Wonder

Is there a fact that fills you with wonder whenever you think about it, no matter how long you've known about it? Something that just gives you a little frisson of excitement whenever you think about it? That's how I feel about Pluto.

Image of the Disney dog Pluto, just his head. His mouth is open, his tongue is hanging out, one ear is down and one ear is up over his head and he is wearing a green collar.

source

NO, not THAT Pluto! This Pluto!

I remember learning about the Solar System in grade school. Our teacher told us, with great authority, that we would never get to Pluto because it was so far away. It was just a dead, cold, lifeless planet, anyway.

Artist's impression of what the surface of Pluto looked like. The image is a rocky, barren landscape with a dark sky, an unrealistic very bright yet small sun in the upper right and a large crescent moon on the left side.

What she was thinking of, probably | source

This would have been in the mid-70s. We had already been to space, although only up to the Moon and back. Space travel was still such a relatively young endeavor and Pluto was so terribly far away that I can see how a grade school science teacher in the 70s would totally discount the idea of humans ever getting there.

And then, in 2015, we did get to Pluto, by way of the New Horizons interplanetary space probe. Launched in 2006, New Horizons reached the impossibly far away Pluto in 2015.

Pluto is turning out to be pretty amazing! Far from being a gray, lifeless rock like our moon, it's colorful! (Although, yes, still lifeless. As far as we know.) It has undergone geological processes - there is evidence of tectonic movements and possibly also erosion and cryovolcanic activity. It has moons! And an atmosphere!

And all of this just fills me with wonder and gives me a little chill every time I think about it. To have gone from "Nope, we'll never get there and it's just a dead, rocky wasteland" to this? Truly fricking amazing.

Keanu Reeves as the character Ted wearing a red jacket and saying Whoa!

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