PROBLEM V
CHEMISTRY AND BIOLOGY
OF THE
TERRESTRIAL PLANETS
VELIKOVSKY’S thesis has some peculiar biological and chemical consequences, which are compounded by some straightforward confusions on simple matters. He seems not to know (page 16) that oxygen is produced by green-plant photosynthesis on Earth. He makes no note of the fact that Jupiter is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, while the atmosphere of Venus, which he supposes to have arisen inside of Jupiter, is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide. These matters are central to his ideas and pose them very grave difficulties. Velikovsky holds that the manna that fell from the skies in the Sinai peninsula was of cometary origin and therefore that there are carbohydrates on both Jupiter and Venus. On the other hand, he quotes copious sources for fire and naphtha falling from the skies, which he interprets as celestial petroleum ignited in the Earth’s oxidizing atmosphere (pages 53 through 58). