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Worlds in Collision

The End of Everything You Thought You Knew

After something like ten years of research into the subject, Velikovsky's account was published as Worlds in Collision, which appeared in 1950. Its essential thesis can now be summarized in modern terms as follows.

Some time before the middle of the second millennium b.c., a white-hot, fiery object was ejected from Jupiter. For an indeterminate period, possibly centuries, it moved as a giant comet on a highly elongated orbit that passed close around the Sun and intersected the orbit of the Earth. Eventually, around 1450 b.c., it emerged from perihelion—the point of closest approach to the Sun—on a path that brought it to an encounter with Earth.

Approaching tail-first, it engulfed the Earth in the outer regions of its millions-of-miles-long coma, from which a rain of caustic, asphyxiating dust filtered down through the atmosphere, turning red the landscape everywhere, and choking rivers and lakes with dead fish. As the Earth moved deeper into the tail, this intensified into rains of red-hot gravel and meteorites, destroying crops, livestock, and towns, and laying waste whole regions. Hydrocarbon gases torn from Jupiter's atmosphere, unable to ignite in the oxygen-free space environment, mixed with Earth's atmosphere to form explosive mixtures that fell as flaming naphtha, causing fires that burned for years and smoke that darkened the entire surface. Unburned petroleum sank into the ground in enormous quantities forming broad swathes across the planet.

 

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As the two bodies closed under their mutual gravitational grip, volcanoes, earthquakes, tectonic upheavals, and hurricane-force winds rent the Earth's surface, while the oceans piled up into huge tides that surged across continents. Through the pall of dust and smoke, the comet loomed with the appearance of a monstrous dragon spitting fire in the form of electrical discharges between its head and writhing coma arms of charged plasma, and then down upon the surface of the Earth itself as the magnetospheres of the two bodies met. The forces of mutual gyration eventually tore the intruder away to retreat back toward the outer Solar System, in the process of which the Earth turned over to emerge with inverted poles, and its orbit and spin perturbed. Velikovsky speculated that given the electrically active condition of the ionized plasma enveloping and still forming much of the bulk of the incandescent proto-planet, electromagnetic forces probably played a significant part in this.

 

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Having thus interacted, the Earth and Venus moved in a resonant pattern that brought them into proximity again every fifty years or so, though with the closeness of the encounters reducing. This continued for about seven hundred years until Venus's still-eccentric orbit brought it close to Mars, which in those days was nearer to Earth. Here, Mars and Venus exchanged roles. Venus receded to become no-longer threatening, while Mars was diverted into an Earth-encounter that changed Earth's motion again and commenced another series of destructive interactions until Mars finally settled into the orbit it describes today. The close approaches of Earth and Mars every fifteen years, the similar tilts of their axes, and the almost identical lengths of their days could, Velikovsky suggests, be remnants of the period of repeated interaction between them.

If such events indeed happened, they would be expected to have left evidence discernible today. Velikovsky offered a number of suggestions for findings that would support his theory, many of them going against the prevailing scientific beliefs of the times. One was that close encounters between the Earth and bodies the size of Venus and Mars would also have major effects on the Moon. (The lunar deity is also involved in the mythological scenarios of all cultures, usually in some kind of amorous entanglement or rivalry with the other gods.) Hence, the Moon's craters and other surface features should be relatively young—in the order of thousands of years, not billions. It should show evidence of recent heating, possibly with some remnant volcanic activity still detectable, and exhibit magnetic effects impressed into its rocks.

Similarly with Mars. Mars has a mass of around a tenth that of the Earth and a radius slightly over a half, whereas Venus is only slightly smaller than Earth. Tidal effects of a larger body upon a smaller one will be immensely greater than those of a small body on a larger one. Therefore Mars would be a devastated planet, its surface scarred by rifts and fissures. This suggestion was put forward at a time when the possibility of life on Mars was still being vigorously debated by many scientists, and some believed that the "canals" might be the legacy of a lost civilization. It also seemed probable that a small body like Mars would lose a portion of its atmosphere in encounters with Earth. Since oxygen and water vapor are not present in the Martian atmosphere, Velikovsky reasoned that some other elements of the terrestrial atmosphere should be found there. He urged that a search be made for argon and neon. 93

As for Venus itself, the mainstream view propounded in 1950 held it to be an Earthlike sister planet, probably somewhat warmer than Earth on account of its closer position to the Sun. Some astronomers predicted that its clouds would turn out to be water vapor and its surface covered by oceans. This was despite infrared and spectroscopic data available at that time that indicated a higher temperature and complete absence of water, but which were largely discounted because the current theory had no explanation for them. Further, although indications were that Venus's rotation about its axis was very slow, there was no difference between the radiated temperatures of the dark and light sides, which seemed anomalous. For Velikovsky there was no contradiction. Because of its violent expulsion from Jupiter and recent history as an incandescent object, it would be innately very hot, swamping any day-night effect due to the Sun.

Velikovsky also reasoned that the bulk of the Venusian cometary tail would have been derived from the atmosphere of Jupiter and hence have contained large amounts of hydrocarbons, much of which fell upon the Earth. Hydrocarbons and other carbon derivatives should therefore be abundant in Venus's atmosphere today and contribute to its high reflective brightness. If oxygen exists in any significant amount, conceivably obtained via gas exchange with the Earth, hydrocarbon fires could still be burning on the surface.

Since petroleum hydrocarbons were universally attributed to organic origins, Velikovsky speculated that life might exist on Jupiter, and that its transportation in some form that could survive might account for the "vermin" that came with the other Egyptian plagues. While acknowledging that the heat and general conditions were in themselves sufficient to produce proliferations of things like frogs and locusts, he thought it possible that the plague of flies could have come as larvae, known to be capable of surviving extremes of temperature and the absence of oxygen. The suggestion of life first arriving here in some preserved larval or microbial form has been put forward since from other quarters too. 94 (Personally, I think that the rivers full of dead fish, along with all the animal and human corpses from everything else that was going on provide a ready explanation for flies and the like.)

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, Velikovsky suggested, would be a structural scar marking the place where Venus erupted, still giving rise to atmospheric perturbations. And in a lecture at Princeton in 1953 he proposed that contrary to the prevailing view of Jupiter's being cold and dead, it should be emitting nonthermal radio energy. His reason for supposing this was that if electrical forces played a role in planetary dynamics, and the Solar System as a whole was neutral, the Sun and planets would have opposite charges. Jupiter would have the largest planetary charge, and its rapid rotation should radiate electromagnetically. He had asked Einstein, with whom he maintained friendship, to use his influence to have a radio survey performed to look for such an effect. In the same talk, Velikovsky suggested that while the Earth's magnetic field was known to decrease with distance at lower altitudes, it could be stronger beyond the ionosphere and extend at least as far as the Moon—again violating currently held opinions.

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