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by chmod600 873 days ago
"We have no idea where Venus will be exactly [ten] million years from today."

I'm trying to figure out what this is supposed to mean. Of course we don't know exactly, but also of course we have some idea.

Like, could Venus have had an eccentric orbit that extended further from the Sun than Earth or closer than Mercury? Could it have had a moon?

1 comments

Sorry I should have been more specific. We can't predict the accurate position of Venus in its orbit ten million years from now, and it's possible its orbit will have a different shape then too. However it's unlikely that the orbit would be so eccentric that it would intersect with Earth's orbit. That kind of deviation becomes more likely when we talk about a billion years.