When Worlds Collide

Sharon did you happen to actually read that article in nature? you completely garble what the authors say (as mentioned by another poster) ??? also there's only one article not two as you state. I
s your writing always this sloppy?

Here' what that nature article actually says.

There is a greater then 99% chance everything stays stable

There is about a 1% chance mercury enters a resonance with the gas giants (ie Jupiter) that destabilizes its orbit (the actual number is 20 scenarios out of 2501 Not 25 as you state).

Of these 20
In 14 the simulations have not yet hit 5billion years and need several more months to finish
In 1 there are no collisions
In 3 Mercury hits the sun (all 4+billion years)
In 1 Mercury hits Venus (1.7 billion years)
In 1 Mercury???s eccentricity causes a disruption of Earth???s and Mars??? orbit also (3.3billion years)

In this one scenario where earth and mars orbit is disrupted:
the authors intergrated 201 scenarios of that one scenarios (again 1 out of 2501 scenarios). In 5 Mars is ejected from the solar system ??? collisions in the other 196 Sun???Mercury, 33; Sun???Mars, 48; Mercury???Venus, 43; Mercury???Earth, 1; Mercury???Mars, 1; Venus???Earth, 18; Venus???Mars, 23; Earth???Mars, 29

Lastly Earth's clock is not ticking down from 5 billion years its actually less then 500million years when gradual brightening of solar output (due to increasing helium content) will render earth uninhabitable. 1 billion years from now Earth's oceans will have boiled away and in five billion the sun goes red giant.

Yaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwn.

"the time required for chaos to significantly degrade the predictability of a system [on] the order of 5 million years."

Hey, mass extinctions happen. Maybe rude orbital perturbations have already happened once or twice. With a many-body problem, we'll never really know, will we?

Sharon Begley, I love your writing.

But today, you get both a Tip of the Hat, and a Wag of my Finger!

Besides your rigorous standards for conceptual clarity and your
commitment to seeking alternative interpretations consistent with the data
(all too rare these days), I consistenly find gems of sublime humor like:

"Given how upset people got when Pluto was demoted from planethood,
I can't wait to see how they'll react to Mars's exile."

But OOPS -- 2 significant flaws today ...

Note that Mercury collides with Venus or the sun 25 times in next
"5 billion" years. Yet in next "100 million" years,
Mercury collides with the sun 33 times, and with Venus 43 times.

I thought maybe "5 billion" should instead read "5 MILLION",
but that's not sufficient.

I'm unable, quickly, to find a single MILLION-BILLION transposition
that makes all the numbers consistent (including relative fraction
of scenarios run, and the 1% disaster probability).

But since there were 2 studies, perhaps the apparent conflicting numbers
came from different studies? Enquiring minds want to know!

For that minor lapse, I can forgive you.

But I vow never to forget your more egregious oversight today:

No veiled references to "occult rendezvous", "fatal attractions",
or "charged encounters". And given the "frequent close encounters"
between Venus and Mars (not counting the 23 actual collisions),
there seems abundant opportunity for "ejections of planetary material
short of simultaneous cataclysmic union".

But, as with the encounter between Earth and Mars, perhaps
it's best we not touch that, even with a 500-mile pole ;-)

The closer, "Whatever turns you on," suggests that perhaps,
such speculations are best left as an exercise for the reader ;-)

Wow! this was a great article.

We can survive smashed and annilated or swallowed by the sun, after all we just survuved the disaster of 8 years of Bush Cheney.

LMAO I think we stand a better chance of having robot vs politics, and if we do the big picture will show it to be, self inflicted.

Oh well, wouldn't it be more fun to be smashed and anihilated by another planet, rather than swallowed and burned by the sun? All we need to do is pray that planet-to-space escape systems are developed by then. No one should really be to worried about this though, because at the rate that our technology is increasing, we will all be in extra-terrestial vechicles long before either impending doom. - Robots.vs.Politics