Isn’t the 3 body problem (sun, Earth, Moon) very difficult to solve? How did humans predict future eclipses decades even centuries ago?
In: Planetary Science
The 3 body problem can’t be solved but it can be simulated to some accuracy. So you can accurately predict what will happen in the next few hundred years, but maybe not in the next few hundred million years.
This is true of any chaotic system, you can’t accurately predict it forever but you can take the current state and then work forward to where it will go in the near future. Because you can never have a perfect capture of the starting state your predictions will eventually drift out of sync with reality, but you can still make accurate predictions in the near term.
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