An Argument The Moon is a PLANET!

Note 1 is not prescriptive. It's descriptive.

The moon has very obviously not cleared out its orbit. You're sitting on the evidence of that.

But it's not an ad hoc justification for what they want to be planets, because using these criteria they disqualified Pluto, which had previously always been considered a planet. The current definition of a planet is rooted in science, whereas saying "Pluto is a planet" is doing the exact thing you were criticizing, arbitrarily deciding what does or does not meet the definition of planet.

...But... the moon clearly hasn't cleared its orbit? Regardless of what the graph at 1:54 says, isn't it plainly obvious that it does not in fact gravitationally dominate everything nearby? I'm honestly kind of baffled as to how one could conclude that the moon satisfies the criterion "has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit" and therefore could be a planet according to the definition.

2:01 I "clear the neighborhood" every time I have tacos

Is this an early April Fools video?

I thought this was minutephysics not minutesemantics

I am fairly sure it says 'HAS cleared its neighborhood' not, 'is theoretically able to clear its neighborhood'. I should not have to mention, the Moon has not cleared its neighborhood, since it shares it with the Earth.

1:33 THIS is where I respectfully think your argument falls apart. The definition doesn't say that the celestial body 'COULD' clear the neighborhood, it says it HAS cleared the neighborhood. And the moon hasn't done that. Furtherore, I don't see an issue with the way they set about defining planets as being 'The 8'; because Ceres is MUCH more similar to other things in the asteroid belt than it is to any of the 'rocky planets' and Pluto is far more similar to other objects in the keiper belt than it is to anything else in the solar system... If Pluto was where earth is it would grow a tail for Pete's sake! Hehe :)
Love your stuff, but I respectfully disagree with your position here. :)

That is absolutely not how they intended that footnote to be interpreted.

The thing about the IAU reclassification was mainly so that they didn't have to deal with the headache of "if Pluto is a planet, which of these other Kuiper belt objects are planets?" They set a hard definition to disqualify not just Pluto but all the Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is the only one people care about because it's the only one that's been previously classified as a planet. However, the definitions are not arbitrary because they still leave room for more massive objects that would undeniably be considered planets, such as the hypothetical Planet X.

Moon: I have cleared my orbit I’m a big boy
Earth: Yes little fella you are doing great
😂

The moon would only satisfy the third requirement if the earth didn't exist. Fortunately for us humans, the earth does in fact exist.

Re: the footnote at 2:59, I read that as being informative and not *normative*. I've read a lot of programming language technical specifications, and those generally have a separation between normative specifications which are the strict requirements of the language that MUST be followed, vs. informative specifications which are just additional context and not part of the technical requirements.

So the footnote isn't saying "the definition of a planet is only these 8," but rather "here's a list of the 8 objects that meet the definition criteria given above in the main text."

The criterion is "HAS cleared its neighborhood," not "would be able to clear its neighborhood if there weren't any more massive bodies in it," so I'm not sure what the point of this video is.

I love that the celestial body that is mostly responsible for all this mess about is Eris, a Pluto-like object (now called dwarf planet), slightly heavier than Pluto. Eris is named after the Greek goddess of discord, a very fitting name! That this name was chosen is probably not a coincidence, however, that the name was available is!

if you say the moon is in orbit around the sun, then it doesn't clear its orbit. earth is there.

Just sweeping the Earth under the rug for that third criteria, are we?

"has cleared the neighborhood..." is not the same as "is massive enough to clear the neighborhood...", is it?

Moon: "I'm capable of clearing my own orbit."
Earth: "Am I a joke to you?"