Thread by @DrPhiltill

@XgoMonstrous Read the paper ;)

Jk. It is the crystal clear insight that planets are the engines of complexity in the cosmos, such a tiny fraction of the cosmos’ mass yet responsible for the great flourishing of complexity up to & including life. Regardless what or how they currently orbit.

@XgoMonstrous 2/ That is the essence of the insight Galileo had when he saw mountains on the Moon and realized that all planets are “other Earths” possessing features of complexity like Earth, unlike the “fixed stars” (which we now simply call stars). From Galileo’s insight, all the …

@XgoMonstrous 3/ … early scientists who embraced Copernicanism immediately left to the idea that planets throughout the cosmos are likely the homes of civilizations like Earth. Since then we have realized not all planets have life, but we have continued to embrace that they are unique as…

@XgoMonstrous 4/… the locations in the cosmos where the physics is right to cause complexity to emerge: geological, mineralogical, chemical, biochemical, up to and possibly including life, but with a vast array of diversity in the way this complexity emerges.

@XgoMonstrous 5/ What they orbit is just a tiny factor among all the other factors in the great diversity of the flowering complexity. Sure, orbits matter, but so do so many other factors.

@XgoMonstrous 6/ It would be impossible to argue that orbits are the most important since that groups Mercury with Jupiter but splits Titan & Triton from Mars & Pluto. It produces a nonsensical taxonomy that aligns with no reductionist theory, no deep insight.

@XgoMonstrous 7/ Not to mention that orbits change. Triton was not a satellite, having formed very much like Pluto as a primary planet, but was later captured and became a satellite. Saying it is a different class of body than Pluto does not align with any theory or reductionist insight.

@XgoMonstrous 8/ The emergence of complexity is the only unifying feature of all these bodies, and it is ultra important for grasping our place in the cosmos.

@XgoMonstrous 9/ In fact, I would argue that the nature of planethood as the engines of complexity (which is common across all the various orbital states) is possibly one of the 2 or 3 greatest insights in the history of science.

@XgoMonstrous 10/ That insight gets muddled if we say “planets ONLY include bodies that are currently (while humans are looking) following a simple orbit around the Sun, so it excludes the same types of objects if random events have put them into some other orbit.”

@XgoMonstrous 11/11 The problem is that the cultural view of orderliness in the cosmos, the human desire to impress simplicity and hierarchy onto nature, plus non-scientific tradition, biases us to not grasp the clarity of Galileo’s insight and to instead want to stick with the cultural view.