Solar system will remain stable for just 40 million years
How will life on Earth end? The answer, of course, is unknown, but two new studies suggest a collision with Mercury or Mars could doom life long before the Sun swells into a red giant and bakes the planet to a crisp in about 5 billion years.
The studies suggest that the solar system's planets will continue to orbit the Sun stably for at least 40 million years. But after that, they show there is a small but not insignificant chance that things could go terribly awry.
On human timescales, the solar system seems to move as regularly as clockwork. But Isaac Newton realised three centuries ago that the gravitational tugs the planets exert on each other can potentially nudge them out of their orbits over time.
Predicting what will happen is extremely challenging because so many bodies are involved. Even small errors in the observed positions of the planets today can translate into huge uncertainties in projections of the future. Because of this, astronomers can only say for sure that the solar system will remain stable for the next 40 million years.
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
