Sacks of typos as ever .. Man, I wish we could edit in this thing!

Yes that _was_ another hint.

What like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island or the China syndrome transfered from fact to fiction? Or like Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Yep, just what the planet needs – more great dirty holes in the ground with stacks of pollution, radioactive waste, plutonium on tap for terrorists (incl. government terrorists which some would say include the Good ole US of A ..)

In my nation we are now being told of plans to pour acid into the ground to mine uranium for export and all of a sudden, surprise, surpise, a hand-pcked team of nuclear advocates has recomneded nuclearpower as an answer to the anthropocentric greenhouseeffect. Well if they were talking solar they’d beright. But they’re talking uranium fission sothey aredead wrong.

RTGs for space probes and medical isotopes are one (good) thing.

Generating serious amounts of power through a non-renewable rare fuel, mined at great cost and waste that produces dangerous, mutagenic, carcinogenic, near eternal, highly toxic, highly unstable material tahtcan be used asposions and indirty bombs and H-bombs and A-bombs -well that’s another very bad, very stupid thing.

There are better ways – alternative energy from Sun, wind, tides, geothermal, space radiation, Ocean Thermal System (a la JerryPournelle) et cetera.

Nuclear we don’t need. Its very much cure worse than illness.

That whole “cleared its orbital neighbourhood” business all sounds very fuzzy logic and hard to define and plainbadscience. Cleared it sorbit What about Pluto crossing Neptune? What about trojan asteroids and indeed all the other asteroids and comets that cross all planetary orbits? How far is a neighbourhood? What constitutes cleared?

Pluto’s round, its got an atmosphere, its almost certainly geologically diferentiated, it has three moons -one large and two small, it may have rings (they hope New Horizons doesn’t slam into those!) and oh yeah itdirectly orbits theSunand doesn’t fuse atoms like stars! C’mon its a planet!

Okay its small and its in the Kuiper belt but still – if we found an Earth or even Mars size object there surely we’d have to call that a planet -and by the same reasoning then where do we draw the line? At roundness I say or hydrostatic equilibrium and as was first proposed -so Pluto counts, Eris counts Sedna counts,Ceres counts and so what if we have twenty or thirty or more planets in our system! The more the merrier!

Keep calling Pluto a planet Phil, don’t strike it out. The IAU plain got it wrong and until they correct their error lets just treat their misguided, unscientific and undemocratic “decision” with the contempt it deserves!

Anybody know if they can call an emergy meeting between the scheduled ones and remedy their stuff-up?

Great images and news too thanks.

GAry 7

Gee, I wonder how long it will take humanity to fill up the entire Sol system?
In Fire Fly, as in most space oriented SciFi, we assume we have to have interstellar flight in order to have enough room for a multiplicity of social experiments. In reality, if it took 10,000 years to essentially fill up the earth,(from the advent of farming) it could take 3000 times that long to fill the entire system with free orbiting colonies, moon colonies(both above ground and underground), etc. Can you visualize how many such City States there could be?,,,and how dynamic the potential interactions???

GAry 7

Looking at this: , I find myself awed by our ability to send a probe 3 billion miles away, then know where it will be within a thousand miles, and to furthermore setup the trajectory so that both Pluto and Charon will occult the Sun, and to know when it will be within 10 minutes across just over 2 hours starting 10 years from now. They are giving a 1 month window for the start of that 2 hours, but that is still an amazing prediction.

I’m also interested in the plans to do a flyby or two of Kuiper Belt objects, just because that’s cool.

the limit or range of perception, knowledge, or the like.

I think it fits well.

Also, the probes passes by Jupiter in approximately 90 days.

Unless we are talking about an Event Horizon.

Ivan.

Just kidding actually, but I do respect that little probe. Hey, it’s starting to earn its keep already.

Ivan.

There’s no room for sentimentality in science. I tease. But still. It’s not a planet.

2015. Geez. We need new propulsion ideas really badly. :\ Can’t we get something nuclear going?

One day, one day, it’ll be bigger than 5 pixels. I can’t wait to see Pluto, even though some people around me now discards it as something minor. (As if the “planet” title changed its nature.)

Clear skies,