Once there was a constancy to the world. As children, we knew, among other truths, that the sky was blue, milk was good for you, that rain was pure, and that there were nine planets in our solar system.

But as we grew, we learned that the sky really wasn’t blue, that it was just the filter of our atmosphere that bent the sun’s light to make it look so. We learned that milk could contain Strontium-90 or BGH, and that rain was actually water vapor formed around dirt, and it could be acidic. That left the planets. There was some comfort in knowing that at last there was an indisputable constant. Shakespeare wrote of our unalterable fates that lie in the stars. The Greeks and Romans placed their gods in the skies as a reminder of constancy.

No more. Pluto has been demoted, and our personal universes reel. If there is no constancy in our stars, even, then what hope is there for the rest of our world?