3 ms·
I think the problem gets into some chaos theory, the kind you see in weather prediction. When the forecast says "60% chance of showers tomorrow", what he reall
by mabbo 9y ago
I think the problem gets into some chaos theory, the kind you see in weather prediction.
When the forecast says "60% chance of showers tomorrow", what he really means is that they ran a few billion simulations of the environment with very tiny perturbations of the initial conditions and in 60% of those simulations, it rained. In 40%, it didn't.
Tiny little changes in any variable in a chaotic system will, in the long run, lead to huge variations in outcomes.
This system with it's 416 planets has one outcome- perfect orbits constantly. But if you add a single 1 kg asteroid to the system, that would perturb everything ever so slightly. That slight change could result in the entire system chaotically coming apart from stability.
- keymone 9y ago"stable" always comes with conditions, even if implicit. there's no need to add any asteroids - if any of those planets has tectonic activity, that will already introduce perturbations into gravity fields and cause a collapse eventually.
- maskedinvader 9y agogoing off on a tangent here, since you mentioned weather prediction, chance of rain % or probability of precipitation (pop) are computed not only for probability of rain in a given area but also for area of location that will receive the rain if any at all, ie 60% here expresses combination of degree of confidence that rain will occur in an area and geographic coverage of that rain. more details on the wiki entry here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_of_precipitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_of_precipitation