2773: Planetary Scientist

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Planetary Scientist

Title text: This rumpled fabric at the corner looks like evidence of ongoing tectonic activity.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a BOT THAT'S PROBABLY FULL OF WATER - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Some celestial bodies are hypothesized to have liquid water under the surface (e.g. Europa (moon)). Often there's a further hope that those oceans might possibly contain life similar to ours, so a lot of scientists are excited about this possibility. The comic hyperbolizes this excitement, showing Ponytail so eager to find water she imagines it inside of a mattress.

Transcript

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Discussion

First. 127.0.0.1 02:14, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

https://xkcd.com/1258/172.70.38.127 02:14, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

The latest edit to this page adds a name for the clerk, "Rumplesoyskin". Is this an in-joke I'm not familiar with, or vandalism? Angel (talk) 11:32, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

If I'm to guess, probably vandalism - especially considering Rumplesoyskin isn't mentioned anywhere else Coreirei (talk) 13:01, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

(Ninjaed by Edit Conflict... However, my reply was...) Vandalism. "Soy" is an insult used by certain types (against some nebulous target group or other), which has commonly cropped up here due to (probably) a single rather pernicious recurring vandal with seemingly nothing better to do than prove their own childishness. Revert what needs to be reverted and move on, if you see that again. 172.71.178.206 13:04, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Could this have to do with the fact that planetary scientists can't directly observe the conditions of the exoplanets and are relying on circumstantial eveidence to classify which planets are most likely to have a subsurface ocean?172.71.150.174 14:32, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Not just exoplanets but moons. Images/flux-measurements by Pioneers/Voyagers and then later outer-planet probes keep turning up reasons to believe there may be a subsurface 'ocean' of liquid water (and not just the ones with water-ice surface, where it might be fairly obvious if there's signs of rills in the ice-sheets or even water-geysers that must be fed by something below that's liquid H₂O).

If anything, exoplanets are still more in the "exciting if there could be signs of surface liquid" stage, as surface conditions and atmospheric composition are the things being worked out from the orbit/rotation and the spectral signature from its occluding. We're a bit further away from working out that a salty mass of subsurface water is distorting the magneto-electric field its orbit passes through.

But it's a big thing, regardless, to wonder if Pluto has h8dden liquid water, or how much there might be underneath Europa's frozen surface. (Or if there's actually quite a lot more to be found deep beneath the martian surface... or not so deep... as well as as a fraction of its surface ice-caps.) 172.71.134.85 15:06, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

I think this is related to the recently announced subsurface oceans on Uranus' moons: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/new-study-of-uranus-large-moons-shows-4-may-hold-water 172.69.22.119 17:03, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

The reference to "plate tectonics" should be removed. The comic simply says tectonics. "Plate tectonics" is not the only type of tectonics and is not synonymous with "tectonics". For example, Mars and Venus are currently believed to have tectonics but not plate tectonics. Ice worlds could be either/or.162.158.62.167 19:26, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Done. :-)172.71.178.166 18:05, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't know how I'd feel about tectonic activity in my bed. I mean, it could be kind of hot, but... 162.158.239.38 08:55, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

"Did the bed move for you, dear?" 172.71.178.146 19:00, 25 November 2023 (UTC)