MAY 23, 2011 - Free-Floating Planets is proof positive that Firesign Theatre's October 1974 album Everything You Know Is Wrong made the single most important existential and philosophical declaration since Plato's Socrates allowed as how he didn't know anything - but at least he knew he didn't know anything. All these years, we've been regaled with tales of planets as bodies orbiting stars; which is important to us astrologers, since despite our appellative we really don't pay any attention to stars, being focused instead on planets . . . well, plus the Moon, and the one star we really do pay heed to, the one that gives our Solar System its name. Lo and behold, now NASA tells us that rogue planets are running around the universe, free and clear of any parent stars. Not just brown dwarfs (failed stars) mind you, but real live Jupiter-size planets - and, you can just bet that it's a statistical certainty, gazillions of smaller planets too. First we're told that Pluto isn't a planet - a spherical body orbiting a parent star in a niche that it's cleared out - and now we're told that planets may or may not be planets. So now I'm wondering about these renegade planets. How shall we classify them: threat, or menace?
