May 8, 2025 • 10 mins
Our solar system runs pretty smoothly, but even tiny changes to how the planets, moons, and asteroids move could potentially cause Earth to collide with Mars or Venus in the distant future. Learn more about how chaos theory applies to planetary orbits in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/earth-venus-mars-collide.htm
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, brain Stuff,
Laurin Vogelbaum. Here, we all know that the planets of
the Solar System revolve around the Sun in a calm
and orderly fashion. In fact, the planets move with such
clockwork precision that astronomers can calculate orbital characteristics like eclipses
(00:24):
and planetary alignments with certainty. Want a list of solar
eclipses for the next ten thousand years, No problem. And
now let's say you want to look further into the future,
not thousands of years, but billions. How will those dusty
astronomical tables hold up? Then? Not so well if you
(00:45):
take into account the principles of chaos theory. A chaos
theory says that small inputs in an enormously complex system
can produce large scale outputs. This is what's sometimes called
the butterfly effect. The idea is that when a butterfly
flaps its wings in say Brazil, it could lead to
a chain reaction that causes a thunderstorm to develop over Australia.
(01:09):
Some scientists now propose that the evolution of the Solar
system may adhere to chaos theory, and that way way
way into the future. This could cause Earth to collide
with either Venus or Mars. A pair of scientists from
the Paris Observatory published a letter with this determination in
an issue of the journal Nature back in two thousand
(01:31):
and nine. For their research, they tapped into the power
of the Jade supercomputer, located at France's National Computing Center
for Higher Education and Research, which at the time was
around the twentieth most powerful computer in the world. So
what were they trying to calculate with that veritable muscle
car of computational capacity. It has to do with Isaac
(01:54):
Newton's universal law of gravitation, which states that gravity exists
between any to given objects. This gravitational force is directly
proportional to the object's masses and inversely proportional to the
square of the distance separating them, meaning that the more
massive an object is, the more gravity it will exert
(02:15):
on another object, but the further away an object is,
the less gravity it will exert on another object. A
Newton then proposed that the Sun's gravity is what holds
the planets in their orbits. But it's not that simple.
According to his own law, the planets and all of
(02:35):
the other objects in the Solar System, including moons and asteroids,
also exert at least a little gravity on each other.
So could the complex interplay of those forces cause the
stability of the Solar System to degrade over time in
the short term Nope. Even over longer periods, astronomers have
(02:57):
generally supported the idea that the Solar System would remain stable.
It just sort of makes sense. After all, the Sun
is overwhelmingly more massive than anything else in the Solar System.
Out of the Solar System's total mass, the Sun accounts
for ninety nine point eight percent of it. But a
few cosmologists began to wonder if chaos theory might apply
(03:20):
to planetary orbits. If so, small changes in planetary movements
could get magnified over time into something substantial. But how
long would it take? Thousands of years, millions billions? To
answer that question, you'd have to build a sort of
model to account for the movements of all of the planets,
(03:41):
as well as all of the forces being exerted as
that movement occurs. Then you'd need to let your Solar
system model run like a clock. So the planets cycled
through hundreds of thousands of orbits. As this occurred, you'd
need to track key data about each planet. One of
the most important pieces of data to collect would be
orbital eccentricity, which is a measure of how far a
(04:04):
planet deviates from a perfectly circular shape as it moves
around the Sun. Orbital eccentricity determines whether two planets might
come closer to having a close encounter. This is not
the kind of simulation you could run in your head
or with whatever fancy device you have at home, which
is why the researchers selected the Jade's supercomputer to do
(04:27):
their heavy lifting. Their inputs consisted of two five hundred
and one orbital scenarios, where each one altered Mercury's orbit
by just a few millimeters. They chose Mercury because, as
the runt of the Solar System, it's the biggest pushover,
and because its orbit synchronizes with jupiters to create changes
(04:48):
that ripple across the entire Solar System. For each hypothetical scenario,
they tracked the motion of all planets for more than
five billion years, which is the estimated life span of
the Sun. Even with the high powered CPU in the
Jade unit, each solution required four months of computing to
generate results. Luckily, for any future life on Earth, the
(05:14):
Solar System remained stable in ninety nine percent of the
researcher's scenarios. That is, no planets got set on collision
courses or ejected from their orbits. But in one percent
of their models, the ones in which the orbital chaos
had the greatest cumulative effect, Mercury's orbit became eccentric enough
to cause catastrophic changes in the Solar System. Some of
(05:37):
those catastrophes only involved Mercury, which could either crash into
the Sun or get dislodged from its orbit and flung
out into space, but other scenarios played out with Earth
colliding into either Mars or Venus. According to their models,
collision with Venus would occur through five steps, all of
(05:57):
which illustrate the cumulative effects orbital chaos. First, interaction between
Jupiter and Mercury about three point one three seven billion
years in the future, could cause the orbital eccentricity of
Mercury to increase. This would transfer some angular momentum from
the outer planets to the inner planets. This transfer would
(06:20):
destabilize the rest of the inner planets, so the orbital
eccentricities of Venus, Earth, and Mars would increase. This would
cause Earth to have a near miss with Mars, which
would disturb the eccentricity of Mars even more. This would
cause some weird reinforcing interactions among the inner planets to
decrease the eccentricity of Mercury but further increase the eccentricities
(06:44):
of Venus and Earth. Venus and Earth would have several
near misses until at three point three five two eight
nine one billion years in the future, the two planets
collided in an epic explosion that would destroy both worlds. Again.
