Protesting Pluto and Improving Our Planetary Paradigms

SOME YEARS AGO, maybe twenty, a group of the world's astronomical planetary scientists gathered together and decided by vote that the planet Pluto is no longer a planet, even though there were not enough people in the room to technically take such a binding vote. This action engendered immediate and vehement reaction. Most folks, it seemed, hated it, and believed that Pluto had been dealt with dirtily. Lay people got involved, by the googol. Petitions were written and circulated. Protests sprang up on America's street corners and around the world. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the home of Pluto's discovery in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, the street corner protesters held signs like: "Bring Back Pluto" and "Free Pluto" and even goofier ones. There were two sides to this story. The Plutonic pro-planetary eviction people held strong, with the strong argument that in Pluto's part of the solar system there are thousand of rocks as big as Pluto in similar orbits; if Pluto is a planet, so are thousands of other smallish orbiting planetoid rocks. Assigning planetary status to Pluto in the first place, and even naming it, has proven to have been a bit, shall we way, premature. Key here is the fact that the action taken by the International Astronomical Union triggered a backlash, when one might not have even been expected, including near revolutions in the streets, especially here in the land of superfluous revolutions, the U.S. of America. In this country not only do we argue about anything and everything, we'll fight over it and revolt against it, and that fact makes us beautiful, bigly, to quote Trump. Jesus himself brought a revolutionary approach, although he said he didn't want to rebel against any existing authority, but merely to add improvements to existing institutions. Then so be it. Let's do the same here and now. Let us revolt against the world the way it is, and start the process of building a better one. Out into the streets with us, or onto the internet, whichever works best and is more convenient, with our hand painted signs reading "No More War", "End Hunger", "Cure Disease", "End Poverty", "Equality Now", and all that kind of good stuff, even if nobody carries a sign defending the dignity of the late great planet Pluto.