I've been watching the planet/KBO argument with fascination, largely because of the passion people bring to it. And I'm reminded very much of the early (here I go on one of my riffs) automobile. For the first 20 years or so, the automobile was called the 'horseless carriage', and it looked just like a carriage. Since we'd had hundreds of years of carriages and only a few years of automobiles, it was natural to see it as just another breed of carriage. But over time, engineers found that there was no reason to build a car like a carriage. And cars developed capabilities that far outstripped their horse-drawn antecedents. The name 'carriage' reverted back to something with wheels that a horse pulls around. The term 'planet' is like that. It had a pretty universal meaning until fairly recently. The term got stretched a bit when Uranus was found; then more with Neptune, but there wasn't much of a change in concept except the loss of naked-eye visibility. Now over only a generation, we're overwhelmed by thousands of big rocks going around the sun. We argue over a categorization -- planets, Kuiper Belt objects, trans-Neptunian objects. It may be simply that the term 'planet' can't get stretched any farther without losing its meaning and its historical associations. These things have a way of working themselves out, and I'd imagine some less-unwieldy term will find its way into common usage eventually. Michael
This seems to be the underlying reason behind some of the classification criteria, and what I am rejecting outright as truly arbitrary.
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