QED, your words are not evidence. You have made reference to literally nothing which says or suggests that the three body sun-earth-moon problem can exist as a stable system.
Whether he says it here or not, we know it is a stable system from observation, and from travels between Earth, Moon and Sun.
If they were not stable, the lunar craft sent to the Moon by USA, Russia, India, Japan, China and Saudi Arabia would have missed their marks.
No?
We also know the stability of the other planets from travels to and between them.
The orbits are stable on human time scales. Since the multi-body interaction is chaotic, predictions of trajectories may not be reliable beyond a few 100 million years. Of course, that is a running number. With reasonable assumptions, the predictions can be extended further.
What Tom doesn’t understand is that although the solar system is technically a chaotic system, the gravitational force is very weak, and so this permits us to compute predictions with relative ease.
How else could we launch a probe that would meet Pluto exactly in its orbit 9 years later?
Tom strikes me as someone who is very eager to find anything to justify his position. So when he discovers that the solar system is chaotic, he probably goes:
Aha! It’s chaotic! I knew Newton was bullshit! I knew it was a conspiracy!
Then he probably tracks down some technical details of this chaos description to use as debate fodder, and subsequently feels remarkably safe with his position on the issue.
But it doesn’t seem like he ever bothered to ask the question most people would in that situation:
What does the solar system being chaotic MEAN?
And that’s his problem! He just assumes what it means. And he’s wrong.
But if you try to reason with him, I think he interprets it as a trick. Or perhaps he thinks that because he found technical details (which he cannot assess) the matter is proven.
Im not entirely sure, but for whatever reason, he has placed himself into an entrenched position where he is not able to adjust his view even if it is based on a basic mistake that is shown to him.
It’s like you thinking there are 5 apples on the table, and then I go: “no there’s 6, look.” And instead of just looking and realising you miscounted, you weave a network of half-relevant and misinterpreted information, including the history of apples and cultivation methods in various cultures, and different products made from apples — all to hold on to the position that there just absolutely NEEDS to be 5 apples on that table.