So the computer based solution proposed by Newton and Turing is rejected because the system is chaotic, meaning a general solution will always diverge from reality.
What I don’t get is: this should still be good enough Run your solution every month or so, with updated measurements, and you’ll have an ongoing “forecast” of conditions.
I’m referencing weather because that’s we do. A weather forecast is a prediction of a chaotic system, but of one which changes every day or so. Prediction difficulty is dependent on local conditions and weather type, but we can still make predictions.
A gravitational system of 4 mutually interacting bodies is muuuuuch simpler than weather, and could be predicted far enough in advance to let a civilization adapt and persist!
I’ve heard that in reality a system with three stars will collapse into a two-star system within human time scales anyway
No sillier than Star Trek, and the more I learn of it the more I want to read it
It’s neat! The science stuff often just magic to justify the story, but a lot of the ideas are neaalt and it’s an easy read. There are some occasional weird moments, but it’s also a quick read so not a huge time investment.
It’s not for everyone and I can understand why some won’t like it.
On its own, it’s quite an interesting sci-fi though it has some of your typical Chinese boomer nationalist brainworms.
But it helps to understand why it has gained such a cult status in China (even among the highest bureaucratic circles). The book was written in the early 2000s when China was much weaker both militarily and technologically and it reflected the anxiety of a rising country/civilization that is surrounded by much stronger imperialist powers with hostile intentions, and the various attitudes of the Chinese society toward it (some people think we should just open up and embrace the Western world, some think we should be cautious about it. Very common views about Americans and the West up until Trump).
In fact, in Ball Lightning
spoiler for Ball Lightning, which is a prequel and set in the same universe but has little overlap with TBP main plot
a war broke out between US and China. So in the TBP universe the US and China had already fought a war which ended in a very “interesting” way.
Well, alpha centauri is a 3 star system in reality. 2 sun like stars orbit each other and a red dwarf orbits 13000 AU away from them, which is really far away, but happens because the red dwarf is so much less massive than the other two. The two stars will be orbiting close to their center of mass and barely feel the gravity of the red dwarf. So the center of the star system is the pair and planets would orbit them. Nasa says the biggest worry fo life in this system would be the x-rays emissions by proxima centauri (the red dwarf).
