My son’s favorite shirt:
I’ll forget Pluto together with the 200+ other dwarf planets in our solar system, thank you very much.
I understand the rationale for demoting Pluto, and I don’t disagree at all
It’s not even a demotion, it’s just reclassification. There’s no hierarchy of importance of solar system objects. People against a more accurate understanding of reality are dumb.
What’s more fun, demoting pluto or announcing the discovery of a new planet every week for a couple years?
There’s a LOT of dwarf planets we’ve found since Pluto is what happened, basically.
The real problem here is the nostalgia factor. A lot of people grew up having the planets ingrained into their brains with various mnemonics. Hard to say goodbye to “pizza”.
There was no scenario where your precious mnemonics got preserved. If Pluto was still a planet, then Ceres would be too and it would fuck them all up.
Mary’s Virgin Explanation Made Joseph Suspect Upstairs Neighbour’s Potent Cum
MEin VEtter ERklärt Mir Jeden Samstag Unsere NEun PLaneten. Is a German mnemonic
Yes, but your language is even weirder than English.
At least English doesn’t have any words like rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.
Compound words make words rather descriptive and precise though, and we German love being precise.
Beef-sticker-surveillance responsibility-shifting law
The law which transfers the responsibility of regulating grocery stickers on beef to presumably some other state agency?
No, we have “thin blue line” and somehow a long running controversy about which lives matter and which lives still matter but we shouldn’t say it because it implies you think the others don’t matter because of the thin blue lines. Humans are fucking weird, no matter the language.
If Emilia is a scientist at heart and heard that Pluto was reclassified because we found many more like it, she’d probably be fascinated. Mind blown, even, that we’ve found Sedna, Ceres, Makemake, a bunch of others I’ve forgotten the name of, and a few more that just have a number.
On the other hand, she was just introduced to the concept of things like interstellar travel and aliens, so “someone took away one of our planets” wouldn’t have been all that far-fetched. (Especially since the dialogue in the post doesn’t actually mention Pluto. Maybe she thought it was Venus.)
What happened:
