All the problems in the world going on today, and this is what someone is sitting around doing?  Figuring out what may or may not happen in 5 billion years?  Are you kidding me?  This is the problem with the world today.  Can we concentrate on the problems of today and in the NEAR future, let's say, 10 years?  Come on!  Are we really that stupid of a human race?  We must be.  Let's get our priorities straight. 

Al Gore will come up with some way to make money on this information...

Leafgreen>>> here's a slogan for ya from the United Negro College Fund: The mind is a terrible thing to waste. What happens in 5 billion years doesn't really matter now does it? What they are doing is wasting their minds. Obviously they are smart. I say put their smart minds to work for NOW!

Do I hear Immanuel Velikovsky turning over in his grave? Everybody laughed at his book about world orbits changing, and the upheaval it could bring. Now that "scientists" can run a computer model, it becomes serious stuff! Oh, wait, a computer said it, so it has to be right!

Or, going back to the Bible "There is nothing under the sun that is new, behold, it has been of old...."

J -- Leafgreen is right. Most Inventions were the result of accident. Penicillin was discovered because someone left the window open. Transistors -- and all that they are in -- were developed to reduce weight for the space program.Very little that is in everyday use was developed because scientists said, "Let's develop one." The best way to solve the problems of the world today is to fund wild-eyed research (such as, "where does my lap go when I stand up?").

Norman>>> Most inventions? Let's see, you named two out of the 1000's of things invented. I would highly disagree with your statement that MOST inventions were the result of an accident. And yes, transistors were invented with a THOUGHT, not a mistake. Geez, if you're going to come on here, at least make a relevant point.

Surely global warming is to blame.

The article states that, "Our moon was created when a mars sized object hit earth about 4 billion years ago, theorists figure." Considering that there are too many other variables that contradict that age of the earth, such as, the amount of helium in the earths atmosphere produced by radioactive decay of uranium & thorium, the decay of the earths magnetic field, the pressure of oil in petroleum deposits, the presence in rocks of pleochroic haloes of very short- lived radioisotopes, the rate of cooling of the earth(taking into account heat produced by the decay of radioactive substances), the Poynting-Robertson effect, the lifetime of comets, & the time required for clusters of galaxies to disperse, just to name a few, gives the earth a very young age, not 4 billion years old. These "scientists" use words as figure, might have, could be, possibly, may have, etc.. Not very good science. Pretty much supposition based on ones philosophy of the origins of all there is around us. Same as creationists. Both camps use their philosophical views of HOW things began. They need to stick to the empirical evidence at hand. Not at WHAT they think happened. No human was there at the beginning of all things. All guess work.

wonder what the dow jones industrial average will be then? will china still have more than a billion people? will anyone be able to find a republican with any sense by then? will the feeble minded still believe the earth is young? well the easy answer is people won't be alive by 2100. way too many problems we are ignoring. we are creating refugees all around the planet ( 2 million in pakistan just since obama's election ). so when there are so many people with nothing to lose, and with so many people losing loved ones due to our imperialism, it's just a question of time before a few madmen get nuclear weapons. there is no solution because american leadership is deaf to the problem (ike warned us 50 years ago ). so let science have a little fun. all scientific disciplines reach the same conclusion, evolution is a fact of life. from astronomy we learn the big bang happened about 14 billion years ago, from geology & paleontology we learn, the earth is about 5 billion years old, and we as a species are about 100,000 years old. from biology & chemistry we learn our dna is extremely close to both chimps & gorillas. we have the giants newton, darwin & einstein that enhanced our knowledge to an incredible degree. from creationism we have the same stupidity that galilleo, copernicus & kepler encountered centuries ago.

As I will reiterrate, many of the people in the world and on this forum, need hugs.

Wonder if the geeks on those other planets have any concern ? Opps ! I guess they aren't born/evolved/ are not there yet. So many possibilities over the course of billions of years. Bottom line - stupid article !

