After all this time, this still ticks me off. A bunch of eggheads huddling in a closed room in Austria think they can reach out and legislate the contours of the universe for the rest of us! And people SWALLOW it! And poor Pluto paid the price. And it's years now, and no one's doing anything about it.
Well now it's payback time. I think that in retaliation, NASA should mount a mission to destroy the planet Mercury. Just utterly reduce it to a streak of dust smeared across its own orbit.
"You knock out one of OUR planets, we'll obliterate one of yours!"
Plus, that'd be just so much more awesome a use of space resources than some ho-hum Mars trip.
Well now it's payback time. I think that in retaliation, NASA should mount a mission to destroy the planet Mercury. Just utterly reduce it to a streak of dust smeared across its own orbit.
"You knock out one of OUR planets, we'll obliterate one of yours!"
Plus, that'd be just so much more awesome a use of space resources than some ho-hum Mars trip.
Comments
First, the controversial demotion of Pluto, which was done in Prague, Czech Republic, not Austria, was done by only four percent of the IAU, most of whom are not planetary scientists. It was immediately opposed by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.
People, whether astronomers or lay people, are not just "swallowing" the IAU definition. Many are ignoring it entirely while others are working to overturn it. Saying nobody is doing anything about this is not true. You can find out more about efforts to get Pluto reinstated from the following sites:
The Great Planet Debate, a two-and-a-half day conference held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in August 2008:
http://gpd.jhuapl.edu/
My Pluto Blog: http://laurele.livejournal.com
Siobhan Elias' "Dwarf Planets Are Planets Too" web site at http://www.dwarfplanetsrplanets.com
The Society for the Preservation of Pluto As A Planet:
http://www.plutoisaplanet.org
Dr. Stern's petition of professional astronomers rejecting the demotion:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/planetprotest/
I will definitely check out your Pluto Blog! Quite right, people are attempting to do something about it, and I hope the movement prevails.
As to Mercury, well. Sometimes drastic words call for drastic measures - and sometimes those words must be mine! But I certainly should not have dismissed or passed over the less drastic efforts being undertaken "on the ground" as it were, by those with a bit less bombast and (perhaps) a bit more sense.
I thank you for setting me straight!