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 solution to a 3 body problem (in which you can given the initial values predict the exact position and momentum of all 3 bodies at any point in time) does not exist. That only means we don’t have a perfect formula for solving it forever and perfectly because it eventually gets chaotic.
We can, however, take a look at the enormous amount of data we have and create reasonable, short term predictions for specific times that seem very long in human years but are very short in the astronomical sense. And in those passing years we have gotten better at gathering said data and analyzing it, and now have computers that can do, as James May one said: Years worth of arithmetic: *snaps* like that.
That and the Earth being MUCH bigger than the Moon and the Sun being MUCH, MUCH, MUCH, MUCH bigger than everything else means the math can be simplified a lot and still work.
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