>The Sun’s gravity (red arrow) pulls the Earth straight toward it the whole time — so why no collision? Because the Earth is also moving sideways (green arrow) at 29.8 km/s. Each moment it does fall toward the Sun, but its sideways speed carries it past — it keeps missing. The dashed line shows where inertia alone would send it; gravity bends that straight path into a closed loop. An orbit is simply falling, continuously, and always missing.

Reading stuff like this always makes me think "well that is fortunate." Of course there is survivorship bias so its not exactly surprising. But it also makes me wonder what could change the status quo.

I guess these are the things that could change it:

- suns becomes lighter (earth shoots into space)

- earth accelerates (earth shoots into space)

- sun becomes heavier (earth falls into sun)

- earth decelerates (earth falls into sun)

I guess in theory some large interstellar object could pass to close too earth and fling us off into space or into the sun.

> well that is fortunate

I think that was one of the arguments of the Anthropic principle [1], that there doesn't appear to be any reason why there are 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, or why the fundamental constants are what they are - but if they weren't then there wouldn't be anyone to exist to say "well that is fortunate".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle#Dimensions...