Steel Balls

Speaking of New Horizons…

The fact that Pluto is the furthest known outpost of Steelers Nation solidifies the argument that Pluto should be considered a planet once again. Although it’s small, Pluto has more planetary character than Mercury. Pluto has interesting structure with a surface littered with frozen gases and mountains of ice, and even has a thin atmosphere. It also has five moons. Mercury is a burnt cinder with nothing interesting at all with no atmosphere, much like downtown Baltimore. It’s basically a big space rock. Pluto’s orbit is eccentric, but that shouldn’t be an issue. The word planet means “wandering body”. A planet could be free floating in space without orbiting a star and it would still be considered a planet, so the orbit should not matter. The argument that a planet should have cleared its “neighborhood” of competing rocks is also arbitrary. All of the inner planets, including Earth, had their neighborhoods cleared thanks to the Sun and Jupiter which is cheating like a Patriot. Poor Pluto has been doing that job all on its own, with maybe an occasional assist from Neptune. I say if you are spherical, have at least some atmosphere and diverse surface features, you ought to be a planet. If you need to kick one to the curb, it should be that chunk of charcoal Mercury.

+1