Neptune May Have Eaten a Planet and Stolen Its Moon

jitendraharlalka noted a piece about the origins of Neptune. There is a theory now that it once ate a super-earth in the outer solar system, and kept its moon as some sort of macabre trophy to make sure that Mars and Venus didn't get any big ideas.

Nuclear?

[EvilBudMan]

Maybe there is a Nuclear core with fission going on to explain the heat. In fact it is possible that this is happening at the very center of the earth's core. It's hard to say really what caused this. As anyone can guess, I guess.

Re:Nuclear?

[ral8158]

Um....... Not likely.

Re:wasted opportunity

[radtea]

Yeah, every day this place hits new lows. This is an interesting story on planetary formation and the complex unravelling of the history of the solar system using a mix of precise observation and computer modelling, and the comments are almost exclusively juvenile jokes and complaints that the proposed mechanisms sound stupid.

My question is: is there anywhere that is remotely like /. used to be (say a few months ago, even) when we still got the odd intelligent comment that added something useful to the story?

Re:Nuclear?

[Anonymous Coward]

It also tells us something about how utterly bizarre and rare a phenomenon like life is. Most of space is vacuum. Life there is fucked. There's a few spheres of matter that aren't a vacuum, by mass they're far and away mostly stars. Life there is fucked. Orbiting these stars are some much, much smaller chunks of rock. Too close to the star and life there is fucked. Too far, and life is fucked. Inside the magical zone of habitability (with some even more bizarre possibilities like Europa), life is mostly fucked and confined to a thin band of territory between a vacuum on one side and radioactive-decay powered/initial planetary formation leftover/tidal pull/smurfy molten-hot magma. And some dumbasses marvel about how the universe is clearly built for life. More like clearly built to prevent life and kill it the fuck off if it should ever somehow arise.

Re:amphromoporthizing

[bh_doc]

The theory doesn't anthropomorphize the planet. The article describing the theory does, because that makes it more accessible and interesting to general readers.

Remember, not everyone is an emotionless nerd. Some of us like allegories.