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!
In the books they basically had the forecast system you talk about. The real problem was their most recent predictions showed their whole planet falling into one of the stars.
More a nitpick for the overall series, but if I were a swordweilder I’d just start terraforming Mars or Venus and constantly be saying, “Hey, what a lovely planet we’re making. It could look like anything, be home to anyone. I sure do wonder if our interstellar neighbors would like to have it in exchange for us maintaining some autonomy? Maybe a mutual partnership? A jointly operated particle accelerator?”
Most of us can survive most of the weather most of the time, for now. Getting slingshotted deep into space or into another celestial body is like a category 999 hurricane; nothing’s going to be able to adapt.
Well yeah, I guess I just don’t like how it’s waved away as useless when there’s very real civilizational utility in being able to predict orbits with e.g. 99% accuracy out to like 2 months.
I’m not sure what limits the sophon has. in the books, I thought it could gather all intelligence, hence the name, but physically could only interact on the extremely minute scale.
in the TV show, I don’t understand why it can’t just kill everyone, crash every plane, destroy all computers, and make all the main characters blind and give them hallucinations until they go insane.
Book spoilers.
That is not the reason why they had to leave their home planet. In fact, their calculations could go pretty far, but it also predicted that the planet will eventually become engulfed by one of the stars.
They further corroborated this with the observations that there used to be multiple planets in their star system (which have all since been engulfed by the stars) and the one that they are living on has been cracked into two by the last great cataclysm which further deteriorated whatever conditions it was on the original planet.
