Our club held a discussion on this matter last Friday night. A panel consisting of members for and against brought their arguments. We came to the following decision for the following reasoning.

The life sciences group things together but they also subdivide those groups. Humans, lions, whales and deer are all grouped as mammals and are distinguished from amphibians and reptiles..The plant kingdom has its heirarchy as well to help define and point to reasonings for those subdivisions of kingdoms and phyla.

We, therefore, need to group all the bodies that circumvent the sun into one group with subdivisions as the life sciences do. What those names are is undecided at the moment but it appears likely that all bodies that orbit the sun are going to be called planets..They could then be subdivided into terrestrial planets, gaseous planets, asteroidal planets, cometary planets, and Kuiper Belt planets or some other nomenclature. The reason some thought all will be called planets is to keep a consistency with the term "planetary nebula", which only holds its definition from gases that are ejected from a dying star yet are holding an orbit.

With this reasoning there are thousands of planets.

Anyway, that's our two cents.