Slashdot Mirror
Earth Could Collide With Other Planets
Everybody put on your helmet;
Smivs writes "Astronomers calculate there is a tiny chance that Mars or Venus could collide with Earth — though it would not happen for at least a billion years.
The finding comes from simulations to show how orbits of planets might evolve billions of years into the future. But the calculated chances of such events occurring are tiny. Writing in the journal Nature, a team led by Jacques Laskar shows there is also a chance Mercury could strike Venus and merge into a larger planet. Professor Laskar of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues also report that Mars might experience a close encounter with Jupiter — whose massive gravity could hurl the Red Planet out of our Solar System."
mors certa, hora incerta
Wherever you go... There you are. B.B.
There are tiny odds of just about anything happening, why is it news?
...in about a billion years. The chances are infinitesimally small, but it could happen!
...I could win the PowerBall or MegaMillion jackpot if it's actually over $150 million. And in about the same time as the slight possibility of the Earth, Mars, or Venus change orbit enough to actually collide.... Really... Isn't this as much as the story some years back when it was shown that using the use of atmospheric breaking causing Jupiter's rotation to lose a second of time over 50,000 or more years? I call FUD. Next up.. How to make a tinfoil hat that can stop the CIA's mind control rays.
"The truth points to itself." - Kosh, Babylon5
I can record that event in my 64bit unix timestamp field.
We've known for almost a hundred years (since Poincare more or less) that the 3 body problem is inherently chaotic and not terribly stable and here we have an n body problem for large n. All they seem to have done here is list some of the more catastrophic possible outcomes if the system becomes seriously unstable.
Looks like God screwed that one up.
Does anyone think our species will even be around in a billion years? I mean that's a long time for some kind of disaster that whipes out mankind. Disease, virus, nuclear war, zombie outbreak, etc. However, if mankind was still around hopefully we would have other planetary colonies to seek refuge. So I don't this is really news.
first they announce that the recession is over in the UK (yeh right!)
then we find out earth is about to collide with another planet
at least the later is more believable :D
Is it any wonder the general public doesn't take science seriously nowadays?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This is the state of science that to remain relevant a lot of rubbish has to be published. Welcome to the 21st century! The age of scientific noise!
Damn, something else that will happen before I get laid.
World Will end in 2012. Nostradamus predicted it so. Billion years is an over statement. More like 3 years
Next up.. How to make a tinfoil hat that can stop the CIA's mind control rays.
You have my undivided attention.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Remember, when they say there's a small chance of planetary collision, they're really just relating the lack of precision they have in their knowledge of the positions, velocities, and mass distribution of said planets. If they knew them precisely, they could precisely predict their future positions.
For all we know...
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7248/full/nature08096.html
Full story requires payment or subscription (which I don't have), but the blurb reads:
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
Women and Children Hit Hardest.
Congress opens investigation.
Minority groups suffer disparate impact.
Let's go back to crystalline spheres and immutable heavens. That was a much safer design model
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm glad they took the time to do this. Perhaps predicting something a billion years out ends up making it not so important to us, but at least they're reasonably sure that it won't be in the next 50 years when it WOULD be important to us. Now, this does sound a lot like meteorology, and like the weather, it sure would be a bad day if they were off by 999.999999 million years or so.
were no longer allowed to use arcane mathematical models.
Give a man a model, and he'll fret for a day. Teach a man to model, and he'll have major news media fretting forever...
They're killing independent George!
Just the workarounds for the floating point math must be cool to see. Or the optimizations they would use in a simulation like this.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
The Cubs might win a world series.
could...could...could!!
What a Swell Party This Is
"Have you heard that Mimsie Starr
Just got pinched in the As...tor bar?
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!
Have you heard? It's in the stars,
Next July we collide with Mars!
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"A couple billion years? Who cares, I'm not in office anymore when that happens!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... but how exactly is it that 2 planetary bodies can collide, and "merge" into one larger planetary body? Wouldn't the collision obliterate both planets?
I truly believe the Earth is the insane asylum for the universe.
(OK, now off to actually read the article....)
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I have a solution. We get Martin Landau to lead us on a Moonbase that we construct. Since it is the first moonbase ever, we will call it Moonbase Alpha. We detonate a nuclear weapon on the surface of the moon, causing it to rocket away from the Solar System, like when Wile E. Coyote attaches a bottle rocket to a car.
