Thursday, August 24, 2006

AHHH! Alien Invasion!

Watch out for death rays everyone 'cuz the aliens are here and they're here for blood. They've already destroyed an entire planet because our solar system is down to 8...or Pluto got demoted.

Thats right folks, Pluto is no longer officialy a planet, its now a "Dwarf Planet" (along with Ceres, a moon, and a big asteroid named "Xena"). That means that our solar system only has 8 planets, not 9 like we were taught for so long. Can you imagine how that celestial body orbiting Pluto feels? It was bad enough when it was orbiting the runt of the system but now its orbiting a freakin' dwarf. That sucks. But does anyone really care? I guess its sad that Plutos got cut 'cuz its such a cultural icon (kinda) but ultimately it hasnt changed, just the classification. Although it might commit suicide, and that'd be tragic.

In other news, scientists have developed a way to make stem cells without killing embryos, but the dumbass social conservatives still have a problem with it because apparently any cell is "potential life"...bullshit. What part of their "culture of life" forbids the curing of diseases?

8 comments:

OSK said...

As far as Pluto goes, I think life will go on. I mean, either that or we start calling all hugeass asteroids planets, and that could get out of hand.

I read about the stem cell thing, and while I have to say I'm not 100% convinced of the morality (I'm beginning to think this is solely due to my "brainwashing" by hard-core conservatives), the prospect of studying genetics-related diseases is suddenly much more appealing and believably plausible. Only time will tell.

gbz said...

I dont think this should be such a huge deal as far as morality goes, its not like researchers used to steal embryos from innocent young mothers...they used donated embryos that werent ever going to be babies. this whole "potential life" thing is a slippery slope too so serious, get over it and bust some blastomeres.

OSK said...

As usual, the crux of the arguement is at which point life becomes life. This is not a matter of the origin of the embryos, but the morality of experimenting on embryos which many people consider to be life already.

Terra Shield said...

That's sad... Pluto was one of my favourite (ex)planets :(

Juicy said...

heres an argument for ya:
would you rather have an embryo with no conciousness and possibly a soul be alive, or a concious, living, breathing person who definitley has a soul be alive?

poor pluto, i guess that discredits my jr highschool science project...

gbz said...

I can understand people wanting to beleive in a soul when thinking about humans with conciousness, because its so complex and, being an emergent property, is hard to exaplin scientificly with any amount of satisfaction, but the embryos we're talking about here are literaly just balls of undifferentiated cells. They dont think or feel or do anything but metabolize glucose and divide. Mosquitos are closer to having souls than that.

Anonymous said...

Clearly you're all missing the point. The Pluto demotion is just another of the ever expanding effort to undermine science as we know it. We all know Pluto is a planet until a planet zealot comes along gains enough grass roots power and subverts the system to declare it's not. Remind you of anything?

gbz said...

I dont know much about how this came about, but I think it actualy is now kore in keeping with the definition of planets....and I dont think there were any zealots involved, although u sound like one