I have long felt that science is a smug teenager, self-convinced of its own brilliance for having learned a few things and unaware of what they have yet to learn.
I laugh every time I watch a “science program” on History Channel where the guy with the ‘stache or the Asian guy with the long grey hippy hair say the phrase “we know.”
What passes for science in the public arena today is 1 part observation and 100 parts wild speculation. One small leap for fact, a hundred giant leaps for unproven theory heaped on unproven theory.
Anyway, to my point. Next time you hear the ‘stache or any of the other twerps say “we know” about something a billion years ago or a billion years from now, or a billion light years from here, or if you hear that they have discovered an “earth-like” planet 17 light years away based in the perturbation of a star, keep the following story in mind.
Turns out, we don’t even know how many planets are in our own darn solar system. Turns out there might be up to two more planets and they might be huge.
The monsters are multiplying. Just months after astronomers announced hints of a giant “Planet X” lurking beyond Pluto, a team in Spain says there may actually be two supersized planets hiding in the outer reaches of our solar system.
When potential dwarf planet 2012 VP113 was discovered in March, it joined a handful of unusual rocky objects known to reside beyond the orbit of Pluto. These small objects have curiously aligned orbits, which hints that an unseen planet even further out is influencing their behaviour. Scientists calculated that this world would be about 10 times the mass of Earth and would orbit at roughly 250 times Earth’s distance from the sun.
When science grows up, maybe it will be worth something.
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