Why Jupiter is
Jinxed & Saturn Stinks? MARCH 2026 Musings.
Facts are supposed to provide us with a sense of
clarity and certainty. But sometimes they can be misleading too, if we just
look at them superficially. Take the case of Jupiter and Saturn, the two
largest planets in our solar system.
Let’s take Jupiter. To a superstitious person on
Jupiter the Sun would look like a blazing dot and would seem to follow two
distinctively strange elliptical orbital patterns and hence the person may
think the planet was jinxed. This is the consequence of a unique location of
the Sun-Jupiter center of mass (barycenter). The location is outside the Sun,
making them perform a loose binary dance rather than a simple planet-star
orbit.
Now consider Saturn. Its core consists mostly of
hydrogen and helium, both of which are odorless, while its atmosphere has
methane, ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, water vapor, phosphene, ethane,
acetylene, propane. Its upper atmosphere has ammonia clouds that would smell
like strong cleaning fluid, while deeper layers with hydrogen sulfide might
smell faintly of rotten eggs. To a human being trying to penetrate this
atmosphere, the planet would stink! But only if the human olfactory sense can
survive the journey through its clouds.
In this series of blog posts during 2026, I hope to
discuss facts that may seem strange at first glance, but which could otherwise
be explained. I will focus on one factoid every month.
The factoid for this
month is Not just Humans, African Buffalos also Vote and the females are decisively
enfranchised!
Yes, it must be very humbling (nay, indeed
humiliating), especially for the votaries of modern western democracies to be
told this. But the ecologist Herbert Prins, who spent years observing buffalo
behavior, formulated a theory many decades ago, and confirmed by others, that large herds of buffalo
in fact have a rudimentary voting system to determine the direction they move
in.
African buffalos engage in a democratic
"voting" process to make collective decisions about herd movement.
Adult females indicate their preferred direction of travel by standing up,
looking, and aligning their heads in that direction, with the majority choice ultimately
deciding the herd's path.
And other researchers have found that there is more to
the “buffalo democracy’ than just migration! Some interesting key aspects of
the African buffalo democracy includes:
Inclusive Decision-Making: Even less dominant members of the herd have a say in
the decision-making process.
Directional Voting: Females signal their preferred direction by resting,
then standing up and turning their bodies to face a specific direction.
Collective Choice: The direction that the herd takes is the one that receives
the most "votes" (alignments to traditional pasture cycles),
demonstrating a form of consensus.
Social Behavior: This behavior is part of the complex social
structure and, specifically, the female-led decision-making process in African
buffalo.
So, the next time a candidate turns up at your door
soliciting your vote, remember the following:
ü
A
bellowing buffalo is just nature’s way of telling the world it is there; so too
is the candidate’s supplication, democracy’s way of telling you it still
exists!
ü
A
buffalo seldom wanders far away from the marsh where it was born; and so is the
person standing in front of you!
