Hehe...I read this and imagined that he was advocating blasting out of space the iceball someone named Pluto that has been long miscategorized as a planet. KaBlam! Wait, maybe he does mean that...
From now on, everyone should ignore the distracting debates of the scientists, and planets in our solar system should be defined not by some attempt at forcing a scientific definition on a thousands-of-years-old cultural term, but by simply embracing culture. Pluto is a planet because culture says it is.
We are then left with two cultural choices. (1) Draw the line at Pluto and say there are no more planets; or (2) Draw the line at Pluto and say only things bigger are planets. Both would be culturally acceptable, but to me only the second makes sense. In addition, the second continues to allow the possibility that exploration will find a few more planets, which is a much more exciting prospect than that suggested by the first possibility. We don't think the number of planets found by the current generation of researchers will be large. Maybe one or two more. But we think that letting future generations still have a shot at planet-finding is nice.
Thus, we declare that the new object, with a size larger than Pluto, is indeed a planet. A cultural planet, a historical planet. I will not argue that it is a scientific planet, because there is no good scientific definition which fits our solar system and our culture, and I have decided to let culture win this one. We scientists can continue our debates, but I hope we are generally ignored. -- Michael Brown