Talk:Mesklin

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Mesklin has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Review: January 15, 2025. (Reviewed version).

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This article was nominated for deletion on 12 September 2024. The result of the discussion was keep.

This page was proposed for deletion by TTN (talk · contribs) on 8 January 2021.

Licensing

The article states:

In "Whirligig World", Clement stated that he gave "official permission to anyone who so desires to lay scenes there ..."

Did anyone ever take him up on it? Google reveals no further stories by anyone else. --Phil 09:37, Jan 29, 2004 (UTC)

First?

"They were also the first attempt to set stories on a known planet outside the solar system." Are we sure about that? It seems unlikely. For example the Lensman series and The Skylark of Space predate it. DJ Clayworth 17:40, 11 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Lensman certainly predates it, and the author ("Doc" Smith) does occasionally use the names of real stars, but none of the books in that series (I've read them) have a planet based on a planet that had actually been detected by science (mistakenly or not). Which only makes sense; at the time of the Lensmen series, the available tools and processes weren't able to even TRY to detect planets. -- Dwheeler 03:13, 31 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A planet in 61 Cygni

A reprint of "Whirlygig World" from 2000 has a note at the end that a large planet has been confirmed in the 61 Cygni system, but unfortunatley for the Mesklinites, orbiting 61 Cygni B. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.227.200.16 (talk) 04:42, 29 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For the record... this is unphysical

I can't help but be the Negative Nancy here. The idea that the plant would have gravity of 3g on one edge and 100s of g on the poles is simply wrong for ordinary matter. The Earth deforms due to the spin by the mathematics of hydrostatic forces. This means that we assume that the interior of the Earth are not load-bearing. Obviously this is untrue to some extent because rocks are strong and do not behave as water does, but on large scales this is exactly how they behave due to the cosmically large forces in this problem. If this plant has a mass similar to that of Jupiter... the hydrostatic assumption is valid unless we're talking about compressible physics. Either way, any large homogenous planet will have a constant normal gravity over the entire surface. The Earth's gravity differs from place to place due to differences in composition from place to place, and the rotation deformation has a net zero effect on the gravity. I love sci-fi, I just wish the "sci" part could be correct. -Theanphibian ^{(talk • contribs)} 18:31, 1 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not so, though in the case of the Earth the effect is minor.

"In combination, the equatorial bulge and the effects of centrifugal force mean that sea-level gravitational acceleration increases from about 9.780 m·s⁻² at the equator to about 9.832 m·s⁻² at the poles, so an object will weigh about 0.5% more at the poles than at the equator." Gravity of Earth#Latitude

For any spinning body, the centrifugal force reduces the apparent surface gravity at the equator. For a liquid body, the effect is enhanced because the body deforms, increasing the distance of the surface at the equator from the body's axis. If you spin it fast enough, it will deform until the equator is at synchronous orbit. I.e. surface gravity at the equator is 0. (Of course, if you want a livable planet, you'd better stop before the top of the atmosphere reaches that point.)

—WWoods (talk) 21:15, 1 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Name?

I wonder whether it's coincidence that this fictional planet with peculiar gravitational properties has a name so similar to that of Nevil Maskelyne, who attempted to estimate the density of the earth by measuring the gravitational deflection caused by a mountain. Does the "Whirligig World" article perchance say anything about how Clement chose the name Mesklin? Gareth McCaughan (talk) 15:32, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

... I found a not-necessarily-legal copy of the article on the we (for whose accuracy I can't vouch) and it doesn't appear to say anything about where the name comes from. Perhaps we'll never know. Gareth McCaughan (talk) 15:38, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Merge into article on "Mission of Gravity"?

