Back To The Solar System

Genesis, PART TWO, III.

After a billion or so years:

the Sun is brighter, whiter and slightly blue;

"The rings of Saturn were tattered and tenuous." (p. 124);

one Jovian moon has become rings;

the Red Spot is gone;

Mars has lost its moons and its axis has shifted;

natural forces have eroded most human artifacts.

After only three million years, Larry Niven's Corbell and Peerssa find bigger changes but that is because there has been planetary engineering. The most interesting of these changes are:

the sun is a red giant;
Mars is moonless;
what looks like Earth is in orbit around what looks like Jupiter.

They do not know whether they are in the right planetary system!