Editing 2925: Earth Formation Site
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Secondly, specifying a single year of formation BCE (Before the Common Era) is an amusingly precise choice. It takes [https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/how-do-planets-form/ tens or hundreds of millions of years] for a planet to form. Picking a year would require some specific definition of when a gradually-coalescing mass of proto-planet dust and gas could be considered a planet, as well as the impossible ability to determine when that mass met the definition. | Secondly, specifying a single year of formation BCE (Before the Common Era) is an amusingly precise choice. It takes [https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/how-do-planets-form/ tens or hundreds of millions of years] for a planet to form. Picking a year would require some specific definition of when a gradually-coalescing mass of proto-planet dust and gas could be considered a planet, as well as the impossible ability to determine when that mass met the definition. | ||
− | If the precise year was knowable, | + | If the precise year was knowable, it’s somewhat improbable the number would end in seven consecutive zeros. As in literally a one-in-ten-million chance, ''assuming'' that the actual possible spread of years is widely enough distributed; though we do not have enough information to establish this, and the statistics for last-number(s) frequency is different from those of {{w|Benford's law|first-number frequency}}, so it might well be only one-in-a-million, thus [https://wiki.lspace.org/Million-to-one_chance far more likely]. |
The topic of what precisely makes a planet — related to the 2006 redefinition of a planet and the subsequent reclassification of Pluto from the solar system's ninth planet to a dwarf planet — has been covered before in [[473: Still Raw]] and referenced in other XKCD comics. | The topic of what precisely makes a planet — related to the 2006 redefinition of a planet and the subsequent reclassification of Pluto from the solar system's ninth planet to a dwarf planet — has been covered before in [[473: Still Raw]] and referenced in other XKCD comics. |