There's a proposal to delete this article. I think that's too far, but it could be merged into the article about "Mission of Gravity". Comments? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwheeler (talk • contribs) 18:07, 8 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I don't particularly see anything worth merging myself, but either that or redirecting would be a suitable enough alternative. TTN (talk) 18:10, 8 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review

Passed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:53, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

This review is transcluded from Talk:Mesklin/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: TompaDompa (talk · contribs) 23:02, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 11:49, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Is there anything on the etymology? German Mischling means a mongrel or hybrid, and (WP:OR warning) this does feel like a hybrid planet (gravity + spin) ... would be interesting to hear if there's any source on this.
- Nothing I've found. I would have expected it to be mentioned in "Whirligig World" if anywhere. TompaDompa (talk) 19:51, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe wikilink centipede in lead.
- Done. TompaDompa (talk) 19:51, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Lead: "is considered... commonly regarded to be ... is sometimes regarded as". Maybe say this more directly and less repetitively. I'm not sure I wouldn't just say "is" for the first one, for instance.
- These are all subjective assessments, and I wanted to both make that clear and indicate the relative levels of prominence of the different points among commentators. I swapped the last "regarded" for "viewed" to make it a bit less repetitive. TompaDompa (talk) 19:51, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Concept and creation: there are 5 citations for one claim, and 7 for another, which does seem excessive. There's another in Fictional description that has 5, too.
- These are fairly information-dense sentences where it is necessary to use multiple sources in combination to verify everything, but I've managed to reduce the number of sources for each of them. TompaDompa (talk) 19:51, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Love the sharp edge at the equator! It would of course be delightful to have a corrected diagram of the planet's shape. Did the MIT students give the equation for the planet's curve? Seems to be tough to calculate.
- Not to my knowledge, no. TompaDompa (talk) 19:51, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Morgan further commented that the Mesklinites' human-like thought processes in combination with their desire to gain scientific knowledge while seeking to avoid giving up their independence makes them more reminiscent of an "emerging third world country" than a wholly alien species;[4]: 218 Barron similarly identified a native–colonist analogy.[ - is a bit complex. Split?
- Tweaked somewhat. TompaDompa (talk) 19:51, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For humans to be able to land ... it'd have to be at the equator for low enough gravity. The rate of rotation would mean the spacecraft would have to match the rate by orbiting that fast, which would be so extreme as to throw the spacecraft out of orbit, no? [23] says "contrary to present fact" but I take this to mean "we couldn't sent a spacecraft so far", not "we couldn't orbit or land on something spinning so fast". Has any source commented on that? I read in one of the sources that M would throw off any moons ...
- I don't think so, no. I similarly took Davenport's comment to be about travelling to another planetary system or, given that he wrote it in 1955, space at all. TompaDompa (talk) 19:51, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Holdstock discusses M in a semi-fictional style, with a painting of an astronaut, a giant Mesklinite sea-creature, and some small sapient Mesklinites that don't look much like centipedes. This might be worth using, cropped, as it explores what the planet's lifeforms would have looked like.
- It's a rather tongue-in-cheek work (it cites Conservation[ist] and Non-Interference Motivations in Post-Industrial Space Exploration Programmes by a J.T. Kirk published by Enterprise Press, for instance), which is the reason I haven't cited it inline even though I think it is well worth linking as a "Further reading" item. As for the pictures (on pp. 52–53, 54–55, and 58–59, for future reference; pp. 50–51 and 56–57 contain the textual description), I don't think they would improve the article enough to motivate including any of them. I would be more inclined to use the Mesklinite image in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials (here), but ultimately I think the diagrams of the planet itself are all that's needed. TompaDompa (talk) 19:51, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Images

Sole image is fair use, with NFUR.

Sources

All the sources are appropriate and reliable for the topic.

Spot-checks [6], [12], [23], [28] ok.

Summary

A fascinating article on fiction's brush with science, very well explained. I've very few actual comments, so I expect to see this at GA very soon. Great work. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:31, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Did you know nomination

(

Comment or view
Article history

)

... that Mesklin, the first planet in fiction that was based on a suspected real-world detection of an exoplanet, appeared in 1953?

A bit bloated. How about:

ALT1:... that novelist Hal Clement created the planet Mesklin based on real-world astronomical data that seemed to indicate the existence of an extrasolar planet? DS (talk) 22:44, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm not overly attached to ALT0, but I do think it's interesting that this was the first time that it happened and that it was as early as 1953. TompaDompa (talk) 06:10, 16 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Source: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/60/westfahl60art.htm

Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Milkrun
Comment: If you can come up with a way to make the hook snappier, please do.

Improved to Good Article status by TompaDompa (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 30 past nominations.

TompaDompa (talk) 20:38, 15 January 2025 (UTC).[reply]