On February 18th, 1930, Pluto was discovered. So, it’s not really a birthday since it existed long before it was discovered, just as America existed long before October of 1492, just as gravity existed before the apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head. Also, Pluto’s not really a planet any more, because it got reclassified, but I feel bad about that. I feel like the human race has taken an adopted dog back to the pound.
Happy Birthday, Pluto
Just because it is small. So what? If we call the Dead Sea a sea and not a lake, then why should Pluto be penalized? On the other hand, fair’s fair, and if we were going to continue to call Pluto a planet, than anything larger than Pluto would have to be a planet, and we’d add Eris and have ten instead of eight, which would screw up the mnemonic phrases just as bad, and that’s really what I was most upset about. It makes no difference to Pluto, which is inanimate and therefore not offended in the slightest that it has been demoted and schoolchildren will no longer be taught it’s name, at least not with the same reverence.
What’s interesting to me, though, is that before 1930, there was no Pluto. That is to say, nobody had ever heard of the planet Pluto.
I know people who were born before that. Sure, not very many of them, but still. It means it was a very narrow window of time in which Pluto was considered a planet. Most of a lifetime for us, but 100 years from now it will be thought of as a short interim, and a 1,000 years from now it will be a strange blip in history, less widely known than the 10 missing days of 1582, when the switch was made from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar.
Most people have never even heard of that, but to the people alive at the time, it was a huge deal. Things get smaller and, sadly, less important, with the increase of distance and time.
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