2B — Thursday, September 19, 2019
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

There 
isn’t 
much 
to 
remember about 2006. It was 
a year of Razor scooters and 
Dum Dums and multiplication 
tables. I was in second grade, 
where our hottest topics were 
who was seen holding hands 
on the playground, or what 
treats we were bringing in for 
our birthdays. We certainly 
weren’t talking about scientific 
discoveries, 
intergalactic 
developments or the terrifying 
depths of the universe. That 
is, of course, until it was 
announced that Pluto would no 
longer be considered a planet.
This plunged our narrow 
halls into despair. I don’t know 
why I took this news so hard. 
My teacher told me I was at a 
fifth grade reading level and 
I had just gotten a life-sized 
stuffed dog for Christmas, so 
things were going pretty well. 
But this news about Pluto — 
it rocked me. It shook me to 
my Lisa Frank-clad core. I 
remember little about that year, 
but I do remember the day Pluto 
was demoted.
For 
those 
who 
don’t, 
some background: Pluto was 
discovered on Feb. 18, 1930 
at the Lowell Observatory in 
Flagstaff, Ariz. by astronomer 
Clyde W. Tombaugh. According 
to a website for the Library of 
Congress that looks straight out 
of the year 1993, the era during 
which Pluto was discovered 
was one of “intense planet 
hunting.” Hardcore. The name 
“Pluto,” later the name of a 
beloved Disney pet, was actually 
proposed by an 11-year-old girl 
from Oxford named Venetia 
Burney who was interested in 
mythology. To thank her for a 
name that would literally be 
used for the rest of time, Burney 
was awarded five pounds.

Such a great story, right? Well, 
astronomers don’t care about 
the story, they care about the 
facts. And, in 2006, the fact was 
that Pluto could no longer be 
considered a planet. Instead, the 
International Astronomy Union 
(IAU) downgraded it to a dwarf 
planet. To be a full-blown planet 
a mass needs to: 1) Orbit around 
the Sun 2) Have sufficient 
mass to assume hydrostatic 
equilibrium (a nearly round 
shape) and 3) Have a “cleared 
neighborhood” around its orbit. 
Apparently, 
Pluto 
also 
has 
annoying neighbors that hover 
around it, because the third 
criteria is where it lost out.
That’s a lot of science for 
me to understand now, so I 
certainly didn’t understand it 
during the year “A Bad Case of 
Stripes” caused me to become a 
juvenile hypochondriac. What 
I understood was suddenly my 
time spent memorizing the 
nine planets was wasted — all 
the acronyms, the solar system 
dioramas, the crudely colored-
in circles. Why had we even 
spent so much time learning 
about planets? Was it all a 
waste? A facade of happiness to 
be ripped apart when some old 
men decide a planet just wasn’t 
good enough anymore?
In hindsight, I think our 
little 
second 
grade 
hearts 
were broken because we truly 
did love Pluto. It was every 
student’s favorite planet — the 
underdog, the little guy. Oh you 
like Jupiter, Sarah? We get it, 
your dad’s a broker at Meryll 
Lynch. Your favorite planet is 
Saturn, Jason? No one cares 
that you’re in accelerated math. 
Pluto was the planet for the rest 
of us, the ones with no rings, no 
red storm, no semblance of life. 
When Pluto was told it wasn’t 
good enough, we were told we 
weren’t good enough. Everyone 
always says kids are the future, 
the next generation will change 

the world — how could we do 
that when no one will respect 
us?
It wasn’t just the second 
graders, though. The world felt 
the effects of the diminished 
Pluto. Just in the past month, 13 
years since the tragedy of Pluto, 
there 
have 
been 
numerous 
articles about just how bad 
everybody wants Pluto to be a 
planet again. We just want it 
to be happy, to be recognized 
again, to stand along the big 
boys of the Milky Way.
Honestly, I think all of us see 
a little bit of Pluto within us. 
Yeah, it sounds silly to care so 
much about an insentient rock, 
but this stuff hits home. We’ve 
all been told we’re not good 
enough, and if an entire planet 
can be ousted, so can we. I don’t 
care what the IAU says, they 
can’t tell us how to see Pluto, no 
matter what fancy degrees they 
have or how many telescopes 
they own. For Venetia Burney, 
for heartbroken second graders 
and for NASA administrators 
that can’t let things go, there 
will always be Pluto. And for 
Pluto, there will always be those 
who never give up on it.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
In defense of puny Pluto

