Mercury is "he" and Venus is "she?"
How the fuck can one science video be so heteronormative all by itself? As a lesbian trapped in a man's body, I am profoundly offended!
Whatever. I think the minimum separation distance is at least an equally sensible definition of 'closeness'. No planet comes closer to Earth than Venus.
You're right, but then that wouldn't make for a very good video. He went a little overboard on the "Mercury is closest to all planets" angle in my opinion though and should have talked about the different definitions and how the results vary, e.g.
Because some planets like Pluto have highly elliptical orbits, the standard textbook order of the planets doesn't guarantee a meaningful result since sometimes Neptune is further from the Sun than Pluto.
Yeah, there's an infinite number of definitions of representative 'closeness' in a situation like this. I have a soft-spot for the harmonic mean:
Ham Planet, I see them at Walmart all the time.