We launch out of the Solar System and into the galaxy, meeting strange alien beings along the way. We will build shuttlecraft, and call them "Eagles".
Earth crashes into Mars, we move into the deep reaches of space, exploring and adventuring! Let's get started, Martin doesn't have long to live!
I still fear the Vogon construction fleet more...
now get that planet off my lawn!
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
We've got scientists telling us the world is getting warmer while at the same time it's getting colder and now they're telling us that the planets might collide billions of years from now. If they can't even get the weather predictions right 5 days in advance what good are their long term predictions?
I'd say an impact wiping out life would be much much more likely in that course of time, so who cares? Oh wait... this ... would be that impact ...
See!
This is funny because I was thinking just the other day about the cheesy overused lyric 'when two worlds collide' - I mean, it just doesn't happen that often does it?
Ok, here's a question: Has this happened in the past?
It doesn't take long playing with simple, fun orbit simulators to see that while most planetesimals get glommed, a few get chucked. Escape velocity from the Sun at Mars distance is WAY MORE* (technological term) than Jupiter could perturb. Some things tossed could have 'very long' periods, but still not escape. THAT would be news.
And yes, I am a rocket scientist and yes, I HAVE done the math.
Vcircular * sqrt(2) = Vescape! 41% is too much, even for Jupiter.
Time to put a good biking helmet over my tin-foil hat.
>> Mars might experience a close encounter with Jupiter -- whose massive gravity could hurl the Red Planet out of our Solar System.
Woo hoo! Let's colonize it now. We won't have to worry about the inter-stellar travel problem.
With the movie remake of When Worlds Collide due out in 2010, a story like this would be one way to create a buzz.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455856/
ceci n'est pas un sig
"What was that 'one in a million' talk all about then"?
There's a tiny chance anyone on here will ever kiss a girl, but we still sit puckered up just in case. You know we all do. Muuuuuaah.
So in other words, the collision will occur around the time that Duke Nukem Forever is released?
"But when worlds collide," said George Pal to his bride, "I'm gonna give you some Terrible Thrills."
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Sprinkle us with wisdom from your mighty brain. How scared should we be?
They ran a numerical simulation of the solar system through more than a billion cycles of the Earth's orbit... presumably thats a trillion time steps of their simulation, at the very least (1000 steps per orbit would give poor accuracy over that many iterations), and preferably more like a quadrillion time steps. Even with that, I'm suprised anyone thinks that so few iterations can be relied upon to give meaningful results over such a long time.
Since Nature actually published them, I wonder if perhaps the chance of Earth colliding with Mars / Venus isn't actually the focus of their paper, and that the Beeb has just turned tabloid on us yet again.
Astronomers calculate there is a tiny chance that Mars or Venus could collide with Earth -- though it would not happen for at least a billion years.
That's no reason not to print another $500 billion to study the problem! If it saves just one child's life in a billion years, then it's worth it! Why do you hate the Earth? Hater.
Why can't they come up with a plausible theory of apocalypse by snu-snu?
Michael Bay could do wonders. Imagine the CGI of one planet hitting another.
Just blow up the sun so it stops swinging these planets at us.
My webcomic
I, for one, say goodbye to our Martian overlords? On Soviet Mars, Venus pwns you? 1. fling mars 2. merge with venus 3. Profit?
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
Isn't our galaxy on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy that should happen in less than a billion years? So really, a bump into Venus or Mercury is moot.
You have my undivided attention.
Here it is: How to make a dunce hat
Just use tinfoil as material.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE?
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
I don't doubt collision is possible; but I also consider that the discrete nature of the computation (for simulation of a naturally continuous system) has such a significant chance of error that to talk about these tiny chances being predicted by the computation is rediculous - I doubt the predictions are informative.
I know this is a funny-ha-ha joke, but to completely dismiss and trivialize the notion of sheeple isn't really doing humanity any favors... I wish this particular meme would die a silent death.
Funny you say that, because people win PowerBall on a regular basis...
Could they also calculate the probability of monkeys flying out of my ass? Or would this be considered racist in this day and age?
I could have sex with Angelina Jolie - though it would not happen for at least a billion years.
