Proposal: Uranus et. al. should no longer be called "plane-ettes".

[halfeye]

I've long favored just throwing out the term "planet" entirely, an just referring to bodies as rockballs, gasballs, or iceballs. Earth, Luna, and Ceres are all more like each other than any of them is like Jupiter or Neptune.

I dunno about Ceres. From what I've heard that's mostly water ice, and would be liquid for the short time until the water evaporated in Earth's orbit.

If we define planets based off of the state of matter on their surfaces, Pluto gets reinstated as a planet- which admittedly has its supporters, but mostly out of inertia.

I don't see that. My understanding is that Pluto and the other Kuiper belt objects are largely snowballs that would become smaller iceballs or even comets nearer the sun. Haumea would presumably break up due to it's rotation rate if it melted.

Similarly, Earth loses its planetary status, as the majority of its surface is liquid.

The surface is infinitesimal, the main body of the Earth is rock allegedly solid most of the way down, but somehow flowing too.