Lecia_Wynter wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Some say that the Arctic Ocean is really just an extension of the Atlantic. So that there are only two "ocean basins", and not "three".
There is really just one ocean because "they are all attached" as Isabella said above.
But for various purposes it's useful to split them up rhetorically if you want.
In both the human/socio/geo-political realm you can talk about plural oceans, and in understanding nature and ecology you can split them up rhetorically.
But its even more arbitrary the "number of continents", or the "number of planets".
No you can define the amount of planets in a solar system as that which orbits the solar body
What I said was that "the number of oceans the earth has is even MORE fuzzy than the number of planets there are in the solar system". Though that number is fuzzy too.
The reason being that its hard to define exactly what is a "planet".
You seem to be saying that "a 'planet' is a body that directly orbits the sun/star. As opposed to a 'moon' that orbits a planet - that in turn orbits the star.".
But there are countless hundreds of comets and asteroids that directly orbit the sun (that we know about- and literally millions that we havent cataloged yet), that are not moons, ranging in size from microscopic specks of dust up to hundreds of miles across. So is a microscopic speck of dust in the asteroid belt a "planet"?
Some would modify your definition by saying that "a body big enough to have enough mass for gravity to mash it down to a spherical shape around a single center" is a "planet". But then sphere-shaped asteroids like Ceres (only 480 miles across) would have to be promoted to planets.
So then you would have to find some size cut off ...between "planets"(like earth), and "dwarf planets" (like Ceres). But where exactly would the size cutoff be? Would Pluto (at 1400 mile across- way bigger than Ceres, but smaller than the Earth's Moon) be a planet or a dwarf planet? And so on.
09 Jun 2023, 7:26 pm