SAMANTHA DELLA FERA
Senior Arts Editor

B-SIDE: FOR THE SAKE OF PLUTO

The first few bars of the theme 
music for “Star Trek: The Next 
Generation” sounds more like 
ambient music at a yoga retreat 
than the introduction to an ’80s 
imagination of the year 2364. Then 
things speed up, soaring into a 
marching band-esque crescendo, 
and it’s clear: This is the future. 
The Star Trek franchise includes 
12 movies, eight television shows, 
two theme park attractions, two 
magazines, about 850 novels and 
17 series of comic books. The 
cultural impact of the show can’t 
be understated — it’s where we 
got “live long and prosper,” “beam 
me up, Scotty” and “make it so.” 
It inspired “Galaxy Quest” and 
“Futurama,” a few notable scenes 
in the music video for Eminem’s 
“We Made You” and even a 2010 
training video made by the Internal 
Revenue Service.
The franchise garners the kind 
of obsession that’s endearingly 
embarrassing: 
flashing 
the 
Vulcan 
hand 
salute, 
having 
intimate knowledge of Klingon 
chess, making detailed costumes 
for conventions. “Trekkie” has 
become cultural shorthand for 
a very specific kind of fixation. 
It suggests, with a patronizing 
wink, that wanting to be part of 
the world of “Star Trek” requires a 
mix of social isolation and naiveté. 
Instead I think it requires hope, or a 
profound lack of it. 
At the height of my Star Trek 
fandom, I was never the kind of 
enthusiast who found themselves 
mired in the minutiae of the show. 
Instead, it was the big picture that 

I latched onto. I watched “Star 
Trek: The Next Generation” with 
my mom when I was in middle 
school; we liked the cleanliness of 
the Starship Enterprise and the 
grand, sweeping views of planets 
and stars. The world of the show 
(an immense silver vessel, aliens 
with ridged foreheads) seemed 
very far away from the setting and 
context of my life at the time: our 
little row home in Philadelphia, 
homemade pumpkin ice cream, 
math homework, forgetting to 
hang my suit up to dry before swim 
practice. Now, rewatching the 
show, the associations have become 
reverse engineered. “Star Trek” is 
inextricable from the way it felt to 
be fourteen and think the future 
could contain absolutely anything. 
According 
to 
“Star 
Trek,” 
everything we’re worried about 
right now will be OK. There will 
be other things that go wrong — a 
species intent on taking over the 
universe, 
arguments 
between 
factions of aliens — but these 
concerns are foreign enough that 
they’re intriguing rather than 
scary. The show depicts its fair 
share of pain and suffering, but 
usually it’s the aliens who suffer in 
any permanent way; when humans 
do, it’s an aberration from the new 
normal that’s been created. By the 
time the Enterprise is exploring 
new worlds, we’ve eliminated 
climate 
change, 
war, 
disease, 
xenophobia and sexism. On Earth, 
everything is as it should be. 
In the rest of the universe, 
though, these things still exist, and 
nearly every conflict on the series 
involves starship crews becoming 
entangled 
with 
random 
and 
calculated unfairness, cruelty and 
moral complication. We get Klingon 

in-fighting, 
alien 
merchants 
selling slaves, a civilization about 
to be decimated by its dying star. 
“Star Trek: The Next Generation” 
is especially prone to depicting 
easily-recognizable 
versions 
of 
real quandaries. The characters 
encounter everything from sex 
trafficking to territorial disputes 
on distant planets, and they’re 
forced to confront moral codes 
that exaggerate the ironies and 
falsehoods of our own beliefs.
Familiar 
dramas 
play 
out: 
Apartheid is displaced onto a 
matriarchal society in “Angel One,” 
and the Israel-Palestine conflict 
plays out with a group of alien 
separatists in “The High Ground.” 
Here lies the ethical problem with 
“Star Trek,” and also the thing that 
is so deliciously attractive about it. 
Every earthly dilemma has been 
outsourced to an alien species, 
and we get to be the arbiters of 
goodness, the agents of scientific 
reason. Who wouldn’t want to buy 
into this vision of the future?
When I was in middle school 
and 
watching 
“Star 
Trek” 
I 
imagined we were moving closer 
toward the show’s version of the 
future: 
egalitarian, 
democratic, 
creative. Now when I watch the 
show, I vacillate between hope and 
escapism. I want to believe that 
“Star Trek” is predictive of how 
things will turn out for humanity. 
I want us to wander the universe in 
brightly colored uniforms, listening 
to operas sung by sentient robots. I 
hope we will find our way to peace. 
But if that’s not what the future 
holds, if it’s more war and injustice 
and greed that we’re headed for, 
then all I want is to watch Captain 
Picard hold court on the bridge one 
more time.

