A Giant Waste Of Time

I knew it. I have long suspected that everything I learned as a child in school was a giant waste of time, and today my suspicions were confirmed.

For those of you who have not yet heard, Pluto is no longer a planet. Yes, leading astronomers had been meeting this past week to decide the fate of the solar system…and when all the votes were in, Pluto was out.

Therefore there are now only 8 planets, which are defined as:

“a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”

Pluto, for those wondering, is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune’s. It will now instead be reclassified as a “dwarf planet.”

Now, maybe this decision might be popular among these alleged astronomers who had the final decision in this matter, but i worry that this is a slippery slope we’ve started down, and to be honest i am downright fearful of what else might prove to be useless in the coming years.

Just think how many minutes were wasted trying to learn the planets way back when. Time that could have been spent doing more important things like playing video games, or watching tv, or eating crayons (or however else you chose to spend your free time as a child). I imagine that at least 5-10 minutes could have been saved had I needed to only learn 8 planets as opposed to (the at the time correct amount of) nine.

And I ask you, what’s next?

Will they decide in a few years that Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species is no longer the proper way to classify things in Biology? Will I be forced to come up with some other mnemonic device besides King Phillip Came Over From Great Spain in order to sort it out? How long will that take?

Am I going to wake up tomorrow and find out some new element has been discovered to the periodic table? That it slides in between Selenium and Bromine. And now Bromine has become 36, and Krypton is 37, and Rubidium 38, etc…

Or, perhaps someone is going to finally declare once and for all that Grover Cleveland should only be counted one time as President, and that all the other numbers from 22 on are one off (because even if he was elected to 2 non-consecutive terms, he is still only one man and so really there’s only been 42 men to ever hold the office).

Where will it end?

Is nothing sacred?

I will tell you that looking back this evening on all the time I (potentially) wasted, I am extremely grateful for one thing…

That I refused to attempt to learn the metric system. A decision, which I might add, that led to a D for one marking period in 7th grade.

Ms. Hennessey, my science teacher, did not accept my logic that Americans didn’t need to learn the metric system because as the leaders of the free world other countries would adapt to whatever system of measurements we wanted to use.

And that there was no chance the metric system would ever become the dominant system of measuring in the United States, and therefore it was foolish to spend the time trying to learn all the conversions.

I remember she laughed at me, telling me that I had a narrow view of the importance of the metric system and that someday in the future I’d be grateful that I knew that 100 feet is equal to 3.05 dekameters or approximately 30.5 meters.

Well, who’s laughing now Ms. Hennessey? Who’s laughing now?