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Science Memes
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

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- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
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- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
If you are here asking: "Is this a science meme?"
Probably, yes. We use the Dawkins definition of meme: a replicating idea, not just an image macro with a fact on it. A good post here doesn't need to teach you something. It needs to make you ask something: who, what, where, when, and especially why or how.
Science isn't a filing cabinet of facts, it's a conversation. For example, a photo of an eel or other localized wildlife counts because most people never see one, and wonder is the first step of inquiry. A car meme counts if it makes you curious about what's under the bonnet. If you want to talk about something you noticed in the world, chances are someone else wants to talk about it too.
We moderate for vibe, not category. Pruning is light, especially where a post creates interesting discussion. Experimenting is encouraged.
See the pinned paper on Shitposting as Public Pedagogy if you want the academic case for why this works.
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Wait this is so true, and I've never even thought about it. Space photography has a lot of pictures from the Moon, Mars, and Venus (I've never seen those Titan photos, so thank you for the link), but there are no "real" photos of a planet with oceans. That might be where the "uncanny valley" kicks in, with my brain going "this doesn't look quite right". I do get a similar feeling when I see AIgen videos, so you might be onto something!
Venus is difficult to photograph for the same reason as Titan, thick opaque atmosphere. We've got radar imagery of Venus, plus the Soviets landed some probes and took a few pictures of the actual hell that surface level Venus is.
We can actually get a pretty good look at Mars from here; This is a picture of Mars taken with Hubble. We have active missions in orbit and on the surface of Mars as well so we can look at it as close as we want.
Meanwhile, this is the best Hubble could do with Pluto. And that's still inside our own solar system, we're not getting any photos of the surface of Earth mass planets around other stars.