Long term future: Inner planets collide

Astronomers looking at the long-term future of the solar system have concluded that "a collision with Mercury or Mars could doom life long before the Sun swells into a red giant and bakes the planet to a crisp in about 5 billion years." USCS astronomers Gregory Laughlin and Konstantin Batygin, and Jacques Laskar of the Observatoire de Paris, ran computer simulations of the solar system. According to the New Scientist,

The studies suggest that the solar system's planets will continue to orbit the Sun stably for at least 40 million years. But after that, they show there is a small but not insignificant chance that things could go terribly awry....

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