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These chaotic orbits remind me of the chaotic solar system in Liu Cixin's novel "The Three-Body Problem". And they give me the same sense of terror that we can't predict where these objects will go.
It's a thread, and mere mortals without accounts see only the OP (OT?) I'm starting to get the hang of nitter.net and here's the thread. https://nitter.lanterne-rouge.info/latifnasser/status/175095... Other nitter instances were rate-limited or down. This one worked for me. It's actually interesting.
Thank you. That was wonderful! I couldn't figure out from the linked X (formerly Twitter) post what it was all about. I think it's time for the good samaritans of HN to post nitter links for every X (formerly Twitter) post. Also, is there some extension which I could add in the browser which would show the corresponding Nitter link?
Too bad we have to devise technology to solve problems that technology in the wrong hands has created. I've been taking notes for years.
Nothing in the solar system is regular and orderly. It's chaotic because 3-body problems are almost always chaotic, and >3-body problems are always chaotic.
Our solar system is a hundred-body problem (or more depending how small a "body" you want to include).
So why then does our solar system mostly appear to be regular and orderly? Because of the time scales we care about, and because for the majority of bodies (not Zoozve!), only one other body produces the overwhelming majority of gravitational influence. Which means we can cheat and treat many very short-term predictions as 2-body problems.
Over a one-month timeframe we can predict the solar system analytically as a bunch of 2-body problems. Easy.
Over a few hundred years we can use numerical methods. Harder, but it mostly works well enough.
Over a million-year timeframe it's completely hopeless. We have no idea where Venus will be exactly a million years from today.
Edit: 10 million years is a better threshold for hopelessness. A million years is still somewhat predictable for some bodies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_Syste...
It's a thread, and mere mortals without accounts see only the OP (OT?) I'm starting to get the hang of nitter.net and here's the thread. https://nitter.lanterne-rouge.info/latifnasser/status/175095... Other nitter instances were rate-limited or down. This one worked for me. It's actually interesting.
> we don’t live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club These chaotic orbits remind me of the chaotic solar system in Liu Cixin's novel "The Three-Body Problem". And they give me the same sense of terror that we can't predict where these objects will go.
Only on time scales like thousands of years or more, that are too long to worry about as far as any danger to Earth is concerned. On shorter time scales we can predict orbits very accurately, which is how astronomers know about objects that will pass near Earth decades in advance.
It's a thread, and mere mortals without accounts see only the OP (OT?) I'm starting to get the hang of nitter.net and here's the thread. https://nitter.lanterne-rouge.info/latifnasser/status/175095... Other nitter instances were rate-limited or down. This one worked for me. It's actually interesting.
> Anyway, I think this is so cool because everything else on the solar system map is so regular and orderly, but not quasi-moons! Nothing in the solar system is regular and orderly. It's chaotic because 3-body problems are almost always chaotic, and >3-body problems are always chaotic. Our solar system is a hundred-body problem (or more depending how small a "body" you want to include). So why then does our solar sys…