maniakos

Same here Kevin, my three favorite movies are all sci-fi, The Abyss, Contact and now Interstellar too. But I too know I will never experience those possibilities. Most people for instance would be in fear of or draw weapons on a UFO and it's occupants should they ever encounter one for instance. Not me though, I would look at them and say "Come here so we can communicate and be friends."

And only 500 light years away.... a close neighbor...

I dunno how old or young you are ... but I already have seen a radical shift in our experience of the universe, by the mere advent of the age of exoplanet discovery.  I grew up on Carl Sagan.  I was very bright-eyed at the prospect of finding other worlds around distant stars, but ... it was still just a dream, a hypothesis.  It seemed reasonable, but we had no evidence ..... and now we do.  And that's amazing!

That's not to say I'm not sorely disappointed we've lost the fire for space exploration.  We could have had a manned mission to Mars over and done with by now, but instead we elect politicians only interested in keeping their wealthy benefactors wealthy, and finding impoverished people in far-off lands to bomb. :/  It isn't a matter of we couldn't do it because we don't have the technology, we could have had it decades ago.  We have more than enough resources to do it .... but we have to change our leaders to get there.  Keep electing the same idiots, we'll keep grinding our gears in space.

And now this:

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-kepler-mission-discovers-bigger-older-cousin-to-earth

Apparently we have discovered Stellar Cartography. That should mean it's just a few more turns until we get Hyperdrive...

Let the Gremlins do it.

Then we must make at least Eris a planet, too, and probably Haumea, Makemake, Ceres, 2007-OR-10, Sedna, and Quaoar as well. Plus the 10,000 or so other similar bodies that we haven't found yet but probably are there.

Mind you, I am not against labeling them all planets. The current definition is a bit artificial and smacks of tendentiousness. It'd be more logical to just use a simpler definition and drop the orbit clearing rule. Our solar system would then have "as many planets as it happens to have" and if that number turns out to be huge then it turns out to be huge and that's it. After all, we are supposed to make our theory first and then check it against reality.

It's just that I can understand the argument for having two categories of planets in order to limit the number of the "major" ones, too. Even if the line we draw between normal-sized and dwarf-sized ones happens to be somewhat arbitrary.

But in any case we should be rational and consistent with our definitions. If we want to define Pluto a planet then we must accept any similar object by that definition a Planet, too.

In the mean time you can take comfort in the thought that Pluto is not just any old dwarf-planet but the title-body to a whole class of dwarf-planets: the Plutoids.

a good reason to make not make Pluto a planet is so kids don't. Have to memorize 3008 names for planets in school. Pluto has not cleared it's. Neighborhood. Their are thousands of objects like it in our solar system. It is a dual planet in a sense it orbits around the same center of gravity with five other objects that go around the sun. It's way smaller than our own moon.