Bye bye Pluto!

Pluto booted out of league of planets | The Register

Ok, well although it's not such a controversial topic, for people other than die hard geeks, this whole Pluto not being a planet business is somewhat of a downer for me. All of my life I have been expecting something exciting to happen in the "race for space". I thought that perhaps I would get to see the first colonies in space or some other planet, even a slight hint of extraterrestrial life. OK, it is true, we have great images of Mars (see picture), and some pretty exciting missions (the Mars missions, or most of them, the Cassini Huygens mission is awesome, etc.), but come on! Not only we have done very little to explore what's out there but we have had a lot of very anti-climatic news and events: the deadly Space Shuttle accidents, the goof about the metric-imperial system mismatch, and now, we have one less planet!!! What's the deal? Goodbye 9th planet, goodbye!

I guess the most relevant idea we can get out of this rant is that everything is just names, categories, conventions. Today you are a planet, tomorrow you are just a planetoid. Perhaps one day you wake up and you are no longer considered human.