3.3 billion years,no one will be here.

if we are still on earth by that time we are to stupid to stay around. in 20k yearswe will not even be just on earth anymore.

The computer they are using is obviously programmed under evolutionary assumptions. A major malfunction right there.

Are we suppose to panic about this, or what is the point here? Maybe the greenies will want to use this information as another excuse to dictate our lives.

I know I'm not the best speaker but let me try. We do need to move off of this planet some time (sooner rather than later) as earth is just too fragile a basket to keep all our eggs in. Right now we don't have the technology to colonize other stellar systems, but if we are still around we will eventually. This research will help in choosing those different systems.

Oh, big deal. Gregory Laughlin at UC/Santa Cruz created a math program last year that demonstrated the same thing. The real possibilities were that Mercury will crash into the sun; be ejected from the solar system altogether; crash into Venus; crash into Earth. Whatever, humans will be long gone, whether we move off the planet and settle elsewhere or simply go extinct. By the time anything actually happens, the sun will have expanded to a red giant and vaporized the Earth and none of us will be here, so what difference does it make? This is old news -- more than a YEAR old.

So why is this kind of news story important? Well, if Mercury's orbit is unstable, then so is Earth's orbit, which is probably why we get climate changes. If Jupiter's gravitational influence can change the shape of Mercury's orbit, then, logically, it can do the same thing to Earth's orbit. Gregory Kasinsky and Victor Brumberg calculated in 2004 that the distance between the sun and the Earth is increasing by about 6 inches per year. Takaho Miura has now shown that a tidal pulse between the Earth and the sun is the cause.

These researchers have to publish the results of their projects in order to meet the requirements of tenured positions and/or justify the grants they get for funding the projects. My sister is working on a research project involving clinical pain studies and she is also teaching classes and counseling students. These people work up to 80 hours a week. The techno junk that all of you take for granted comes out of these research projects. One invention builds upon the results of other inventions and on nearly obssessive hours of research.

I agree with cried: we need to escalate research and development of space travel so that we can settle elsewhere and reduce the human population on this planet to a more sustainable level, and some day, some bright person will have the "eureka!" moment and realize that the impossible and the implausible are both plausible and possible.

Just the tiniest of movements can throw everything out of whack. Imagine one small nudge by some other body and we're toast. That's why it takes a galaxy with at least 100 billion stars in it to be able to produce one planet with intelligent life. That means at least 100 billion conditions had to be met, and met just right for us to be here. Conditions such as the Goldie Locks zone, the size of our planet , and the size of the sun, to get the gravity just right and heat just right. The fact that in the beginning we had to be hit by another planet in just the right way to produce a moon that would keep our orbit and the angle of rotation just right, is in itself mind boggling. The fact that our planet is made of just the right material that gives the planet a magnetic field that protects the life from radiation from the sun is also mind blowing. We won't even get into the dynamics of how the ocean currents react with the land mass that effect our climate, or how if the Dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct, we wouldn't be here. These are just a few of the conditions that we know about that had to be met. There are billions of others we don’t even know about. There is estimated to be about 240 billion galaxies in the universe. That means there could be at least 240 billion planets out there that have intelligent life on them. I like to call it the Banks equation which says, “It takes one galaxy with at least 100 billion stars to produce one planet with intelligent life".

Interesting story but not really relevant to everyday living. Sorta like the headline: "GOP Could Be Bipartisian - Eventually" being news. We all know it's possible 4-5 billion years from now - maybe - but not likely in our lifetime...

There are so many other things to worry about, like politics on www.AmericanParchment.com, why worry about another planet crashing into us. Just keep up with what you are doing and relax, if it happes it happens nothing you can do about it and there is no reason to stress over it.

WTF? in 7 billion years will the human rece even be around to give a dam? next thing you know these researchers will want money to try and find a way to prevent this. WOW!

saweeeeeeet!

This reminds me of the cut scenes from "3rd Rock From the Sun."

"Incoming message from the big giant head!"