So I’ve been playing catch-up on NOVA’s “The Planets” and it told me an astonishing story about the solar system which somehow I’d never heard before: the gas giant Jupiter once spiraled violently inward through the nascent solar system.
Its path ended the development of watery Ceres, created the carnage that is the asteroid belt, kept Mars small, and likely prevented the formation of “super-Earths” like the ones we see around other stars. It only managed to avoid doing to Earth what it did to Mars because the development of its gas-sister Saturn pulled it back into an outer orbit, a move which itself tossed water-bearing objects inward, facilitating the development of life on Earth.
Long before there was The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin, there was The Marauding Jupiter by Vity Gra.