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Gah. What a mess. The Kuiper Belt ha always looked fishy to me and it made Pluto's reign as a stand alone outer planet on shakey grounds. Fact is most scientists suspected there's a high possibility of bigger shaped objects beyond Pluto for a long time but didn't want to deal with technicalities. If you ask me there's an easy solution to this - since we're redifining the definitions lets do a thorough job at it - only objects that pass a certain diameter can be considered planets, while others remain planetoids. That would prevent the needless inflation of known planets as we discover the Kuiper Belt further. My personal preference is to just keep the status quo and have 9 planets which we all know and love. There are thousands of annomalies in astronimy, this could be jsut another one.
I really don't believe we'll ever develop warp/hyper-drives or anything of the nature since the law of nature telling us that light-speed is unachievable seems extremely firm. Mathematics pretty much proved it's a brick wall. And those worm-holes bending space...yeah sure they exist. But they're not exactly hallways through which you can just waltz through. In order to curve the time-space constant you have to apply ridiculous amounts of energy - we're talking millions of millions °C coupled with endless Nms pressure - any functioning worm-hole out there would therefore be pretty hostile to it's "users": a space ship would enter it and emerge on the other side completely annihilated in the form of basic particles - not even atoms, but rather electrons and quarks.
About Venus: eventhough it's Earth's cousin (smaller than Earth by just a few hundred kilometres in diameter) it can't be mankind's final destination, even if it did have water. Simply because it's even closer to the sun than we are (which accounts for most of it's woes today), so when the sun explands into a giant supernova a few billion years from now it's entire orbit will be swallowed up along with Mercury's. So Earth (and possibly Mars) will still be our springboard towards teh stars.
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