They are called African-Americans, and if you do put a little bit of pressure...
Shouldn't we destroy them now? Preemptive strike is the only solution. Who needs them anyway?
that this was an excerpt from a Charles Sheffield novel. No mention of the Great Bat though...
Amazingly tiny probability that all airline pilots everywhere will simultaneously suffer heart attacks, causing all planes to crash. Here's a cool looking animation of them crashing, and just to emphasize the point, here's an animation of them not crashing.
I miss the BBC, where did it go?
My UID is prime!
I am not worried about something that may happen in billions of years. I think the chance that I will be around then is even smaller.
What we should be aware of is that if this can happen, it may already have happened in some other solar system...
A Jupiter like planet has been catapulted out of another solar system and is planning a visit... Latest calculations predict collision with Earth somewhere at the end of 2012.
Load New Commander (Y/N)?
At about or before the same time as the possible collision, the Sun will gradually heat up, baking the earth. Many estimates put the livable time on earth for another half-billion years. This baking is a much bigger worry because it's almost certain to happen. Warp Drive better be ready by then. Plus, there's a pretty good chance that an asteroid will pound us within that time.
Table-ized A.I.
that the earth may simply stop existing because if it's quantum state. This applies to the universe as well.
This is why this isn't news.
Obviously the planet Mercury is a terrorist and should be destroyed. I'd suggest waterboarding it, but it's so hot there that it might like it.
Table-ized A.I.
If, in a billion years, we can't change the gravitational constant of the universe by extending the warp field around the rogue planet and tow it back to its proper orbit, then we're sunk anyway. Either that or just call "Q"!
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
...For my Infinite Improbability Drive.
NGC6633, here I come!
Wait, so given enough time, massive objects in relatively close proximity to one another might drift together? Holy shit!
Paris Observatory : http://www.obspm.fr/actual/nouvelle/jun09/colli.en.shtml
Nature commentary : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7248/full/459781a.html
Nature paper : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7248/full/nature08096.html
I highly doubt mankind has a billion days left, let alone a billion years
nothing to see here
move on
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
There was a student dozing off in a class in college and the professor makes the remark that the Sun will one day go out, but this will probably not happen for at least a billion years.
The student wakes up suddenly with a panicked look and asks the professor to repeat his statement.
The professor does so, and the student says "Whew. I thought you said a million years."
I can't seem to bring myself to worry, either way.
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
Alright guys, the subject has been distracted.Commence brainwashing program.
Current climate modeling software have, with minor tweaks, predicted that in a billion years Lindsay Lohan could in fact become a nun.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Even if they can somehow account for every small asteroid that will change the course of Earth's orbit over a billion years, they can't possibly account for the possibility (near-certainty unless we nuke ourselves to death) that we will, possibly before the end of this century, be able to cause drastic changes to anything in the solar system.
Another theorem says that on this set of initial conditions, if you are given a power-threshold epsilon, and if you are sufficiently clever in your application of thrust at less than total power epsilon, you can force the system either into stability or out of it.
Note that "rational-vs-irrational-number" is inherently not a measurable phenomenon -- all measurements have a tolerance that includes both kinds of numbers.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
The current theory is that a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth sometime in history. When this planet, usually named Theia, collided with Earth, some of the disturbed matter from both planets got ejected into space, some fell onto and became part of Earth, and some got caught in orbit around Earth as natural satellites.
The resulting dust either escaped or eventually coalesced into the modern Earth and Moon.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
.. Earth had near collisions with Venus and Mars within recorded history. The results of these near collisions had a significant impact on our religious history. Much of religious speculation regarding the "end of the world" is because it almost happened once or twice within historical memory. Organized science rejected Velikovsky, but people continue to follow and expand on his works.
Among other impacts of his efforts, by correlating the various events across cultures and records, he was able to show that in building the timeline of history there were several hundred years fit in that didn't exist. They were put in because people and places with multiple names were treated as separate and placed in different eras of history.
Galaxies are almost entirely empty space. Even when Milky Way and Andromeda collide, it will for the most part be a peaceful merger. Most likely, we'd have more stars in the sky, but that's about it. Some stars or systems will collide, but for an individual star the probability is remote.
In 3 billion years, I'm more worried about the Sun becoming a red giant and eating Earth. But there probably won't be life on Earth then.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Whew!!! I thought they said a million at first.
