Recently I met a fellow who insisted that Venus either originated from Jupiter, having been knocked off a few thousand years ago, or had a recent encounter with Venus. His idea was based on a few assertions that I have had trouble figuring out the veracity of. He claims:
Venus is too hot to be explained by the greenhouse effect.
Venus emits too much energy (I’m not clear whether he meant heat or radio energy) to be one of our run-of-the-mill inner planets.
The atmosphere of Venus, largely CO[sub]2[/sub], N[sub]2[/sub], and sulfuric acid, is best explained by originating in Jupiter’s atmosphere, with the components altered at high temperature and pressure.
His ideas are apparently based on those of Immanuel Velikovsky and Zecharia Sitchin, with the twist that they are based on the points above instead of ancient mythology.
I’m obviously a bit skeptical of the above statements, and I’m wondering if any of them are true and where I could find more information.
Velikovsky’s ideas are not accepted by mainstream scientists. I like mavericks who buck “The Establishment,” but I don’t think the Velikovsky has the scientific evidence on his side.
Venus does have a couple of other oddities, like it’s “backwards” rotation and its enenly distributed crater distribution.
The cratering seems to be no older than 500M-700M years old, and the absense of plate tectonics. Currently, the two competing theories are:
a) 500M=700M years ago, Venus suffered a catastrophic event (like an asteroid strike), that liquified and reformed its surface. Thus, only craters made after it cooled and resolidified are present.
b) Venus undergoes a cycle of the crust cooling off. Then, once the temperature internally builds up to some certain point, it causes the entire crust to break up and fall back into the molten interior, after which the surface later cools and resolifies. The last time this would have happened would have been the aforementioned date ranges.
Velikovsky knew just enough science to sound intelligent, but not enough to actually know what he was talking about. His book had Venus periodically swooping over the planet Earth and causing some of the Biblical miracles, such as the appearance of manna in the desert, and the halting of the Earth’s rotation during the battle of Jericho. Needless to say, his explanation had a few holes in it (e.g., stopping the Earth’s rotation would have destroyed the planet).
If you can find some of Isaac Asimov’s old science article collections, he wrote one called “Worlds in Confusion” that did a great job debunking the Velikovsky theories.
Mjollnir is right…Velikovsky’s ideas are not accepted (or, perhaps I should just call a spade a spade and say they are flat out wrong).
One of Sagan’s books (was it Broca’s Brain?) had a detailed debunking of Velikovsky. There’s plenty of other debunkings available on the web too. http://www.talkorigins.org/scripts/search/query2.idq?Cmd=Velikovsky&How=simple
Can your friend think of a valid mechanism by which Jupiter could spit out Venus? (now there’s a cue for a dirty joke).
I’ll have to check further into the three points you raised, but I think the greenhouse effect adequately exlains Venus’ temperature.
I have heard of Velikovsky’s theories. I understand that his ideas are not widely accepted, but at the same time, some of his theories HAVE panned out and have been proven to be correct…usually without him being credited for the original theory. I don’t have my sources on that at my disposal right now, but I do specifically remember reading them.
No it’s not. The greenhouse effect explains quite handily why Venus is so hot. Planetary scientists commonly refer to the phenomenon of Venus being too hot to support life, Mars being too cold, and Earth being just right, as the Goldilocks problem, and it’s well understood.
No, Venus actually came from Uranus… You see, when Jupiter castrated Uranus, his father, some of the blood dripped into the Sea, and this divine ichor coalesced into Venus, and because of the nature of the wound, she became the goddess of love and sex, and…
Oh, wait, that’s not what we’re talking about here, is it… Sorry, go back to your scientific discussion.
Which one of Velikovsky’s theories has “panned out” but Velikovsky didn’t get the credit? I’m sure Velikovskeites have claimed that some of his theories have proved to be correct, but (ahem) they are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I found it interesting reading. There’s background on Velikovsky’s clashes with Sagan and some details on why velikovsky’s archaeology may not have been totally wrong, even if his astronomy was.
Ah, memories. Man, that guy could rant. Is he still hanging around on talk.origins? Remember his fascination with Kaz, the weightlifter, and the implications on the lesser effects of gravity?
The quote I heard about Velikovsky came from some researcher who said,
“When I talked to physicists about his book, they’d say that of course the physics was completely preposterous, but the archaeology research impressed them. When I talked to archaeologists about the book, they’d say that of course the archaeology was completely preposterous, but the physics research really impressed them.”
This is why these charlatans get the audience they do. The good ones learn how to use all the right buzzwords, so if you are reading outside of your specialty it looks really good. If you actually know something about the subject, it all falls apart and becomes laughable. But since there are very few people around that understand all the required fields, the book never loses total credibility.