RE: When plants align
March 14, 2015 at 9:18 am
(This post was last modified: March 14, 2015 at 9:31 am by Anomalocaris.)
(March 12, 2015 at 9:41 pm)Void Wrote: This is just an absurd question, but I kind of thought it was funny, so I'm just gonna pop it.
I was thinking that in a world with infinite posibilities, there would be a chance that one religion actually was right. I kind of thought the odds of that would be about the same as having all the plants in the solar system line up in one straight line on one side of the sun.
The question is, will that ever happen, or have happened in the past? And if it is possible, how would that affect the physics of the sun and the solar system?
The answer depends on how precisely do the planets have to line up for you to consider them to be "lined up".
If you require a single straight line to pass through all planet, that almost certainly has never happened, nor will ever happen. The reason is the solar system is not a flat plane. The plane of each planet's orbit is slightly different. The degree of inclination is small but when multiplied by interplanetary distances the absolute up and down movement of any planet is large compared to the size of the planet. The planes of different planetary orbits intersect along lines of different orientation. So there is no location anywhere along any orbit where planes of more than 2 planetary orbits intersect. So even if all planets fall precisely on a single straight line when viewed top down from above the solar system - in itself an extremely unlikely event - no matter what the orientation of that line is in the horizontal plane, those same planets would never be aligned on a straight line when looked at edge on.
On the other hand, if you relax your definition of lined up to mean, for example, all 8 planets occupying the same 45 or 90 degree slice of arc around the sun when viewed top down, then yes, it has happened many times before and will happen again many more times.
