Comment by lloda
9 hours ago
Pluto was only discovered in the 1930s. The only cultural heritage of Pluto as a ‘planet’ is a few decades of science schoolbooks, but going by these comments you'd think it's been in the same list as Jupiter since the Babylonians.
Unfortunately this is both a false dichotomy fallacy and an appeal to extremes.
1. Yes, there are culturally significant things that have happened since the 1930s, including the discovery of Pluto and its designation as being a planet. In fact, in 2006 -- far more recently -- a group of people got together -- known as the IAU -- and they also performed a cultural act amongst themselves when they decided to stop calling Pluto a planet, undertaking a social process ("voting") in adopting criteria for doing so.
2. If you would rather define a planet as a wandering star that's visible to unaided humans in the night sky, I'd respect that, and I kind of like the idea. It's somewhat romantic, and it avoids the myriad issues that the article here discusses that have caused the 2006 IAU definition to start to smell bad. However, it's really none of my business. The problem comes up when you police what other people call things, not when you decide to subscribe to the IAU of your own volition.
Yeah apparently people are getting harassed on the regular about Pluto, I'm a little confused.
Uranus and Neptune don't have a long human heritage either. Neither appears to have been known to the Babylonians.
Uranus has been observed since antiquity, but wasn’t recognized as a planet.