User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-26975268-20130407222910/@comment-5507557-20130409122304

CzechOut wrote: For a wiki to be useful, words must have meaning. The word planet doesn't just mean "something that looks like a planet". I mean, Alzarians look like humans but they're not. So our article at Alzarian does't claim that they are humans.

We may not know what Akhaten is, but we do know that it's not a planet and it's not a god, despite the fact that various people call it that at different points of the story. The best we can say is that it is a "unique entity" that had some properties that made people think it was a planet, but, ultimately, it didn't behave like a planet at all. If we're going to talk about definitions, planet is still a perfectly applicable term in the DWU. I don't believe the term has ever been defined in-universe, so the only definition we can use is the real-world one.

The IAU has two definitions of planet, neither of which excludes living beings. One definition applies to planets in our solar system (http://www.iau.org/public_press/news/detail/iau0603/), and the other applies to planets in other solar systems (http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/boss/definition.html).

It is said that the Sun-singers of Ahket are all in orbit around a single sun, so Ahketan is in orbit around the Sun; it appears to be near-round enough to be considered to be in hydrostatic equilibrium; and compared to everything else nearby it is gigantic so it certainly appears to have cleared its orbit. The definition for planets outside our solar system also requires that they aren't undergoing thermonuclear fusion which Ahketan may be, but that would just make it a star instead.

Calling it a god was only of religious significance and the Doctor stated it wasn't a god ("Oh you like to think you're a god. But you're not a god."). It was never stated that it wasn't a planet, while it was stated that it was, so saying it isn't a planet is contradicting in-universe information.

Humans have a much more strict definition than planets, and outer physical appearance is not enough to determine if something is a human (although it can certainly be used to determine if something isn't). I haven't watched episodes containing the Alzarians, but the article indicates they have certain attributes that differentiate them from humans and them having their own species name implies they have been stated in-universe to be a different species to humans.