Remelting whole planet is such a nonsense, it would take millions of years for the large body as Mars to cool enough for surface to be usable.
By the way, the loss of atmosphere takes millions of years too. The popular "we must restart mars magnetic field" trope likes to omit the fact. In the end occassional replenishment of volatiles would probably be cheaper.
If planets are required to clear their orbits, what was Jupiter called while the solar system was forming? A dwarf planet? A proto planet? The entire time?
Was earth not a planet shortly before and after collision with Theia?
The naming pedantry seems ridiculous given that we have such a small sample size.
Every single definition that segments a real world set of continuous objects into discrete buckets has surprising edge cases. This is basically inescapable.
To steal a quote: All definitions are wrong. Some are useful.
I find that to be the most weird one too. I don't know much about orbital mechanics but in the unlikely chance 2 bodies shared an orbit does that mean they aren't planets then? How close can two planets be before losing that designation? I share your ire.
> If planets are required to clear their orbits, what was Jupiter called while the solar system was forming?
Hell, what's it called now? Jupiter's orbit is shared with millions of Trojans. Many of them are more than a hundred kilometers in diameter; for reference, Deimos, one of Mars' moons, has a mean radius of about 6 km.
Back in the day Mercury, Venus, Earth, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were the 12 planets. You could kinda consider Pluto to be the 13th planet, but in 1930 when it was discovered there were already over 1000 named asteroids. So Pluto is the 1146th planet.
Pallas and Vesta aren't gravitationally rounded, though. But then again, the Moon is (being much larger than Ceres). (It's just better numbered as planet 3-1.)
