Hacker News Reader

Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

It always surprises me how millions of planets can move about predictably for millions of years. Unless it's hit with some gigantic rock... or it gets infected with sentient life.

View on HN

I would not draw that conclusion from this article - we don't have such fine-grained data from other planets, perhaps their axes are more wobbly than Earth's. E.g it was only in 2020 that we discovered Mars has a "Chandler wobble" similar to Earth's (which was discovered 150 years earlier). But Mars's wobble is quite different as a matter of geophysics, Earth's Chandler wobble is mostly sustained by ocean sloshing. There's a whole lot we don't know about the non-Earth planets.

I will add that human extraction of groundwater it not nearly as impactful as the formation of large igneous provinces and other ancient supervolcanoes. A tectonically active planet will definitely wobble unpredictably.

We also found that our dams have slowed earth’s rotation!

its survival bias, they were moving billions of years before, objects with unstable orbits traveled somewhere else, and stable objects formed stable planets.

> or it gets infected with sentient life.

If only more planets could be so lucky.

What value does a planet have without sentient life there to enjoy it?

Sentient life: [ ] Venus [v] Earth [ ] Mars [ ] Uranus

Value: [ ] Venus [v] Earth [ ] Mars [ ] Uranus

None? I disagree, we should go back to arguing about sentient life on earth.

Humanity is not an infection. And how many of those millions of planets can you name?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com