Reply To: What if?

I’m going to guess, from the color of that picture, that it is of Charon, not Pluto.

I was born just over 50 years ago. I don’t think I remember Apollo 11, but I do remember Apollo 12. And Pioneer 10 and 11 probes to Jupiter and Jupiter and Saturn, respectively. And the two Voyager probes (and I still want to call them V’ger, but that’s another issue). And Viking.

We’ve gone from probes to the moon, Venus and Mars to probes over all eight of the other bodies I thought of as planets, growing up, in my lifetime. This is in many ways closure, at last we’ve got them all. What a triumph!

Of course there is much to learn about all of these bodies. It will be interesting to see if we return to Uranus and Neptune any time in my lifetime.

(PS I side with the people who reclassified Pluto. I don’t think of it as a demotion; it’s the “flagship” of a new class of objects. And, personally, I think gas giants and rocky “terrestrial” planets should be in different categories too.)