Pluto fans face harsh reality
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. As my favorite Western interpreter of Eastern philosophy Alan Watts might say, the tail goes with the cat.
So it goes with the Pluto fans. OMIGOD, they can’t take Pluto away! Alright then, but if Pluto’s a planet, so are a bunch of other stupid little crusty rocks on the fringes of the Solar System. Then we’d have 12 planets, at a minimum.
NO! Not 12 planets, 9! We only have 9! (Picture the hitchiker from Something About Mary going, “No, no! Not 6-minute abs!!”)
Yes, sweetheart, you have to choose. Either Pluto is a planet, in which case we’re going to have to start buying tons more styrofoam balls for our kids’ new models of the million-planet Solar System… or Pluto is NOT a planet, and we’re left with the Big Eight, with Pluto relegated to the status of Most Famous 4th Grade Science Trivia Question for the next 500 years. Either, or. Can’t have it your way. Not Burger King.
Today, it seems that the International Astronomical Union has chosen science over sentimentality and made the right decision. Get ready for the weeping and gnashing of teeth. Maybe some candlelight vigils. Perhaps a lawsuit or two. Pluto always did have a funny orbit, after all. This could be billed as class warfare and discrimination on a Planetary Scale.