Stability of the Solar System that keeps the far side of the Moon away from the Earth. Mercury is in a 3:2 spin–orbit resonance. The planets' orbits are chaotic over longer timescales, such that the whole Solar System possesses a Lyapunov time in the range of 2–230 million years. In all cases this means that the position of a planet along its orbit ultimately becomes impossible to predict with any certainty (so, for example, the timing of winter and summer become uncertain), but in some cases the orbits themselves may change dramatically. Such chaos manifests most strongly as changes in eccentricity, with some planets' orbits
Gustav Holst likens to "unresolved timelessness ... never ending, since space does not end, but drifting away into eternal silence". Apart from his concession with "I Vow to Thee..."', Holst insisted on the unity of the whole work, and opposed the performance of individual movements. Nevertheless, Imogen wrote that the piece had "suffered from being quoted in snippets as background music". During and after the composition of "The Planets", Holst wrote or arranged numerous vocal and choral works, many of them for the wartime Thaxted Whitsun Festivals, 1916–18. They include the "Six Choral Folksongs" of 1916, based on West Country tunes, of