Will Pluto be remembered in years to come now that it will no longer be considered as a major planet of its own?  That is a hard question to answer, and one that many people will likely not care about.  Given the proliferation of books concerning popular astronomy that have addressed the subject in at least some detail [1], it is certainly the case that Pluto has at present a great deal of popularity among ordinary people who otherwise have no stake in the field of astronomy, enough popularity to ensure the success of an exploratory mission, the New Horizons venture, that spent several days flying by Pluto and its system of moons snapping photos and making observations for future scientific improvement.  Such an effort is not done without reason, as an object generally must be of some importance for NASA to spend large amounts of a fairly limited budget in order to explore remotely.  Of course, at the time that the mission was launched, Pluto’s status as a planet was relatively secure, even if Pluto was considered an eccentric and oddball planet whose discovery was somewhat fortuitous in that a scientist was looking for an object on the order of Neptune and just happened to look in the right part of space to find Pluto instead.

The question of Pluto’s long-term survival within popular memory is not an idle one.  How many people, after all, know or treasure the name of Ceres, which for several decades was thought to be a new planet, albeit a small one, until known asteroids of various sizes became so numerous that their names are usually numbers, it being too hard to find creative and original names for them given their plentitude.  One can see the same thing happening with Pluto given the abundance of objects being found in the area beyond Neptune going out at least to 100AU, far beyond Pluto’s own eccentric and distant orbit.  Given the possibility of hundreds of similar objects being in existence, the chance that Pluto itself will be remembered by future generations is at least doubtful, given that few people can name any asteroids or more than a handful of moons unless they happen to be particularly serious amateur astronomers or students of the science.  This is to be expected–the amount of time that people spend learning astronomy in school is limited, and the memory is limited, and so those things that are too common are not well remembered.  Though this fact is to be lamented, it is not a surprising fact to anyone.

Is it better for Pluto to be viewed as the first discovered of a relatively common type, or for it to be viewed as an eccentric member of a very exclusive club?  This is a question that is hard to answer, not least because planets are not sentient beings like humans who brood about their loneliness and isolation or feel deeply troubled about being different and unusual when compared to their associates.  When one looks at the way that astronomers work, it is hard not to have in mind the portrayal of high school life in movies from The Breakfast Club to High School Musical and beyond, as involving a somewhat rigid set of cliques.  There are two small groups of planets, each of them four in number, that are named and commonly taught, the four terrestrial planets from Mercury to Mars, and the four gas giants from Jupiter to Neptune.  Between Mars and Jupiter there is a body of asteroids, most of which are given numbers in lieu of their own distinctive names, and beyond Neptune there is a large and ever-increasing number of outsiders in the Kuiper Belt that appear likely to be of vast numbers as well.  Just as Ceres was the first discovered among the asteroids, so too Pluto was the first of its kind, and even has an entire class of objects with the same skewed orbits, making it not only not a unique example of its kind, but one of an entire class of objects with the same tendencies, a true harbinger of a class.

If Pluto is to be remembered, it will not be remembered for being the largest of its kind, or even necessarily the most extensive.  It will rather be remembered because its existence hinted at puzzles that had not even been conceived, and that in seeking to understand how something so odd could exist in the face of previously understood knowledge about our solar system, where everything was on the same plane but Pluto was notably skewed, it was found that there were many objects with the same skew.  So it is in life in general.  A great deal of Pluto’s popularity was because it was a poster planet for people who themselves felt themselves as being somewhat eccentric and out of place given the monotony of others.  Pluto attracted fans among those who considered themselves a bit unusual, and often somewhat stigmatized as a result, people like me.

And just as Pluto is not alone in being eccentric but is rather one of an entire class of like objects, so too those who are fans of Pluto are not alone in being eccentric, but have an often similar skewed sense about ourselves as well.  We are not alone in being alone, and just as Pluto is not an isolated case, neither are we.  The question is, what do we do about it?  Do we dwell in distant isolation, or do we embrace the possibility to belong in a class of our own of which we may be the most obvious and notable, but hardly unique, examples.  Instead of viewing ourselves, or viewing others, as isolated examples without relevance except as strange and off-putting, we can view others as the first of their kind, evidence of entire categories of being that we had no idea ever existed before we saw them and their works with our own eyes, and were convinced despite ourselves that they existed, and had a history of their own worth knowing and understanding, no matter how skewed and odd it appeared to us.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/book-review-how-i-killed-pluto-and-why-it-had-it-coming

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/book-review-would-you-baptize-an-extraterrestrial/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/this-is-why-high-school-never-ends/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/getcha-head-in-the-game/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/were-on-each-others-team/