It’s more a PALATR Pit than a real angry Pit. But it’s Bill O’Reilly, so by sovereign law it has to go here.
So a little while ago Fundamentally Oral Bill got asked by someone how tides worked. You know, because when I’m trying to answer a question like “how are low tides created?” the first thing I’m going to think of isn’t going to be a godless liberal commie pinko thing like a book, it’s going to be Papa Bear O’Reilly. Anywho, BO was a little rusty on the science part of the tides, so he said that a wizard did it. I mean God. Yeah, God.
Well at this point even Fred Phelps is laughing at the guy. I mean, we’ve all been there, when the teacher asks us to reduce 2x[sup]2[/sup] + 5x - 4 and we write “only God knows” as the answer, but most of us get past that point. So Bill decided to “clarify” himself by pointing out that, well, uh…I’m not sure what the fuck he was pointing out. Help me out, Dopers:
Yeah, Bill, that’s…that’s just…I don’t know what to say there, Bill, other than I bet the vanilla pudding in your head might have gone a bit off. Fortunately, Doper The Bad Astronomer is on this. Nice going, Phil, even if this is like shooting a bucket full of guppies with an M16.
Um…I don’t know how to break this to you, Bill, but Mars and Venus actually do have a sun. The same one we have, you fucking moron. If ypou’re talking about thje moon, then mars has TWO moons. Guess what, Hawking, Jupiter has 63 moons. Suck on those balls.
Venus does not have a moon, I guess you would be (entirely accidentally) correct about that, but what does that prove, exactly? Venus does not ave a moon, therefore God exists? That’s your argument. You are truly a fucking oracle.
What a fucking dummy this guy is, and what a true window into the religious right mentality.
I think it would be possible – even easy – to mount a defense based on O’Reilly’s words. I could say that he was speaking not literally but metaphorically, arguing that the presence of a complex system that works so well for us suggests the presence of a Designer…
…but I won’t, because I think the truth is that O’Reilly either forgot, or never knew, exactly what caused the tides, and rather than forthrightly admitting that he didn’t know, he’s now trying to “explain” and only digging himself deeper.
Of course, there’s nothing like reading one of your screeds to make me reconsider my impulses.
Yes, Mars has two moons. But even if Mars had vast oceans, Deimos and Phobos would not cause the kind of tides Luna does. Deimos masses 1.5 x 10[sup]15[/sup] kg. Phobos masses 10[sup]16[/sup] kg.
Luna, in contrast, masses 7.4 x 10[sup]22[/sup] kg, five orders of magnitude greater than the sum of both Mars’ natural satellites. Mars, in short, hasn’t got shit in the way of moons. Mars has two large rocks. As Crocodile Dundee might say, “That’s not a moon. THIS is a moon.”
Now, Jupiter’s got some massive moons: Io, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto, all of which are in Luna territory. But since Jupiter is so much more massive than Earth, the comparison fails here as well.
The truth is that Earth and her satellite are unique in the solar system; it’s the only planet with a satellite as close to its own size.
I don’t think O’Reilly knew any of that. But I also don’t think he’s wrong to make the claim that Earth-Luna is a unique pair in our solar system. Other planets have moons, sure. But if the issue is tides, then Earth with Luna is not duplicated anywhere else in the solar system. That doesn’t say anything one way or the other about God, of course, but it’s true nonetheless.
Er, no counsellor. Pluto and Charon. Yes, I will submit that the eggheads have recently declared Pluto to be a “dwarf planet”, but quite apart from this slur on both Pluto and little people, Charon is much larger proportionally to Pluto than Luna is to Earth.
And now **Bricker **(who I admire for his repeated willingness to skewer morons who ostensibly are on his side) has a weird image of Obi Crocodile Wan Dundee fixed in my head.
Uh, until Pluto got the boot, that planet and its moon Charon were also considered a couple of bodies in a pair, comparable to the Earth and Moon system.
This actually isn’t true since Pluto has one moon. I guess you can keep retreating to more and more qualified arguments about the “uniqueness” of earth (along with your arbitrary redifinition of the word “moon”), but you can do that about pretty much anything in the universe if you try hard enough. It means nothing.
How does that let O’Reilly off the hook for saying that Mars doesn’t have a sun and a moon?
That’s not the claim he made, nor is it a meaningful point anyway. First he said that “science can’t explain the tides.” A clearly and irrefutably false statement. He then tried to back-pedal into some kind of half-assed (and still misinformed) cosmological argument, which you are now apparently trying to massage into a fine-tuning argument on his behalf.
The bottom line is that his original claim that science cannot explain the tides was flatly, factually incorrect, and cannot be taken as any kind of wider, philosphical attempt at a cosmological or teleological argument without a great deal of reaching and scrabbling.
Well, I have two objections to that one: first, the center of mass of the Pluto-Charon system isn’t inside Pluto – that is, Charon doesn’t orbit Pluto so much as Pluto and Charon rotate about a common fixed point between them. For this reason, I hesitate to call them a planet and a moon so much as a pair of outer solar system centaurs. For a body to be truly a satellite of a planet, the center of mass of the systems should reside inside the planet.
Second, as you point out, Pluto doesn’t even get the style and dignity of being called a planet.
But you’re right in pointing this system out, because I’m sure the tidal effect of Charon on Pluto is massive.
I agree. I said as much in my first post. I said I wouldn’t try to fit hsi words to the truth, because I’m sure he started out not simply speaking unclearly, but from a position of near-absolute ignorance.
Unfortunately, in an attempt to pile on O’Reilly, you weren’t content to let his actual errors speak for themselves. You had to try to make him wronger than he was. It is THAT that I am now correcting.
I agree. He was completely and utterly wrong, and his attempt to “explain” is after-the-fact rationalizing. That is the bottom line.
What I don’t understand is why pundits like Bill O’Reilly can’t say, “That’s outside my area of expertise: I’m not an astronomer.” Why do they have to pretend to know about everything? Even I admit that there are one or two things that I don’t know.
That’s not true: the Earth and Moon orbit around a central point that is inside the Earth. That’s even more so with the other planet-satellite systems in our solar system. The Pluto-Charon system is unusual because the relatively large size of Charon puts the central point outside the surface of Pluto.
In Bricker’s defense, while he did say that it’s possible O’Reilly could be making some sort of deep, meaningful cosmological argument, he also acknowledged that it’s most likely O’Reilly is talking out of his ass.
Actually, there is one other planet-moon system within our solar system where the bodies “rotate about a common fixed point between them”. It is called the Earth and the Moon.
Now what the hell was this about people talking about things outside of their area of expertise? Go sit in the damn corner, Bricker.
