....Over time....
It does make me chuckle when I read things like that. No doubt, it is interesting to find an example of what our solar system _may_ have been like 4.someodd billion years ago, but the idea that we will be watching it over time to see how it develops, what are they going to do, leave a note on the telescope saying "check back at these co-ordinates in 500,000 years, this is what it looked like in 2014 (pic.jpg)"
considering A) how long the human race has been around, are we even likely to still be looking skyward in 500K years?
and B) given the speed that things move on a cosmological time scale, even if we were able to check back in 5M years, would we really notice much change?
I'm not saying we shouldn't bother, far from it, I'm just saying we should be realistic with our expectations
Biting the hand that feeds IT