As a heat-loving microbe, do you know how long it will take me to evolve and get off this rock? hello, like 3 billion years thanks slashdot for making my day.
The love of good Whiskey,Woman,Weed is all i need.
World ends at 9. News at 11.
I heard Velikovsky talk about all of this back in the 60s.
Good God, people, can we stop wasting time and money on these useless studies and get to the more IMPORTANT science? WHERE ARE OUR FLYING CARS!?!!
And thank you for the survey, although I'm afraid I'm still not its target audience. (First, I need a definition of "symplectic integrator". Hmm. Works on diffeq's related to "symplectic geometry", which studies "symplectic manifolds", which are differentiable (hooray! A word I understand!) and have a closed (ok, maybe), non-degenerate (yeah) "2-form", which is apparently "the 2nd exterior power of the cotangent bundle of the manifold". By paying close attention to my body's signals over the years, I've learned to recognize this feeling as "you've read too far ahead in the textbook again".
P.S. to moderator number 2: "Redundant"? Really? Providing information from a not-freely-available article that directly responds to a specific question is "redundant"? Ooo-kay. Guess I don't have quite so good a handle on this "moderation" thing as I thought.
Isn't the chance of Mars falling down and hitting you in the forehead just as "near"? Really.
This prediction is as meaningless as the one of Mercury falling into the sun in a billion years for the same reasons.
The inner solar system is chaotic with a Lyuapanov time on the order of 5 million years - On average, two very nearby orbits will change their distance between each other in phase-space by a constant in that time. This makes the solar system's future evolution profoundly dependent on initial conditions and integrator accuracy.
First of all it's hard to maintain integration accuracy for more than a few Lyuapanov times, especially when the system has such an enormous dynamic range in mass and characteristic orbital times as the solar system, since this requires that the integrator be exponentially more accurate. The outer solar system is routinely integrated for hundreds of millions of years (and I've run several such simulations myself with a 10th order symplectic integrator) but most simulations of the inner solar system run for a few tens of millions of years at most. A 5 billion year integration of the inner solar system will require that errors be supressed on the order of e^-1000, which is absurd.
Second of all, chaotic systems are also defined by their extreme dependence on initial conditions. Our observational knowledge of the positions of the planets only extends to about 7 digits at best, which makes any simulation in which displacing something by 1 part in e^1000 changes the outcome meaningless. In addition, at such levels of precision other effects come into play - Relativity changes the details of Earth's orbit significantly from the classical prediction after about 10 million years.
You can plug whatever numbers you want into a symplectic integrator and it'll run as long as you want without blowing up, but that doesn't mean the numbers mean anything.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7248/full/nature08096.html
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
"Tiny chance."
..
"Billions of years from now."
Ms. Moneypenny, this sounds serious. Could you call 007, please?
Oh, and please- stop sending me this slashdot innuendo.
-
Extracting sunbeams from
It won't be that many more billion years before our sun becomes a red giant. At that point planetary collisions are irrelevant.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The world was supposed to end in (after 1600 A.C.E):
1601, 1650, 1666, 1696, 1700 (The world is supposed to end every century, it just fails), 1721, 1730, 1762, 1792, 1800, 1812, 1842, 1893, 1900, 1919, 1920, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1950, 1972, 1986, 1992, 2000 (Y2k FAIL), 2001 (A spaceless odyssey), 2006...
Now, it's 2012, 2050 then 1000002009.
Worlds in Collision
While I think he had a lot kooky wrong ideas. I think it's interesting his comments on Mars and Earth having closer encounters.
First I thought we could easily make it to the Red planet by that time, but looks like it has its own troubles. Don't guys feel like Dinos now ?
When Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra sang it in 'High Society':
We sing, so rare!
Like aged camembert!
Like [sung like the Whiffenpoove's song:] baba au rhum! [Crosby;] ba-ba-ba bum
[Sinatra:] Don't dig that kind of crooning, chum.
For another take: Debby Harry and Iggy Pop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6JukvxCwvU
---some unpleasant visuals, but I actually prefer the orchestration and vocals to Sinatra/Crosby, and it features a stoned-looking Harry expressing her opinion of sex at the end.
Duh.
What are the odds that Venis will colide with Uranis ?