![]() (This is needed to make this analogy work, but don't try this at home.) But instead, say you had a perfect bouncy ball with you - a ball that could never, ever break. If you wanted to match your speed with the train's, you could just let it smash into you - and while some parts of you might achieve the required velocity, it probably wouldn't be in the way you intended. Imagine you're standing on railroad tracks and a train is headed right for you. To save ourselves, we'd have to play the same kinds of gravitational games that our young solar system was accustomed to. In about 500 million years, the sun will become so hot that Earth's oceans will evaporate, plate tectonics will grind to a halt, and so much carbon dioxide will build up in the atmosphere that our planet will look like Venus. Every day, the sun gets slightly hotter and brighter - a natural byproduct of the buildup of helium from the fusion of hydrogen in its core. Things won't be so pretty in the future, either. Of those dozens of potential planets, only eight survived the rest were either launched into the sun or ejected into interstellar space. In that chaos, the planetesimals collided, swung too close to each other and got whipped by the growing gravitational power of the gas giants. ![]()
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