Oh No!
OMG what will we do - oh wait a minute, I thought you said a MILLION years.
Forget sending astronauts to Mars, the planet may come crashing right here to Earth if gravitational interactions substantially agitate its now-stable orbit. A new study in the June 11 issue of Nature predicts there's a real, albeit slim possibility of a planetary smash-up inside the inner solar system, largely thanks to …
Jacques Laskar and Mickael Gastineau need to get their heads examined. We know the orbital parameters of the planets to perhaps four decimal place accuracy. Numerical integration methods, regardless of which one you choose -- 4th order Runge-Kutta, Predictor-Corrector, etc. -- all have inherent cumulative round-off error. By the time their computer programs have calculated a few hundred orbits, the results are getting so far away from reality that they're useless. Now, you want us to believe that they can predict a collision 1.76 billion years in the future? Hahahahahahahahaaaaaa! Hahahahahaha!
"...(with the edition of Pluto and Earth's moon)..."
No thanks, I'll wait for the edition that says "...(with the addition of Pluto and Earth's moon)..."
"...so Earth's about half way to retirement..."
So does that make this Middle Earth?
Mine's the one with a copy of "The Hobbit" annotated by Strunk and White in the pocket.
More fundamentally, a lot of work is done using a Taylor expansion which is not known to converge, so , what the heck, just truncate it after N terms and intergrate. Of course it is safe to assume that a .38 mm nudge is significant, but all terms after t^20 are not.
</sarcasm>
...and it looks like I'll be busy sleeping underground in a wooden box when all this happens.
Can one of you wake me up in time to see the fireworks?
Seriously though, how can Mercury's gravitational tug pull Mars towards the Earth? This seems like abject fantasy and needs more explaination. Mercury is tiny (in cosmic terms all the planets are tiny) surely the gravity of the sun will hold it more or less in place...?
Solar system stability is a problem that has been seriously addressed for at least a hundred years. (I think both Lagrange and Poincaré had a go, and they certainly weren't idiots.)
I would expect that the equations being driven forward are not the equations of motion for big lumps of rock, which would indeed require Quite Stonking (tm) levels of precision in the original data and a Pretty Impressive (tm) bignums numerical integration package. A much better idea would be to start with the equations for the time-evolution of the orbital elements. These equations are, to a first approximation, d{elements}/dt=0, which even I can solve. To a second-or-subsequent approximation they are something else and I'm way out of my depth, but at least I know that you don't tackle this by sticking the physics onto a gaming GPU and cranking the handle.
.. hears about this! If you thought anti-terrorist laws and activities were bad just wait till they put together their anti-planetary collision task forces.
Pity the poor companies with the name Mercury in them - "Mercury implicated in massive planetary collision plot"....
At least it'll divert attention from old Gordie for a few minutes....
Reminds me of an orbital mechanics simulation I programmed in Pascal (in high school btw). The most fun was to put in the right numbers to have all planets slingshotted out of the the solar system.
Of course most of those effects were (partly) from my limited understanding of orbital mechanics, and due to rounding issues inherent to floating point numbers, but nevertheless I can see why astronomers would enjoy simulating this :)
Can we have less of this defeatist talk please. Following the lead of the late, great leader Dubya we have a clear solution; bomb Mercury.
This should be followed by ten years of incarcerate for Mars, on a charge of guilt by association and a manhunt for the evil mastermind behind it all; Newton. His theories are the root cause of all this agitation.
No doubt we will see a film about this - the deadly Red Planet aiming to destroy the American Way of life as we know it; then saved at the last minute by Bruce Willis setting off loads of precisely positioned and timed "nucular" explosions usng a TV remote because the timing mechanism was damaged.
I think I'll wait for it to come out on DVD.
BTW, I'm thinking of using the new system to change my handle to "Cynical Old B****r"
Is it the American billion (1,000,000,000), or the good old English billion (1,000,000,000,000)? I've always be confused by this when people talk about billions. What's the standard these days?
I must know because how embarassed would I be if I got my dates wrong for the end of the world?
If Mars did hit the Earth, it would be a billion or so years after all life had left that planet due to the Sun nearing the end of its' life and the radiation levels coming from it would have long since baked everything here.
Therefore if we'd not already left the Solar System by that point we'd have colonised the now defrosted Mars & the moons of Jupiter.
