War Looms

The Plutonians are Not Going to Take Their Expulsion Lightly

By Dan Rattiner

You may not know this, but the man who discovered Pluto is at this very moment flying through space on his way there.

The man is Clyde Tombaugh, born a poor farm boy in rural Kansas in 1907. When he was in high school, he learned that mathematicians just a few years earlier had come to the conclusion that there might be another planet out there beyond Neptune because every once in a while Neptune would be thrown a slight bit off course by the gravity of some object further out. There was a lot of mathematics to be done to find out exactly where this pull was coming from, but they’d get it. Someday.

Fascinated, Clyde studied the math. In 1930, at the age of 23, he thought he had the answer, and so he bought a regular tri-pod mounted student telescope, set it up in the backyard of his parent’s house and aimed it exactly where he believed the source would be and voila, Pluto! The discovery of this ninth planet created a sensation around the world.

Clyde Tombaugh died in 1997 at the age of 90 and was cremated. And then, by pre-arrangement with his family, just this past January, his ashes were put aboard the New Horizons Space Probe which was launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, in anticipation of reaching Pluto in 2015.

The Plutonians have, needless to say, been very excited about the impending arrival of the Earthian who “discovered” them. There are going to be parades, a brass band, a tickertape parade, various performances out at the landing strip where Tombaugh will arrive, and, of course, speeches. Right now, as we speak, artisans on Pluto are preparing a giant “key to the planet” for this famous man.

Last week, as you all know, Pluto got officially booted out of the solar system. The orbit that Pluto takes around the sun is somewhat different from the orbit taken by each of the other eight planets. That little glitch is what did it in. And a transmission of this decision was sent on its way to those involved.

I do not know when there will be a meeting of the representatives of the Big Eight, as they are known, to discuss just when and how Pluto will get the boot. But whenever that happens, you can be sure it is not going to be pretty. You can’t have a ninth hanger-on non-planet spinning around in the busy, busy solar system screwing up the works. It’s got to be sent on its way.

As I understand it, no Plutonians were allowed to speak or even attend the big meeting about whether or not they were still on a planet. Discussions took place. The decision was made. A further decision was made for a committee to decide how this decision could be implemented. The meeting ended. Everybody left.

I feel very badly for Clyde Tombaugh. He is sealed inside this unmanned rocketship and he has no idea about the decision. He is, at the present time, according to the article in TIME Magazine where I learned about his trip, somewhere carefully wending his way through the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, and probably thinking happy thoughts about his upcoming welcome. There are transmitters and receivers on board for data to go back and forth, but no radio communications. He is not going to know what happened until he gets there.

This is very, very poor planning to have made this decision just eight months after his launch. It wouldn’t have hurt if they had put it off for a while. But they didn’t. Frankly, I worry mightily about what might happen to this man. And to us.

The Plutonians are not going to take this lightly. At the present time, they are in the midst of their preparations. This was to be a planetary welcome that would make the Earthian Olympic Games look like a small private dinner party.

As we all know, the speed of light is far faster than any rocketship that we may send through space. Although Tombaugh has been given a head start, there is little doubt that before Tombaugh arrives in 2015, the residents of Pluto will receive the message from Earth that they’ve been given the boot. It will arrive in 2011. They will have four years to prepare a whole new welcome for Tombaugh. And, boy, will they be angry.

There is little doubt that some of the more intellectual residents of Pluto will assume, inaccurately, that the Solar System knew exactly what they were doing with all of this. From this perspective, the sending of Tombaugh will be seen as a complete insult to them. First they throw Pluto out. Then they throw the guy who got Pluto in out too, right into their laps. What gall.

They’ll probably tear him limb from limb, videotape it, and send a broadcast of the video back to the Solar System. Then, they’ll set on fire all the tickertape confetti for the parade, all the balloons, streamers and floats, all the stadiums and planetary flags and souvenir t-shirts and caps and even the eternal flame of peace, something very hard to do on a planet this cold, and then they will blow up all that didn’t burn and the remains of Tombaugh with it. And then they will announce they will not leave the solar system and Declare War on us all.

There will be those who say, so what? How is one little planet, half again smaller than even the littlest of the Big Eight, possibly going to prevail against the rest of the Solar System? Let them come. But like everything else, strange things can happen. Look at what nineteen Islamic terrorists did in 9/11. There is a rumor down at the Pentagon that Pluto has developed snowballs of mass destruction. We’re not set up to defend against something like that.

I wish I could say that there was something we could do about this impending catastrophe. It has been said that perhaps we could have another meeting and decide to postpone for ten years this decision to boot Pluto out. If we did that, and then we send them a message to say that there has been a mistake and Pluto is still welcome in the Solar System and we are very sorry about all this, it could help, except for the immutable reality of the speed of light.

The speed of light is the speed of light. We’ve already sent the worst message possible and it’s on its way. And now it’s nine months later. No matter what we send, we cannot get a newer message to go any faster than this first one. No Fed-Ex, no UPS, no Overnight, nothing is going to get the second message to pass the first.

So during the interval between the arrival of the two messages (at best ten months) — Pluto will do terrible things to Clyde Tombaugh, then electrocute him by tying wires to his testicles and toes, than set everything on fire, blow up what is left, mobilize an army and declare war – and then the SECOND message arrives and we expect them to believe that?

Frankly, there’s nothing to be done. The milk is spilt. We just have to get the hell out of here.