3 ms·
Well, that's the question - is his 416-planet system chaotic? Do perturbtions get amplified or do they get pushed back to the stable configuration? Of course,
by saalweachter 9y ago
Well, that's the question - is his 416-planet system chaotic? Do perturbtions get amplified or do they get pushed back to the stable configuration?
Of course, when you're talking about a civilization building 416 equal-mass planets equally spaced in 8 counter-rotating orbits, worrying about how stable they are is kind of silly; as long as they're "mostly" stable the maintenance of monitoring and tweaking their orbits for a billion years would presumably both be feasible and cheap compared to the initial construction.
- marcosdumay 9y agoOrbits on a N-body system are chaotic if N > 2. Always. That said, the longer you simulate those orbits, the more certainty you have that they are stable. But you will never get a mathematical proof, because only symbolic math can ever prove things in a chaotic system, finite precision math can only deal with statistic degrees of certainty.