Pluto is a PLANET
Get over it , and no bunch of no marks voting after everyone else had gone home is going to change that! :D
The fifth "dwarf planet" of the solar system, Haumea, is shaped like a rugby ball 2,000km long and its icy surface is warmed by radioactive uranium and thorium ores in its interior. The strange ellipsoid world is thought to have a day just four hours long, and is attended by a brace of moons as it circles the Sun far out in the …
When dwindling reserves of radioactives become an issue on earth we should be able to construct vessels, stations and, facilities to exploit the various resources in the solar system (that is if we've decided we're going to survive as a species) otherwise the species will either be pretty much dead due to conflict, or pretty much a dark ages society if we decided that power and technology is bad.
To paraphrase "How do you know he's the king?"
"Coz he doesn't smell of shit like the rest of us!"
It'd be interesting to be a fly on the wall in a few hundred years to see how Humans are working out.
"this dwarf planet is a very very VERY VERY long way away."
Indeed. Around 34AU at its closest to the sun, whereas Neptune orbits at around 30AU. The perennial favourite manned mission target, Mars, with all the "it would take astronauts months if not years to get there" lamentation, lies at a mere 1.5AU.
Yes, that "not to scale" illustration of the Solar System in that schoolbook was very pretty, but didn't give much indication of the jaw-dropping distances involved.
Its a culture GSV with it's shields up, with a few escort ships.
Given the collective intelligence of our parliment(s) and the over-subscription to the darwin awards by the rest of the populous, I'd say on of them is the Grey Matter having a bit of fun on a planetary scale.
...an Orbital. Or for the uninitiated, a small planet with a Mind in it. Capital M to indicate the hyperintelligence levels.
And there was me thinking I'd be different for making an Iain M Banks-related post on some other article. Oh well, I'm just waiting for the BBC to (refuse to) play David Bowie's Space Oddity on request for "the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail aboard her."
...if That Ship were in orbit, I don't think we'd have much of a problem with dictators and ..well, politicians in general any more. As I understand it, Grey has something of a.. fetish, with regards meting out psychopathically righteous and ironic "justice" to genocidal maniacs and other ne'er-do-wells.
I think it (she?) would find Earth to be a positively orgasmic source of fun!