The Oort Cloud View of The Solar System
Strangely reminiscent of other self-organized forms . . .particularly when, as Louis Frank reports, 20 to 40 ton water-ice comets hit the earth's atmosphere 5 to 30 times per minute! And this only the earth! This means the cometary membrane is very actively feeding water to the interior planets... "Dynamical simulations show that Kuiper belt comets simply don't fall directly toward Earth's neighborhood but plod their way toward the inner solar system in stairstep fashion. It turns out that the massive outer planets are almost exactly spaced so that they "hand-off" comets from one to the other. At each step the powerful gravitational field of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter might either eject the com et from the solar system or pass it onto the next planet inside their orbit."
More on Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud dynamics at http://www.earthsky.com/1997/mi/esmi970113.html
Comets: Source of Water on Earth (May 2001)
Louis Frank
Small Comets Website.
Louis Frank's "The Big Splash"
The Big Splash at Amazon.Com