For Your Escape Velocity Plans!

We all know how important it is to have escape plans. How often have we been at a gathering or party, listening to someone talk endlessly, and secretly wishing our friend (that we came to the party with) would call us over or point something out or blow up a mountain or something so we could just get away in this increasingly long-winded, hypothetical, run-on sentence event that I made up to make a point. Then for the rest of the night you pretend that your eyes are broken so that you can avoid eye contact with the person who clearly has more to say about the self congratulatory conversation upchuck, a topic you frankly couldn't care less about. The point, my friends, is that it is important to have escape plans.

This is also true for planetary bodies. In that it is good to have escape plans from them, not that you just wish that Pluto would stop talking about how it was down-graded to a dwarf planet and that even though a class of dwarf planet out beyond the Kuiper Belt has been named in his honor (called Plutoids) that still doesn't really make up for being booted from the planetary family and no longer able to come to the closed planetary parties where things get really out of hand sometimes, he means really wild . . . blah, blah, blah. It is especially good to have planetary escape plans if you are an astronaut. I mean that's sort of the whole point. So to help anyone who is an amateur astronaut (or my readers who do get invited to parties attended by Pluto) XKCD has created this fantastic chart.

XKCD is just about the pinnacle of geek webcomics.
Though to be fair I don't always understand it either. Check it out and avoid Pluto at parties like the plague!