AmericanPapist Comments
The problem is, it took 9.5 years (not a joke) and a team of 2,700 scientists (also not a joke) to make this decision. And those people wre getting paid BIG money. It's kind of disgusting that going through all this just to define a planet and cancel out Pluto was so important in the grand scheme of life.
I'm a big supporter of what these people call "triumphs of science over sentiment," but this still makes me a little sad. :(
It's just all so pointless. No one CARES about this kind of stuff to the point that you have to change decades of textbook information. That money could have been spent on helping sick children, trying to find a cure for cancer, providing homes for children displaced in war, etc. The list could go on and on and on and on of the world's needs. The world DIDN'T need THIS.
And still the world(s) spin on. I thought all the fuss over the calenda--Anno Dominie vs Common Era--was bad. Who paid good money for this anyway. Didn't someone discover a tenth (or ninth or eleventh) planet anyway, one with an even more crooked orbit? Now what?
I, too, this this is a waste of time. As some astronomers have noted, the definition of a planet has absolutely no bearing on their work... the action taken the other day isn't going to impact the work of astronomy in any way. One astronomer (go back and to NPR's archives for Talk of the Nation last Friday, the 18th) argued persuasively that they should just use the cultural definition of a planet, which includes Pluto.
Just a waste of time, it seems to me.
I think accuracy, and consistency, are always important, even in "little" things. And Pluto is not a planet.
Commenting by HaloScan
