Spare Pluto, Save The Future

By: Bryan D. Applegate
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:24:52
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Honk if you Love Pluto! Casual surveys such as this bumper sticker quote began springing up immediately following the International Astronomical Union's decision to reverse itself when the definition of a 'planet' suddenly ousted Pluto. At the same time the bounds of our Solar System lurched significantly closer, it seems as if our imaginations about the boundlessness of space were suddenly more confined.

In 1930, the announcement of Pluto's discovery was poetic and imaginative. Pluto was described as being, “black as coal, nearly dense as iron, [and] twice as dense as the heaviest earthly surface rocks.” Lofty names were suggested including that of the reigning King, the astronomer, Lowell, who located it, President Hoover and Minerva. The name of one of Saturn's sons, Pluto, was the result.

The buzz and whir of telescopes and stunning calculations of mathematicians were set to play against the cold, dark night of space. From 1930, forward to our announcements of three new planets, Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter and Neptune collected a total of eighty-eight satellites and moons between them. Even Pluto gathered up Charon, Nix and Hydra as satellites. The frenzy and expansion of space was perfectly fitting.

The everyday man was encouraged to draw space in his imagination in his own likeness. No fantasy was too fantastic; Astrology proclaimed Pluto the mark of one's inner truth or guidance. Pioneer 10 was designed to last for twenty-one months. It passed beyond Pluto's orbit entering interstellar space eleven years after its launch. Defying its own design, its radio receiver crackled information back to Earth for nearly thirty years. Space was a thing of dreams and amazing facts and speeds and numbers and possibilities.

Pioneer 10 is now headed toward the constellation Taurus where it will pass the nearest star in that constellation in about two million years. The growth of a species depends on what room they have to grow. The energy created by the very idea that our Solar System was expanding still farther by the addition of three new Planets was electric in the minds of every net-surfer, space watcher movie-goer and day-dreamer. It seemed that the sky lifted; the rain storms in the day became smaller and more trivial and easier to bear.

The International Astrological Union announcement on a Friday that the following Monday would change the course of a thousand-thousand textbooks and the history of the future was humbling to conceive. The future's potential would be greater than our own for we remembered when there were only nine planets! A greater Universe is exactly what civilizations and progress build for younger generations and we had done it in a weekend after 76 years since Pluto's discovery and walking on the Moon and building space stations and crawling on Mars.

All those advances would seem like child's play. Before we finished honeymooning the fantasies and re-writing the tasks we had in mind for the future generations, the same Union not only recalled the new wing of the Solar System, but their limitations ate into what we had long held dear. Pluto had suddenly been cast into the newly defined list of, “Dwarf Planets.” Inner truth and guidance be damned; a thousand-thousand textbooks would now be changed to reflect history filled with more hope and ambition than the future!

“Your Universe is smallish. We remember when there were nine planets.” And the future was boundless.

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