We'd have to deliberately destroy the Earth to clear a path for our new home.
Albeit that further research will be required, initial calculations suggest that a sufficiently large and appropriate change can be made to the Earth's orbit to prevent this calamity; and that this can be achieved both safely and effectively. Magnetohydrodynamic coupling between the Earth's magnetic field and that of the Sun and the solar wind is sufficient to provide appropriate thrust. The necessary orbital adjustments can be arranged conveniently and economically by reversing the orientation of a modest array of gyroscopes on an equinoxial basis. The disc storage array proposed for the UK's national data interception facility would be almost sufficient with only minimal modification. To assure the anciliary protection against collision with Mars only a small increase in cost and functional capacity is required. By providing this dual-purpose functionality the cost-benefit from the surveillance facility will be greatly increased.
Icon in case any politicians chance to read this.
Hmmmm, this is all very irrelevant, I've just prodded a few numbers into my old Casio and I can tell you all now that the Earths population by the year 36000000009 will be...... no wait..... what does 6.56+E79 mean?. I guess we'll be standing on each others shoulders 100 levels deep by then.... can you imagine the queues to the toilets, Takeaway, Bar, NCP carparks etc etc
'Seriously though, how can Mercury's gravitational tug pull Mars towards the Earth? This seems like abject fantasy and needs more explaination. Mercury is tiny (in cosmic terms all the planets are tiny) surely the gravity of the sun will hold it more or less in place...?'
It's all down to orbital resonances - how many times Mercury goes round the Sun compared to other planets. Mercury sits in a very - okay - relatively elliptical orbit, the perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) itself progresses around the Sun. Jupiter has a less elongated orbit, but that too has a progressing perihelion. Left long enough, these perihelions begin to align; Mercury *could* find itself receiving an extra tug from Jupiter at the same point in its orbit, which gradually evolves the orbit into an extreme ellipse taking it out into the region of Venus.
If Mercury's orbit is that disrupted, it begins to create new resonances with Mars' orbit; one scenario being that Mars itself goes into a more elliptical orbit whose perihelion is in the vicinity of Earth.
But as the second poster pointed out, it's hard to see how these calculations can be at all accurate given our limited knowledge of the planets' orbits over the long term.
"Now, you want us to believe that they can predict a collision 1.76 billion years in the future? Hahahahahahahahaaaaaa! Hahahahahaha!"
Why not, they've convinced most people that they can predict the weather accurately 100 years in the future ...
(Where's the icon for the evil audio-animatronic Al Gore? Probably got too big to fit into the standard image size.)
It doesn't matter. We're clever, good at engineering and will simply fix things or move somewhere nicer when Mr Sun has a stretch.
Thank Azathoth that our scientific community has been tirelessly working toward the goal of a permanent and tenable manned (and womanned) presence in space instead of wasting everyone's time babling about minutiae like Pluto not being a planet or Lake Huron not being a lake, really.
Wait...%$*&!
"Venus and Mars are all right tonight."
"For a while... for a while... for a while... for a while..."
Rock on. Big rock on. This is Radio Luther broadcasting for ya on SM. All the way. (Where else?). Reflecting your epoc - where simulation is dissimulation. And dissembling creates semblance. And while you cool folks is working out just where you heard those lines first, here's another old but goodie from Radio Luther.
The Cramps, with Rock on the Moon. Rockabilly gone psycho.
Ya think that's crazy? Is there a rock on the Moon? Do bears go boo in the woods? Check (don't touch!) that dial. SM see? Semantic modulation - the mod mod mod modulation for a hyperreal world.
Questions about dynamics and stability of the solar system are classic. The kind of math needed to answer these qualitative behavior questions has only really existed for the last 50 or 60 years. It's not a simple matter of integrating the equations of motion, you can't simulate a billion years that way.
Laskar is very respected in his field. A few years ago, he did a calculation about the effects of planetary resonance on the rotation of Venus. He and his coauthor showed that there were two stable rotation rates the planet could fall into, each equally likely, and one of them is almost exactly the current value for Venus. Very nice work.
Does it get a pension? Where do retired planets go, anyway? Is there a quiet little corner of the galaxy where retired planets sit about on park benches, watching the young starlets desporting themselves on the grass, reminiscing about the days when their climates, too, were hot, hot, hot?