So, hey, Pluto is still not a planet. Actually, never was. We just misunderstood it for 50 years. Now, we know better. Nostalgia for Pluto is not a very good planet argument, but that's basically all there is. Now, let's get on with reality.I'm sure this guy thought he pwned the folks defying Pluto's demotion. There's a nastiness in his tweet, isn't there? Not surprising, considering his handle is @plutokiller.
Should we ever make such a discovery, if we ever, anywhere, find that there has been a second, independent genesis in our Solar System, then I think that at that point the spell is broken. The existence theorem has been proven. And we could safely infer from that, that life is commonplace; that it is not a bug but a feature of the universe in which we live and that it has occurred a staggering number of times throughout the 13.7 billion years of the history of the cosmos. And I think that that might be the kind of discovery that could change a great many things.Maybe I'm just curmudgeonly contrarian, but the discovery of extraterrestrial life would not impress me.
![]() | Rocketships are romance. However grounded they were in speculative engineering, rocketships were ultimately acts of art. They were unreal transports to a heaven closer than God’s. They were graceful. Hopeful. Evocative. |