This is a bit of a cheat blog because I didn’t write one last night and it is just an internet comment which went a bit long, and since there’s no difference, in a literary sense, between a long comment and a short blog, here you go.
When does a hill become a mountain, when does a pond become a lake? The argument I didn’t like was “If Pluto is a planet, there are 3 or 4 others that would have to be designated as planets” because that would have been cool, to have several new planets to talk about, like new dinosaurs.
Personally, I think it should be about sharpening the definition, but whichever way you go you run into contradictions (what in the hell is a platypus?) If you define a planet as a body orbiting a sun, then you’d have to include all the asteroids. If you define a planet as a body orbiting the sun which has natural satellites (moons) of its own, then you’d have to declassify Mercury and Venus as well, which would make Earth the closest planet to the Sun and we’d burn up (just kidding). If they’re defining it strictly by size, then I guess Pluto got the shitty end of the stick.
But no matter what we call it, like the platypus, it’s still there.
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