today, i lost a planet. my universe has shifted.
and it happened this morning in czechoslovakia. Who’d a thunk it?
now, I am not maligning czechoslovakia or its citizenry. not at all. it’s just that when i looked up to the heavens each night as i was growing up, i never dreamed that a group of people, one of whom apparently waved a stuffed disney character named pluto aloft would be able to change forever how I look at my evening sky.
so, these days even our cosmos is no longer sacred. i mean, it’s not like in was in 1930 when they discovered a new planet - the very pluto I’m talking about here. and it’s not like that morning in 1983 when i woke my teenagers telling them that the dusty stuff all around vega was thought to signal the formation of a new solar system. It said so on npr and on the front page of the washington post. “get up,” I ordered them.”new solar systems are being born.” i was enchanted.
no.
discoveries are something we all understand can add to our knowledge. as genealogists, we are used to opening our minds to accommodate all kinds of strange discoveries.
but to me, that is not what this demotion of pluto is. it’s akin to discovering that you’re not related to half the people you’ve been meticulously documenting in your database because some guy’s dna somewhere doesn’t match up, and you’re not in the family you thought you were. and yet, they were your family….
in both scenarios, knowledge has been subtracted. not just a little piece of knowledge. i mean, really, we’re talking whole worlds’ worth!
so now my mind has to forget that list i dutifully memorized and proudly burned into my brain back in second grade - all the planets of our known universe: mercury, venus, earth, mars, jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune, and pluto.
with a stroke of the pen, or maybe several pens - but more likely with a bunch of keystrokes on a bunch of computers - pluto is no longer a planet. it has been fired from planetdom because it was an oddball. it simply didn’t fit in with all the other planets with its warped orbit and puny mass. big tough guys rule. big tough planets rule.
if you stick define: cosmos into google this morning, as I did, you’ll find that the resulting definitions usually contain something about it being the universe and being an orderly or harmonious system. well, HAH! my universe is no longer orderly. i lost pluto.
does anyone else care?
hello?
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