In ninety nine percent of their simulations, everything was fine
(07:07):
until the Sun died. Of course, none of these models
may be accurate at all. First of all, we're still
discovering new bodies around our Solar System like asteroids, moons,
and comets all the time, and relatedly, they could make
more of a difference than the researchers originally accounted for.
(07:27):
In a follow up study of the same scientists along
with a larger team, looked at interactions between some of
the large bodies in the belt between Mars and Jupiter,
including the dwarf planet Series and major asteroids like Palace
and Vesta. They then extrapolated out what those interactions would
mean for the planets. What they concluded was that the
(07:49):
chaotic interactions between Series and Vesta specifically, should quickly amplify
even the tiniest of measurement errors, making it impossible to
predict what planetary orbits should look like based on the
current information beyond just sixty million years into the future
or into the past. Basically, all of this means that
(08:11):
the Solar System is filled with lots of stuff, and
even though it's pretty spread out, all of these objects
exert gravitational force on one another, and these forces can
change planetary orbits a lot, even if we can't measure
those changes very accurately. In fact, astronomers have evidence of
(08:31):
other Solar systems self destructing. In two thousand and eight,
a team from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics spotted
a Saturn sized planet orbiting a star in the constellation
Centaurus that was giving off way too much heat for
its planetary size. The scientists believe that the planet is
radiating massive amounts of heat because of a collision with
(08:53):
a Urinous sized Protoplanet in the astronomically recent past, and
in two thousand and nine, NASA's Spitzer space telescope spotted
the aftermath of a mash up between an object the
size of our moon and another the size of mercury,
about one hundred light years away in the constellation Pavo.
The peacock instruments on Spitzer detected the teltale signatures of
(09:17):
amorphous silica, a substance that forms on Earth when meteorites
slam into the ground. Of course, even if our solar
system doesn't succumb to orbital chaos and a Billiard like
crashing of the inner planets, stars don't last forever. In
about five billion years, when the Sun exhausts fuel supply,
(09:40):
all of the inner planets will disappear into the belly
of our rapidly expanding star. Either way, chaos induced collision
or stellar death, our tiny blue world won't go out
with a whimper, but with a bang. Today's episode a
space the article will orbital chaos cause Earth, Venus, and
(10:02):
Mars to collide On HowStuffWorks dot com written by William Harris.
Rain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks
dot com and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, brain Stuff,
Laurin Vogelbaum. Here, we all know that the planets of
the Solar System revolve around the Sun in a calm
and orderly fashion. In fact, the planets move with such
clockwork precision that astronomers can calculate orbital characteristics like eclipses
(00:24):
and planetary alignments with certainty. Want a list of solar
eclipses for the next ten thousand years, No problem. And
now let's say you want to look further into the future,
not thousands of years, but billions. How will those dusty
astronomical tables hold up? Then? Not so well if you
(00:45):
take into account the principles of chaos theory. A chaos
theory says that small inputs in an enormously complex system
can produce large scale outputs. This is what's sometimes called
the butterfly effect. The idea is that when a butterfly
flaps its wings in say Brazil, it could lead to
a chain reaction that causes a thunderstorm to develop over Australia.
(01:09):
Some scientists now propose that the evolution of the Solar
system may adhere to chaos theory, and that way way
way into the future. This could cause Earth to collide
with either Venus or Mars. A pair of scientists from
the Paris Observatory published a letter with this determination in
an issue of the journal Nature back in two thousand
(01:31):
and nine. For their research, they tapped into the power
of the Jade supercomputer, located at France's National Computing Center
for Higher Education and Research, which at the time was
around the twentieth most powerful computer in the world. So
what were they trying to calculate with that veritable muscle
car of computational capacity. It has to do with Isaac
(01:54):
Newton's universal law of gravitation, which states that gravity exists
between any to given objects. This gravitational force is directly
proportional to the object's masses and inversely proportional to the
square of the distance separating them, meaning that the more
massive an object is, the more gravity it will exert
(02:15):
on another object, but the further away an object is,
the less gravity it will exert on another object. A
Newton then proposed that the Sun's gravity is what holds
the planets in their orbits. But it's not that simple.
According to his own law, the planets and all of
(02:35):
the other objects in the Solar System, including moons and asteroids,
also exert at least a little gravity on each other.
So could the complex interplay of those forces cause the
stability of the Solar System to degrade over time in
the short term Nope. Even over longer periods, astronomers have
(02:57):
generally supported the idea that the Solar System would remain stable.
It just sort of makes sense. After all, the Sun
is overwhelmingly more massive than anything else in the Solar System.
