Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

None of these worlds, you remind yourself, has volition; none intends to be in a particular orbit. But those that are on well-behaved, circular orbits tend to grow and prosper, while those on giddy, wild, eccentric, or recklessly tilted orbits tend to be removed. As time goes on, the confusion and chaos of the early Solar System slowly settle down into a steadily more orderly, simple, regularly spaced, and, to your eyes, increasingly beautiful set of trajectories. Some bodies are selected to survive, others to be annihilated or exiled. This selection of worlds occurs through the operation of a few extremely simple laws of motion and gravity. Despite the good neighbor policy of the well-mannered worlds, you can occasionally make out a flagrant rogue worldlet on collision trajectory. Even a body with the most circumspect circular orbit has no warrantee against utter annihilation. To continue to survive, an Earth-like world must also continue to be lucky.

The role of something close to random chance in all this is striking. Which worldlet will be shattered or ejected, and which will safely grow to planethood, is not obvious. There are so many objects in so complicated a set of mutual interactions that it is very hard to tell—just by looking at the initial configuration of gas and dust, or even after the planets have mainly formed—what the final distribution of worlds will be. Perhaps some other, sufficiently advanced observer could figure it out and predict its future—or even set it all in motion so that, billions of years later, through some intricate and subtle sequence of processes, a desired outcome will slowly emerge. But that is not yet for humans.

You started with a chaotic, irregular cloud of gas and dust, tumbling and contracting in the interstellar night. You ended with an elegant, jewel-like solar system, brightly illuminated, the individual planets neatly spaced out one from another, everything running like clockwork. The planets are nicely separated, you realize, because those that aren’t are gone.

——

It’s easy to see why some of those early physicists who first penetrated the reality of the nonintersecting, coplanar orbits of the planets thought that the hand of a Creator was discernible. They were unable to conceive of any alternative hypothesis that could account for such magnificent precision and order. But in the light of modern understanding, there is no sign of divine guidance here, or at least nothing beyond physics and chemistry. Instead we see evidence of a time of remorseless and sustained violence, when vastly more worlds were destroyed than preserved. Today we understand something of how the exquisite precision that the Solar System now exhibits was extracted from the disorder of an evolving interstellar cloud by laws of Nature that we are able to grasp—motion, and gravitation, and fluid dynamics, and physical chemistry. The continued operation of a mindless selective process can convert chaos into order.

Our Earth was born in such circumstances about 4.5 or 4.6 billion years ago, a little world of rock and metal, third from the Sun. But we musn’t think of it as placidly emerging into sunlight from its catastrophic origins. There was no moment in which collisions of small worlds with the Earth ceased entirely. Even today objects from space run into the Earth or the Earth overtakes them. Our planet displays unmistakable impact scars from recent collisions with asteroids and comets. But the Earth has machinery that fills in or covers over these blemishes—running water, lava flows, mountain building, plate tectonics. The very ancient craters have vanished. The Moon, though, wears no makeup. When we look there, or to the Southern Highlands of Mars, or to the moons of the outer planets, we find a myriad of impact craters, piled one on top of the other, the record of catastrophes of ages past. Since we humans have returned pieces of the Moon to the Earth and determined their antiquity, it is now possible to reconstruct the chronology of cratering and glimpse the collisional drama that once sculpted the Solar System. Not just occasional small impacts, but massive, stupefying, apocalyptic collisions is the inescapable conclusion from the record preserved on the surfaces of nearby worlds.

By now, in the Sun’s middle age, this part of the Solar System has been swept free of almost all the rogue worldlets. There is a handful of small asteroids that come near the Earth, but the chance that any of the bigger ones will hit our planet soon is small. A few comets visit our part of the Solar System from their distant homeland. Out there, they are occasionally jostled by a passing star or a nearby, massive interstellar cloud—and a shower of icy worldlets comes careening into the inner Solar System. These days, though, big comets hit the Earth very rarely.