mkwt

What you do is you nail little marble fig leafs onto the parts of marble you don’t want people to see.

And then you continuously yell at tourists to shut the heck up while they admire the pretty picture on your ceiling.

…

Use esoteric knowledge of jet streams to firebomb the Pacific coast of the United States with balloons.

It’s true. Dwarf planets do have to be round ("in hydrostatic equilibrium"). That requirement will definitely disqualify many of the hypothetical billions of Oort cloud objects.

Ceres is an official dwarf planet, but I excluded it from my list because I was focusing on trans-Neptunians.

A big reason why the IAU hasn’t confirmed most of the 36 is because they want strong evidence of roundness, like a spacecraft flyby with direct imaging. Pluto and Eris are close enough that earth telescopes can just barely resolve some of their shapes.

Finally, Pluto and Charon are too close to be considered in the Oort cloud. Sedna, whose discovery precipitated a lot of this crisis, has been nominated as the very first discovered object in the “inner Oort cloud.” Sedna’s perihelion is at 76 AU.

Officially only 4 trans-Neptunian objects have been recognized as dwarf planets. But here’s a paper that proposes another 36 known objects to be dwarf planets.

That’s about what the situation was in 2006 as well. A new technology was worked out to make it easier to find these, and once it did a bunch of discoveries came in really fast. The writing was definitely on the wall.

If you include the entire Oort cloud, there could be billions of objects out there.

If that happened, then school children would no longer be required to learn the names of all of the planets. That’s just a practical concern with adding another several dozen planets to the list.

And I think it is worthwhile to make kids learn the names and some basic facts about the 8 planets we have.