It always surprises me how millions of planets can move about predictably for millions of years. Unless it's hit with some gigantic rock... or it gets infected with sentient life.

I would not draw that conclusion from this article - we don't have such fine-grained data from other planets, perhaps their axes are more wobbly than Earth's. E.g it was only in 2020 that we discovered Mars has a "Chandler wobble" similar to Earth's (which was discovered 150 years earlier). But Mars's wobble is quite different as a matter of geophysics, Earth's Chandler wobble is mostly sustained by ocean sloshing. There's a whole lot we don't know about the non-Earth planets.

I will add that human extraction of groundwater it not nearly as impactful as the formation of large igneous provinces and other ancient supervolcanoes. A tectonically active planet will definitely wobble unpredictably.

its survival bias, they were moving billions of years before, objects with unstable orbits traveled somewhere else, and stable objects formed stable planets.

> or it gets infected with sentient life.

If only more planets could be so lucky.

What value does a planet have without sentient life there to enjoy it?

Humanity is not an infection. And how many of those millions of planets can you name?

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