I relate, bro,” I thought as I heard the news of Pluto being ‘demoted’ to dwarf planet in 2006. It had not passed one of the three new rules of the International Astronomical Union. Why must these rules be so harsh, I pondered (I was struggling to pass four of my five subjects at the time).
Years later, I discovered World Pluto Day (February 18, which commemorates Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto on that date in 1930). This prompted a check-in on my old fellow underdog. To my chagrin, I learned that Pluto’s demotion apparently hadn’t even been fair.
The IAU’s new criteria for a planet had been: it must orbit the sun, be spherical and “clear the neighbourhood”. It was this third rule—Pluto’s shortcoming—that is said to have lacked nuance. It failed to consider that Pluto shares space with frozen debris of the Kuiper Belt. In fact, it has been suggested that if earth were moved to Pluto’s orbit, our home would lose its planet status; Mother Earth would struggle to clear that neighbourhood.
Several experts were left aghast by the IAU’s imprudence. I read of “stern remarks” by some guy calling the move “scientifically indefensible”. As it turned out, the remarks came from a guy named (Alan) Stern, who was the principal investigator of the New Horizons probe. He argued that by the IAU’s logic, a Chihuahua wouldn’t be a dog because it’s too small to clear the neighbourhood of a Great Dane.
In 2015, New Horizons—a part of NASA’s New Frontiers programme—showed that Pluto is a geologically alive and complex world, shattering the assumption that small, distant bodies are just dead rocks. Pluto had even preserved raw chemical ingredients of the early solar system in a deep-freeze. Moreover, as gatekeeper of the Third Zone of the solar system, Pluto is key to our preparation for potential earth-killers emerging from the Kuiper Belt and beyond.
As all this information washed over me, I realised something: the rush to label things can make us miss details. We classified Pluto before really understanding it—just like we reduce people to job titles or put names on relationships before grasping their true dynamics. We also tag emotions to escape the messy nature of feelings. It could even explain our discomfort with ambiguity, which manifests in the tendency to gossip as well as in the depths of voyeurism.
While the scientific intent of labels is utilitarian, socially, they can lead to identities that confuse and mislead. For instance, in our society a Pluto would be perceived as having failed to make the cut, by our definitions of ‘success’. It would be labelled a loser; the detail that it is a geological marvel (said to be more alive than Mercury and possibly Mars, and more complex than the gas giants and, in some ways, even the ice giants) may never come to light.
So, as we sit here, on the most happening planet in the solar system, trying to fit all we encounter into neat little categories, out there, in the frozen reaches of the Third Zone, Pluto is living its life, blissfully unaware that about six billion kilometres away, a species of opinionated, hairless apes is judging it.