Was Pluto’s 2006 demotion a mistake?
Two things can both be true: The reasons Pluto was demoted from planet were extremely petty The people fighting to reverse it are embracing toxic nostalgia and LOOK WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU
A Frogs Gent10The Pluto debate amuses me because it's grounded entirely in arbitrary categorization. Nothing fundamentally changes whether Pluto is a planet or not. It's simply arguing over what label humans should apply to the frozen space rock.
Dantastic6A lot of it was laziness. It was easier to get rid of one planet than to add four or five of what we now call dwarf planets.
Lurks-No-More5There's basically no reasonable definition of a planet that includes Pluto but not Ceres. And the people complaining about Pluto would not accept Ceres as a planet, because it's all being unhappy about things changing from what they learned as kids.
Mark Shore4the IAU needs a completely objective scientifically rigorous boundary between real planets and dwarf planets that everyone will immediately agree on, like a mass > 0.500 that of Mercury
Skarby Foxy3The new planet definition is pretty ass. As we've been finding more and more exoplanets we've identified plenty that wouldn't fit the definition due to still being in a disc of debris due to far orbits despite being the mass of Neptune or greater.
Alexander Ross1Was in the Facebook group "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet" in 2006-2007. It had over a million members. Was this a Facebook group devoted to activism for restoring Pluto's status as a planet? Absolutely fucking not. It was just a silly online place. Who is actually doing this right now.
The Pluto debate amuses me because it's grounded entirely in arbitrary categorization. Nothing fundamentally changes whether Pluto is a planet or not. It's simply arguing over what label humans should apply to the frozen space rock.
Revan10Clearly the answer is that there’s only one planet and everything else is just part of the Celestial Sphere
Anne M. Carpenter8Arbitrary with respect to the frozen space rock's feelings about itself, sure.(He strong. He brave. He in space.) But... what human meaning isn't arbitrary to a rock? And does that particular arbitrariness resolve whether human meaning is arbitrary?
