Voyage to the Lost Planet

[krpalmer]

After putting it off time and again, at last I'm posting a first message to this multi-purpose journal... but not under the happiest of circumstances. The International Astronomical Union has spoken, and the number of "planets" without additional qualifying words going around the Sun has been cut to eight.

I can understand the cold logic of it; there are many spherical balls of ice not circling larger things not a star at the outer reaches of the solar system, and we wouldn't have made it past the meeting with nine planets remaining in any case. Even so, the sentimental side of me, that would have been happy saying "the many planets" and left others to choose "the first eight" or "the first nine" or "the first ten", is saddened. In The World Beyond the Hill, a history of the beginnings of science fiction, Alexei Panshin proposed that the announcement of Pluto seemed to open up a solar system of firm limits. Have we just closed it off again?

Still, nobody's asking me to forget about Clyde Tombaugh and his lengthy search made with photographic plates and a blink comparator. (And after he found Pluto, he kept looking; he didn't just congratulate himself and start lobbying for his recognition.) Nor have I been asked to forget about H.P. Lovecraft casting dark aspersions on the discovery in "The Whisperer in Darkness," Robert A. Heinlein's harrowing stopover on Pluto on the way out of the solar system in Have Space Suit--Will Travel, Larry Niven's astronaut in "Wait It Out" who, stranded on Pluto, decides to freeze himself awaiting rescue only to have his brain turn into a superconductor every night, or the SDF-1 Macross winding up at Pluto's orbit through an unsuccessful spacefold in "Macross" and "Robotech."

Comments

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

Poor Pluto. *Hugs.*