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Shufflingdead > Articles > Extracurricular
Pluto is Not a Planet
I'm brilliant, it's impossible to deny. It's easily proven too. For years I've been saying that Pluto should not be considered a planet, and it seems astronomers have finally caught up to my all encompassing understanding of everything, and set the solar system right.
You see, Pluto's orbit is whacked the fuck out, it just doesn't line up with the eight real planets of the solar system. It likes to hang out with the other hoodlums of the Sol system, a gaggle of ice balls in the Kuiper belt who could never afford a better orbit. Real planets have nice, clean, round orbits close to the sun like Earth and Mars. Sometimes they blow their wealth on a giant body and hang out a little further away like Jupiter. Pluto could just never compete, and scientists have finally shown the little bastard the door.
Kuiper belt objects, along with their dwarf planet kin don't understand what it takes to be a planet, they don't bother clearing their orbits of other objects, and sometimes they're so small they can't even overcome rigid body forces to make themselves round.
Becoming a planet is like joining an exclusive club. There are rules for these sorts of things, we need to keep the riffraff out, or else any jackass of a rock could become a planet, and I'd never be able to remember all their names. If Pluto had remained a planet, that would have cleared the way for potentially dozens more planets. It's a chilling thought for someone like me, whose overpowered brain couldn't be bothered to actually memorize his multiplication tables.
Mere humans that they are, astronomers still lag behind the sort of super intelligence that an Arts education has granted me. Their definition of a planet still fails my rigorous testing. The persons responsible for deciding this new definition didn't bother including anything about objects with eccentric orbits. Any real planet ought to have an orbit shaped like a fine woman, completely round. Pluto's orbit is elliptical and it intercepts with the orbit of Neptune, and it could have just as easily been kicked out by my own, much more eloquent definition.
If the scientists of the world were all as intelligent as me, they would have figured out interstellar travel by now, and we'd know what other solar systems look like. Since they aren't that smart and they haven't figured out interstellar travel, very little is known about other solar systems. It's impossible right now to know if our system is the standard, and I can dig it if the definition of planet has to keep changing to keep up with new discoveries, I’m just going on what our solar system looks like.
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