Out of the Solar System's total mass, the Sun accounts
for ninety nine point eight percent of it. But a
few cosmologists began to wonder if chaos theory might apply
(03:20):
to planetary orbits. If so, small changes in planetary movements
could get magnified over time into something substantial. But how
long would it take? Thousands of years, millions billions? To
answer that question, you'd have to build a sort of
model to account for the movements of all of the planets,
(03:41):
as well as all of the forces being exerted as
that movement occurs. Then you'd need to let your Solar
system model run like a clock. So the planets cycled
through hundreds of thousands of orbits. As this occurred, you'd
need to track key data about each planet. One of
the most important pieces of data to collect would be
orbital eccentricity, which is a measure of how far a
(04:04):
planet deviates from a perfectly circular shape as it moves
around the Sun. Orbital eccentricity determines whether two planets might
come closer to having a close encounter. This is not
the kind of simulation you could run in your head
or with whatever fancy device you have at home, which
is why the researchers selected the Jade's supercomputer to do
(04:27):
their heavy lifting. Their inputs consisted of two five hundred
and one orbital scenarios, where each one altered Mercury's orbit
by just a few millimeters. They chose Mercury because, as
the runt of the Solar System, it's the biggest pushover,
and because its orbit synchronizes with jupiters to create changes
(04:48):
that ripple across the entire Solar System. For each hypothetical scenario,
they tracked the motion of all planets for more than
five billion years, which is the estimated life span of
the Sun. Even with the high powered CPU in the
Jade unit, each solution required four months of computing to
generate results. Luckily, for any future life on Earth, the
(05:14):
Solar System remained stable in ninety nine percent of the
researcher's scenarios. That is, no planets got set on collision
courses or ejected from their orbits. But in one percent
of their models, the ones in which the orbital chaos
had the greatest cumulative effect, Mercury's orbit became eccentric enough
to cause catastrophic changes in the Solar System. Some of
(05:37):
those catastrophes only involved Mercury, which could either crash into
the Sun or get dislodged from its orbit and flung
out into space, but other scenarios played out with Earth
colliding into either Mars or Venus. According to their models,
collision with Venus would occur through five steps, all of
(05:57):
which illustrate the cumulative effects orbital chaos. First, interaction between
Jupiter and Mercury about three point one three seven billion
years in the future, could cause the orbital eccentricity of
Mercury to increase. This would transfer some angular momentum from
the outer planets to the inner planets. This transfer would
(06:20):
destabilize the rest of the inner planets, so the orbital
eccentricities of Venus, Earth, and Mars would increase. This would
cause Earth to have a near miss with Mars, which
would disturb the eccentricity of Mars even more. This would
cause some weird reinforcing interactions among the inner planets to
decrease the eccentricity of Mercury but further increase the eccentricities
(06:44):
of Venus and Earth. Venus and Earth would have several
near misses until at three point three five two eight
nine one billion years in the future, the two planets
collided in an epic explosion that would destroy both worlds. Again.
In ninety nine percent of their simulations, everything was fine
(07:07):
until the Sun died. Of course, none of these models
may be accurate at all. First of all, we're still
discovering new bodies around our Solar System like asteroids, moons,
and comets all the time, and relatedly, they could make
more of a difference than the researchers originally accounted for.
(07:27):
In a follow up study of the same scientists along
with a larger team, looked at interactions between some of
the large bodies in the belt between Mars and Jupiter,
including the dwarf planet Series and major asteroids like Palace
and Vesta. They then extrapolated out what those interactions would
mean for the planets. What they concluded was that the
(07:49):
chaotic interactions between Series and Vesta specifically, should quickly amplify
even the tiniest of measurement errors, making it impossible to
predict what planetary orbits should look like based on the
current information beyond just sixty million years into the future
or into the past. Basically, all of this means that
(08:11):
the Solar System is filled with lots of stuff, and
even though it's pretty spread out, all of these objects
exert gravitational force on one another, and these forces can
change planetary orbits a lot, even if we can't measure
those changes very accurately. In fact, astronomers have evidence of
(08:31):
other Solar systems self destructing. In two thousand and eight,
a team from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics spotted
a Saturn sized planet orbiting a star in the constellation
Centaurus that was giving off way too much heat for
its planetary size. The scientists believe that the planet is
radiating massive amounts of heat because of a collision with
(08:53):
a Urinous sized Protoplanet in the astronomically recent past, and
in two thousand and nine, NASA's Spitzer space telescope spotted
the aftermath of a mash up between an object the
size of our moon and another the size of mercury,
about one hundred light years away in the constellation Pavo.
The peacock instruments on Spitzer detected the teltale signatures of
(09:17):
amorphous silica, a substance that forms on Earth when meteorites
slam into the ground. Of course, even if our solar
system doesn't succumb to orbital chaos and a Billiard like
crashing of the inner planets, stars don't last forever. In
about five billion years, when the Sun exhausts fuel supply,
(09:40):
all of the inner planets will disappear into the belly
of our rapidly expanding star. Either way, chaos induced collision
or stellar death, our tiny blue world won't go out
with a whimper, but with a bang. Today's episode a
space the article will orbital chaos cause Earth, Venus, and
(10:02):
Mars to collide On HowStuffWorks dot com written by William Harris.
Rain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks
dot com and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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