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3
Jul
Have you ever been to Mars?
If you have, please leave a comment with some details of your trip. I am considering taking a one-week journey to an extra-terrestrial locale, and I hear Mars is nice, but I don’t want to commit until I know if there are decent tourist attractions and accommodations available.
I’m also open to Pluto and the Crab Nebula, but as I understand it the travel to either of those places would take up most of my week. I want to have some time to relax. But if you’ve been to either of those places, I’m open to persuasion.
Actually, I think Pluto would have been my first choice if it was still considered a planet. Being down-graded to a dwarf planet has really hurt its economy, I hear, and apparently the quality of service at most of the resorts and restaurants has gone down. Any first-hand opinions?
Let me know. Thanks.
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6 Responses to “Where Should I Go?”
The Pluto being downgraded thing is a viscous circle. People don’t want to go because they hear it doesn’t have the funds to support tourism properly, meaning no tourists, meaning no money to support tourism. Suggesting any one person try to buck the trend are somewhat redundant considering the previous size of their astral tourism industry.
If you’re looking for a cheap short-haul visit, you can’t go wrong looking for a beach-hut on the edge of the sea of tranquillity: the locals are terribly polite, and most of them speak at least a semblance of English. Otherwise, I always like to fly off to a place in the sun.
Ceres in the asteroid belt is a fun place. It’s a dwarf planet, but they have really fun rollercoaster rides through the abandoned mining shafts, and you can take a tour of the iridium processing facilities. It’s not Mars by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the only place in the galaxy with the “wild outworld” mystique to it.
If you end up going to Mars, I definitely recommend seeing Olympus Mons by balloon.
Far and away the most beautiful place in the galaxy to go is Vega, but building the device to get you there is probably beyond your budget, and even if you do shell out you won’t be able to bring any proof of your trip back with you. The upside is that it’s only an 18 hour round trip!
Pluto IS still a planet. Only four percent of the IAU voted on the controversial demotion, and most are not planetary scientists. Their decision was immediately opposed in a formal petition by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. One reason the IAU definition makes no sense is it says dwarf planets are not planets at all! That is like saying a grizzly bear is not a bear, and it is inconsistent with the use of the term “dwarf” in astronomy, where dwarf stars are still stars, and dwarf galaxies are still galaxies. Also, the IAU definition classifies objects solely by where they are while ignoring what they are. If Earth were in Pluto’s orbit, according to the IAU definition, it would not be a planet either. A definition that takes the same object and makes it a planet in one location and not a planet in another is essentially useless. Pluto is a planet because it is spherical, meaning it is large enough to be pulled into a round shape by its own gravity–a state known as hydrostatic equilibrium and characteristic of planets, not of shapeless asteroids held together by chemical bonds. These reasons are why many astronomers, lay people, and educators are either ignoring the demotion entirely or working to get it overturned.
Whatever you do, don’t go to Saturn… the H1N1 virus really hit hard there.
Mars’ desperation to became a tourism destination has blunted most of its appeal. Still worth visiting certainly, but not without company. I would recommend MakeMake if you had the time to travel there. Express shuttles are excessively expensive.
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