Astronomy. We did settle it. It is a dwarf planet. A dwarf planet is what one calls a celestial body that resembles a planet but doesn't have the mass to meet the technical requirements* of a planet. *which are: 1) a planet directly orbits the Sun. That excludes moons because although they indirectly orbit the Sun, they directly orbit a planet. 2) a planet is massive enough that gravity overcomes rigid body forces and results in a round, almost spherical shape. That excludes the asteroids. And 3) a planet has used its mass to sweep up the trash in its neighborhood. This is where tiny Pluto becomes excluded. /Quote That Robert Frost has a ton of really interesting answers at Quora regarding space, ISS etc.
Nothing's settled, just shelved for more information, I personally tend to agree with this person that the stipulation 'cleared it's neighborhood' is somewhat vague. They might be able to convince me if they came up with a static value, irrelevant to 'the neighborhood' something more along the lines of the actual gravitational density of the celestial body. Either way I'm likely to simply ignore the 237 people who voted for it's change, at least until I'm given a better reason why it's not a planet.
Sooo you agree that Ceres should also be a planet, when it obviously, even by virtue of location, has not cleared out its orbit of all other debris? If you plunked even Mercury down there, we wouldn't have an asteroid belt in the first place. That's not really a vague meaning of "neighborhood', it's rather concise.
I'm cool with it. Mercury may be small, but it's got the same G force as Mars, though I doubt there'd be a whole lot left of Mercury afterwards. They could simply use gravity as the scale 'proto-planet x-y, planet y-z, mega-planet z-Θ' etc... it'd certainly be more easily quantifiable than 'vaguely round shaped and smacked it's neighbors around with a stick'
It's not vague. The object appears as round shaped or it doesn't. If it's "kinda roundish" then it's not a planet. If there's all sorts of shit all over the place then it has not cleaned it's surroundings. This: From your article is revealing. It is after all nothing but misplaced empathy, sympathy, nostalgia and whatever mixed with "fuck you all, you don't know shit, it so is a planet too!" All the pathetic attempts to treat Pluto as if it had a persona or as if people were bullying it.. And that 'returning home' statement is possible the most retarded thing I've heard so far on this topic. Pluto has never been going anywhere even though it doesn't even have a properly established orbit. Astronomists did not send it away, they didn't put it in corner and in no way did they say that it wasn't important or interesting or the coolest celestial body ever. I don't think there were similar uproar when animal species were analyzed for their true family relations with DNA analysis and some previously thought relations were found to be wrong or when certain dinosaur species were found to be actual child version of other species.
Then I doubt Pluto would still make that list. Sorry. Besides, it's not like Pluto being a dwarf planet or not is a bid deal. It's still getting explored.
You have to remember Sheep, there are literally people out there that identify as "plutokin", meaning they are an avatar of that celestial body. So yeah, it makes sense that they get offended by their namesake being regulated to a sub-status from what it once was. They might be crazy, but hey.
you can argue a tomato is round, but some of them are not, if they're not round, are they still a tomato? If an asteroid somehow managed to obtain a spherical shape, orbited the sun, and simply had no other friends on it's orbital path, would it then be considered a planet? There is that proviso about obtaining a spherical shape because of it's gravity, so by that condition it might be excluded... assuming it's gravity wasn't great enough through sheer density. Simply because the person in the article apparently has an emotional attachment to the argument does not make his opinion invalid, aside from the sentimentality most of what I read in that article was well informed and not something that should be dismissed out of hand simply because you disagree and decide that the argument is invalid because of there being too much human in the argument. I doubt it would as well, but it's a far better approach than 'well, these ones are smaller than the others, and kinda have things floating about near them... they must not be planets, even if they behave for the most part like a planet, and even have their own moon in one circumstance'. They could even leave the measurements vague, pending more information, such as Pluto having a gravity of .7m/s² is the highest known gravity of a dwarf planet whereas Mars has the lowest gravity of known planets at 3.7m/s², until studies give us a more conclusive indication of the differences between a dwarf planet and a full planet it can be assumed that ≥Pluto is a dwarf and ≤Mars is a planet, anything in between would have to be determined based on the information at the time. I might be crazy, but I have no affiliation to plutokin and this argument devolves... definitions are meant to be challenged, when they're challenged, some will disagree.
