!nostupidquestions is a community space dedicated to being helpful and answering each others’ questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
That’s it.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it’s in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Let everyone have their own content.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
To find & join our chat room, log into fluffychat.im(or any other matrix client) and put #nostupidquestions:matrix.org
on the search bar.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
How are we not great apes? I’ve taken 2 whole anthropology classes and this is the first I’m hearing of this! /s
For real, though, would love an answer. These things interest me.
How can Pluto cease to be a planet overnight?
I know that you’re asking rhetorically, since you have no idea how science works. But to anyone else who’s interested, the reason is because we found a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt that was bigger than Pluto, and it became hard to justify that Pluto was a planet if the planet that we found was a dwarf planet. Either both had to be planets or both had to be dwarf planets. And we ended up making both of them dwarf planets
I know how science works. It discovers, analyzes, proposes a hypothesis, that becomes a theory and then - widely accepted “truth”.
…and then, often the same truth becomes an obsolete relic of old, once enough new findings emerge, or enough of scientists agree that new definitions, approach and formulas are required.
I know, you don’t exactly understand it, you prefer to follow to the letter everything you’re being told, and trust what people in funny uniforms say, no matter what. The bad news is that it places you in the same spot medieval (and unfortunately current) Flat Earthers occupy. The good news is that you’re about to see many changes to current “truths” across your lifetime.
So, enjoy the ride.
Imagine if the opposite camp would be more convincing/charismatic/numerous and instead of stripping off Pluto of his former status, we’d get more planets to our Solar System. Wow, what a preposterous idea!
In reality, nothing has changed. Pluto is still what it was, and it continues to move in its own slow pace across its trajectory. It’s just that some funny people decided to settle a difficult topic by a compromise.
Same thing with the funny people who decided to equate humans with gorillas. Their distinction is also artificial, forced and imperfect. A compromise. Nothing else.
The meaning of “planet” has changed greatly over the centuries as our understanding improved. It originally meant “wanderer” and referred to the five naked-eye planets known since antiquity plus the sun and moon, but NOT the Earth.
As astronomers and astrophysicists learned more about them, it became clear that classifying all stellar objects as the same category was unworkable. Earth was reclassified as a planet, the moon as a moon, and the sun as a star.
Likewise, Pluto was reclassified because the old classification made little sense.
…and, given time and enough of a change to relevant peoples’ mindset, so does the classification of both some animals and humans might change.
Because that’s how science was, is and will ever be - a mutable “phenomenon”, where rigidity means lack of progress.
I see no problem in that.
…you seem to be vacillating between anti-science and science-literate positions.
Ordo ab chao.
Quam valde stultus est.
Mortuorum verba non faciunt.