Trekkie optimism, or: On 
the merits of Klingon chess

MIRIAM FRANCISCO
Daily Arts Writer

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

B-SIDE: MUSIC NOTEBOOK

There’s something so magical about the night sky. Yes, 
the millions of glowing balls of fire above our heads, so 
far away that we perceive them as only twinkles in a sea of 
darkness, are astounding to think about. And yes, there’s no 
act more humbling than staring into space and comparing 
yourself to the scale of the universe. But the true gift of the 
night sky lies in something much harder to articulate: the 
magic of the unknown.
Just like our expansive oceans, with points deeper than 
Earth’s tallest mountains above sea level, we know very 
little about outer space. The vast majority of space matter is 
unidentified; we know it’s there based on its gravitational 
pull on other matter, but we can’t see it with our eyes. This 
dark matter is second only to dark energy, which is causing 
the universe to accelerate in its expansion, a forward 
feedback loop with its feet permanently off the brakes. Yet 
here we are, nice and cozy on our Earth, rarely stopping to 
gaze up into the night sky and wonder about everything that 
remains to be discovered.

In bustling Ann Arbor, though, looking up 
into the sky will reward you with a fuzzy haze 
of gray. Between lamp posts on South University, 
streetlights on State Street and the glow from 
buildings bordering the Diag, light pollution 
blocks the gems of the sky so effectively that it’s 
hard to even make out what you’re missing. But 
I’m always looking, trying to catch a glimpse. 
Whether on a bright fall afternoon, cloud-
covered, misty day or warm summer night, my 
first instinct upon stepping outside is to gaze up, 
take a deep breath and smile in solitude. To know 
that it’s just you and that beckoning expanse 
above, if only for a moment, is the best form of 
therapy. 
Growing up in the Metro Detroit area has given 
me very few chances to see the night sky in all its 
glory without ambient light washing everything 
out. The most memorable time happened to be two 
weeks ago, in the depths of Acadia National Park 
in Mount Desert Island, Maine. At 8 p.m., I sat wiped-out 
in the backseat of my family’s rental car, my legs quaking 
slightly from trekking all day and my Circadian clock 
disoriented by the early sunsets on the eastern-most state of 
the East Coast. The endorphins from earlier in the 
day had faded away, leaving me with an empty but 
peaceful feeling in my stomach, something close 
to gratitude for being alive, though I couldn’t 
place my finger on the emotion at the time. 
Our destination? Sand Beach in the heart of 
Acadia, always populated by tourists and locals 
alike. New pairs of feet continually trampled the 
sand below, only to have their footprints washed 
away by the roaring Atlantic in an instant. 
Sand is a deceiving name: Shell fragments 
make up the majority of the soft earth, teeming 
microorganisms are littered throughout the rest. 
During the day, one can clearly make out the 
looming granite rocks rising on either side of 
the sand stretch, forming a small bay with calm 
waters. At night, it’s a whole different story. 
The wooden steps felt foreign under my feet as I 
descended in the darkness: My feet had forgotten 
that I’d taken the same path the day before in 

broad, piercing daylight. Everywhere I looked was shrouded 
with intense darkness. The only color I could make out was 
jet black, putting even the poignant black of ink cartridges 
to shame. We stumbled onto the beach, faintly able to make 
out the mound of people in the distance. Everyone else had 
brought a blanket, some were cuddling under sleeping bags. 
We sat on the bare sand, letting it fill our shoes and seep 
through the gaps in our clothes. If you’re going to stargaze 
on the beach, best to do it right, no boundaries necessary. 
There was light, just not the kind one might expect. All I 
had to do was look up and the night sky shone upon me, glad 
that my eyes had finally found its destination. Millions of 
stars danced in the night, teasing me, inviting me to dance 
with them. The broad band of the Milky Way stretched from 
horizon to horizon, home to millions of stars, planets and us, 
the Earth. Park rangers pointed out dozens of constellations 
smiling down at us. I smiled back up at them. This world has 
always been there, waiting for the right moment, the right 
place, to show itself. Second only to the total solar eclipse 
of 2017, I’d never beheld anything like it. 
I can only grasp at memories of that night, close my eyes 
and let the stars that fill my mind push all my lingering 
thoughts away. Whenever I get the chance to gaze again, I 
know they’ll be waiting.

Soul-searching and solace-seeking in our solar system

TRINA PAL
Senior Arts Editor

B-SIDE: COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

The only color I could make out was jet 
black, putting even the poignant black 
of ink cartridges to shame

Yet here we are, nice and cozy on 
our Earth, rarely stopping to gaze 
up into the night sky and wonder 
about everything that remains to be 
discovered

It was every 
student’s 
favorite 
planet — the 
underdog, the 
little guy