PROBLEM I
THE EJECTION OF VENUS
BY JUPITER

VELIKOVSKY’S hypothesis begins with an event that has never been observed by astronomers and that is inconsistent with much that we know about planetary and cometary physics, namely, the ejection of an object of planetary dimensions from Jupiter, perhaps by its collision with some other giant planet. Such a propagation of catastrophes, Velikovsky promised, would be “the theme of the sequel to Worlds in Collision” (page 373). Thirty years later, no sequel of this description has appeared. From the fact that the aphelia (the greatest distances from the Sun) of the orbits of short-period comets have a statistical tendency to lie near Jupiter, Laplace and other early astronomers hypothesized that Jupiter was the source of such comets. This is an unnecessary hypothesis because we now know that long-period comets may be transferred to short-period trajectories by the perturbations of Jupiter; this view has not been advocated for a century or two except by the Soviet astronomer V. S. Vsekhsviatsky, who seems to believe that the moons of Jupiter eject comets out of giant volcanoes.

To escape from Jupiter, such a comet must have a kinetic energy of ½ mv.², where m is the cometary mass and v. is the escape velocity from Jupiter, which is about 60 km/sec. Whatever the ejection event—volcanoes or collisions—some significant fraction, at least 10 percent, of this kinetic energy will go into heating the comet. The minimum kinetic energy per unit mass ejected is then ¼ v.² = 1.3 × 10¹² ergs per gram, and the quantity that goes into heating is more than 2.5 × 10¹² erg/gram. The latent heat of fusion of rock is about 4 × 10⁹ ergs per gram. This is the heat that must be applied to convert hot solid rock near the melting point into a fluid lava. About 10¹¹ ergs/gm must be applied to raise rocks at low temperatures to their melting point. Thus, any event that ejected a comet or a planet from Jupiter would have brought it to a temperature of at least several thousands of degrees, and whether composed of rocks, ices or organic compounds, would have completely melted it. It is even possible that it would have been entirely reduced to a rain of self-gravitating small dust particles and atoms, which does not describe the planet Venus particularly well. (Incidentally, this would appear to be a good Velikovskian argument for the high temperature of the surface of Venus, but, as described below, this is not his argument.)

Another problem is that the escape velocity from the Sun’s gravity at the distance of Jupiter is about 20 km/sec. The ejection mechanism from Jupiter does not, of course, know this. Thus, if the comet leaves Jupiter at velocities less than about 60 km/sec, the comet will fall back to Jupiter; if greater than about [(20)² + (60)²]^1/2 = 63 km/sec, it will escape from the solar system. There is only a narrow and therefore unlikely range of velocities consistent with Velikovsky’s hypothesis.

A further problem is that the mass of Venus is very large—more than 5 × 10²⁷ grams, or possibly larger originally, on Velikovsky’s hypothesis, before it passed close to the Sun. The total kinetic energy required to propel Venus to Jovian escape velocity is then easily calculated to be on the order of 10⁴¹ ergs, which is equivalent to all the energy radiated by the Sun to space in an entire year, and one hundred million times more powerful than the largest solar flare ever observed. We are asked to believe, without any further evidence or discussion, an ejection event vastly more powerful than anything on the Sun, which is a far more energetic object than Jupiter.

Any process that makes large objects makes more small objects. This is especially true in a situation dominated by collisions, as in Velikovsky’s hypothesis. Here the comminution physics is well known and a particle one-tenth as large as our biggest particle should be a hundred or a thousand times more abundant. Indeed, Velikovsky has stones falling from the skies in the wake of his hypothesized planetary encounters, and imagines Venus and Mars trailing swarms of boulders; the Mars swarm, he says, led to the destruction of the armies of Sennacherib. But if this is true, if we had near-collisions with objects of planetary mass only thousands of years ago, we should have been bombarded by objects of lunar mass hundreds of years ago; and bombardment by objects that can make craters a mile or so across should be happening every second Tuesday. Yet there is no sign, on either the Earth or the Moon, of frequent recent collisions with such lower mass objects. Instead, the few objects that, as a steady-state population, are moving in orbits that might collide with the Moon are just adequate, over geological time, to explain the number of craters observed on the lunar maria. The absence of a great many small objects with orbits crossing the orbit of the Earth is another fundamental objection to Velikovsky’s basic thesis.