Every Way Our Solar System Could End Explained In 15 Minutes

Orbital Chaos The first threat is hidden inside the machinery itself. For centuries the solar system was treated as the perfect example of order, a set of planets moving on fixed paths that could be predicted forever. That picture is wrong. The orbits are mildly chaotic, meaning the tiny gravitational tugs the planets exert on one another accumulate over time, and the further into the future you try to calculate, the less certain the outcome becomes.