We are naturally baffled by the downgrading of Pluto from ninth planet to non-planet. Who decides these things? Why should they make the news anyhow? Who cares? Who stares up into space and sees anything more than the moon and the distant stars? Who has ever seen Pluto with the naked eye?
Pluto was allegedly discovered in 1930 by a scientist who had nothing better to do than stare down a telescope and wonder why the solar system was missing something.
For centuries the Bushmen and other indigenous people had been saying: ‘Leave it alone, the universe is perfect.”
But the so-called civilised world ignored them. Telescope or no telescope, there was a restlessness out there in the cities and laboratories that demanded that there should be something more to this humdrum, day-to-day, tax paying existence than met the eye.
There were unreported incidents of extraterrestrials landing in the Kalahari and housewives being abducted by flying saucers in Alabama and Minnesota, but no hard facts about where these extraterrestrials actually lived, how and why they targeted their victims, and how you could communicate with them.
Missing housewives remained missing — the flying saucers were a way of hiding the fact that they had probably run off with a passing cowboy or the milkman, who incidentally had also gone missing.
Then came Dan Dare and all those other cartoon space fantasies. This, of course, coincided with the launching of the Cold War, as Western nations, led by the United States, woke up to the fact that they had to do something about the Communist threat out of the Soviet Union and its allies in the east. A new bugbear had to be found. The extraterrestrials became a metaphor for the communist threat. The space race had begun. (And the Russians fell for it.)
Pluto was ‘discovered” in the midst of all this growing space fever. It was, after all, the later years of the American Depression. Something new had to be pushed out for the consumerist public, to distract them from the fact that capitalism was on a fatal, downward spiral. An as yet unnoticed, icy piece of rock flying round the sun might just be the thing that could do the trick.
Not only did the newly discovered planet Pluto fill the gap, it lent itself to all sorts of ideas in popular culture. The cartoon hero Mickey Mouse got a dog and named it after the new planet. Pluto the dog later became a superstar, like its owner.
Hollywood’s future was secured, breathing new life into the beleaguered economic environment of America. And so it went on.
It is impossible not to wonder (in the course of this supposed historical realism analysis), what the downgrading of the former planet Pluto in 2006 really means.
The Cold War has ended; the Space Race has turned into a friendly cooperation between America and the former Soviet Union, centred around tedious experiments at the Russian-built space station orbiting the earth, to which American space shuttles and Soyuz rockets infrequently send astronauts, at the cost of billions of dollars a shot, on missions that no one really bothers to ask about.
But another, ground-based war has kicked in, making outer space and its controversial inhabitants and potential hijackers and kidnappers of decent citizens an increasing irrelevance. George W Bush and Tony Blair, with their invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and a potential invasion of Iran on the horizon, have brought the whole issue back down to earth.
No one really talks about extraterrestrials any more. Their function has been fulfilled, and apart from the odd fantasy movie, such as The Matrix, the cameras and the guns are focused on far more ancient issues, like the conflict of ideas and identities in the Middle East.
I don’t know if this makes things better or worse for the hapless residents of our own planet, which has not yet been downgraded to the status of a mere piece of mineral-bearing rock orbiting round the sun. Dan Dare has retired or gone on to a better world out there in the outer universe. His quest for a foothold on Planet Pluto has been honourably discharged, with no hard feelings. Pluto is no longer his problem.
Down here on the ground, the guns are, theoretically, silenced in Lebanon. The Israeli invasion, hunting down the invisible extraterrestrials of Hizbullah, has ended in a stalemate. The war, however, goes on.
But guns are blazing somewhere else. It’s a bleak scenario. As bleak as the surface of Pluto, which was once a planet, and now, thanks to the fickleness of humanity, is no longer. Who’s playing God?