NASA New Horizons (@NASANewHorizons) | Twitter Account

NASA New Horizons (@NASANewHorizons) | Twitter Account

Pluto is a useless hunk of stone and metal billions of miles away. So why am I excited?

I'll tell you why. Because just 100 years ago we didn't know the damned thing existed. In my mother's grade school science book, Neptune is the most distant object in the solar system. Eventually we had learned enough about math and physics to know that Neptune's orbit wasn't quite following the rules unless something else was out there. Then we figured out where that something else must be, and approximately how large it must be, and we actually found it and named it. Then our telescopes and cameras got better and we could actually see it, albeit only as a tiny speck in a field of celestial objects.

Now we are up to my own grade school science books, in which the solar system had nine planets, the names and sequence of which we faithfully committed to memory. Man had not yet put an object in Earth orbit and I think Jupiter was said to have 12 moons in those textbooks, and we laughed at Galileo's naive assumption of four. We're now at 63 and counting, although Galileo's four enormous ones are the only ones that don't look like driftwood in space.

Some three or four decades ago we determined that Pluto has a moon of its own, Charon, another big space rock which is almost as large as the planet itself, a ratio which causes them to dance a distant orbital ballet around a point outside the planet. Oh, yeah, and the ninth planet itself is now an ex-planet, demoted to join Grumpy and Sneezy among the dwarves. It takes our best earth technology nine and a half years to get to the Pluto/Charon system, even though we can send an object through space as fast as 100,000 miles per hour. Even light itself requires four and a half hours to move from here to there, which makes it very difficult for us to control a space probe en route there. Despite the enormity of those numbers and the difficulties generated by that enormity, we, a bunch of creatures who only recently in astronomical terms have learned to walk upright and use tools, have managed to send cameras through those billions of miles to photograph Pluto and Charon in sharp and glorious resolution and to relay those images back so quickly that we can view them almost immediately.

So yeah, a lot of us nerds, and maybe even some poets, get a lump in our throats when we ponder the magnitude of this achievement and what we might learn from it, and the far greater magnitude of what we might someday discover in the vast universe that lies beyond.

Because this is, as Joe Biden might say, a big fuckin' deal.