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A comment on A meteorite hit the moon during yesterday's total lunar eclipse. Parent comment

Re:A meteorite hit the moon during yesterday's total lunar e... by gerdesj on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @07:47PM (#18974561)
>> for possibly billions of years with its unknown fate already sealed

>Probably not for quite that long.

No, you are right "Probably not for quite that long" - way longer.

Parent was looking deep in wonder at something and frankly the bits that make up the meteor are as old as they are old. Those atoms have been hanging around the place for quite a while but I'm not too sure that anyone can really decide when they should be considered as "existing" as a meteor.

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Re:A meteorite hit the moon during yesterday's total lunar e... by azernik on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @08:04PM (#18974682)
GP was talking about determinism (chaos theory), not the Ship of Theseus problem. i.e. the same meteor has existed for a long time, but orbital dynamics in the real solar system aren't really deterministic on such long time scales.
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