How many planets?

[Hyperspeed]

Wasn't there a couple of planets beyond Pluto called 'Smiley' and 'Cala'?

And what about planets that have been partially destroyed and no longer orbit a star... like Krypton!

[Hyperspeed]

If they demote Uranus I'm going to get NASTY!

by Tigger:
its actual name will be picked from a list submitted by its submitter next year sometime.

Woah... picked by the submitter of the submition... that's exactly what Tony Blair/Saddam Hussein would do!

Astronomy must be a fascist science!

Just out of curio... can you land a probe onto any of the gas giants or would it be crushed? How many of our planets could (wo/)man actually walk on (and would this include the asteroid planets?).

[Hyperspeed]

Has man created a metallic hydrogen on Earth, sounds like good bomb material!

:-D

[Hyperspeed]

If it could be created in a collider or something then surely this would be THE perfect anti-matter for long haul space travel!?

Another thing that has interested me lately is gravity. Can it be simulated by spinning an object around in circles as portrayed in the Bond film 'Moonraker' and do asteroids have sufficient gravity to be able to walk on them?

If gravity is linked to mass, then what proportion of our Earthly gravity is created by the crust, mantle and the dense metallic core? I read that some places in India you can weigh 1% lighter! When there is a 'full moon' how much counter-gravity is generated and would it save fuel to launch a rocket at a full moon (after all they save fuel by launching near the equator)?

:-D

EDIT:
Tigger

[Hyperspeed]

Would Hydrogen retain it's metallic form after the conversion process? Could we all be wearing hydrogen rings in the future that could power our house?

:-D

I saw liquid Helium on Sky TV years ago, if you take the lid off the container it screams like a falling bomb and tries to do a runner!

In my opinion to be a planet the object must be perfectly spherical. A designation would be mathematical. Can non-spherical objects retain an atmosphere?

Interesting is the fictional 'world' of Halo... a weapon/planet who's entire surface is the inner track of a giant ring. Maybe we should start thinking of more designations when technology allows us to make our own worlds or discover things that don't fit the mould!

[Hyperspeed]

Arthur C Clarke - a diamond geezer!

On this subject though how will world economics evolve over the next few centuries when asteroids, moons and planets are discovered with gold, uranium, diamonds etc. on them?

The UK had to sell off a lot of it's gold reserves a few years ago due to the falling prices... imagine the impact on a country's economy if it's reserves of some mineral were superseded by a mine on the moon!

I read a year or two back that a few scientists think that viruses come from space... that millions of tonnes of organisms live high up in the atmosphere and that they suggested viruses were literally raining down from the sky. Freaky.

[Hyperspeed]

Do diamonds have electrical properties, like Quartz oscillates a current?

Such a perfect lattice should be capable of something extraordinary besides being very hard and twinkly!

:-D

I saw an astronomy program once where it described billions of volts arcing from Jupiter to one of it's moons, constantly. They also say that Jupiter is effectively Earth's guardian angel - absorbing all the asteroids.

What I have been thinking lately is that for planets like Neptune to orbit the Sun there must be some physical thing grabbing hold of them and keeping them in this ring of motion.

Now I've never studied physics academically but surely gravity must be a form of matter to have an effect on anything?

I couldn't make head nor tail of Steven Hawkings' nut book but I don't agree that time is interwoven with gravity. I believe the vacuum of space is in fact a solid entity filled completely with quantum particles and that the planets behave exactly like electrons around a nucleus.

Can anyone educate me or even propose wackier ideas?

EDIT:
And while I'm off on a tangent here - can anyone explain if our moon, if artificially provided with one, could retain a very thin atmosphere (enough for humans to be able to breathe)?

It was suggested that atom bombs could be used to melt the ice on Mars to speedily provide the planet with an atmosphere - how long would artificial atmosphere generation take using today's technology and could it be applied to Ozone regeneration on our own planet?

[Hyperspeed]

by Karlos:
No. First of all, RMS speed of gaseous nitrogen/oxygen molecules at standard temperatures are above the moon's escape velocity. Secondly theres' no decent magnetic field around the moon which means it takes the full brunt of the solar wind which would rapidly strip away any atmosphere it managed to keep hold of.

I see...but why do some moons have atmospheres? Doesn't Titan have one, or is this because it's big enough to hold one down?

by Karlos:
No. The idea on mars is to release the frozen CO2 in the caps, thickening the atmosphere, which is mostly CO2. As much as 1/3 of the atmosphere freezes out into the caps during Mars' winter.

Dropping nukes all over our ice caps would do nothing but make our planet even more screwed up than we managed so far. I suspect if it had any effect on ozone at all, it would deplete it.

I'm sure the idea was to create an accelerated form of global warming on Mars. Why this was suggested I don't know - especially if the ice caps are CO². If the planet got warmer would any plants be able to live on CO² alone (they breathe oxygen during the night don't they?).

Imagine a plant that would breathe only CO² and emit oxygen, you could plant your own atmosphere generators! Hey, maybe even microbes could be engineered to survive the martian environment and generate oxygen or fuel.

With the nukes I didn't mean nuking our own ice caps. I did see some satellite style device on TV once that generated ozone but the estimated time of repair would have been 10,000 years with this basic gizmo.

This new idea of storing carbon dioxide underground though is a really bad one. One earthquake and you could release years worth of CO².

[Hyperspeed]

Karlos: That was an excellent response - my mind is nourished.

:-D

Makes you appreciate how delicate our planet's life support system is.

With the ozone layer though, don't they say that farting cows are mostly to blame? And paddy fields... there's a lot of them in the far east.

You don't think like Aurora Borealis/Australis that the Earth's magnetic field and solar radiation has anything to do with the holes? Why are the holes... at the poles!?

;-)

[Hyperspeed]

cecilia: I'm afraid it's 9 planets and that includes Uranus and Pluto! .

Hear blobrana try to explain away the mistake...


Left click the links ·IBrowse users·!

[Hyperspeed]

"These days it's been harder and harder to tan, ever since we lost the Ozone layer... but now I use Sunblock 5000 - see you by the pool!"



:-D

Wouldn't it be amazing if, in the future, we could dump a sort of counter catalyst chemical from space into the atmosphere and effectively rebuild the ozone layer. We could even have solar powered airships continuously replenishing the ozone or indeed microbes to do it...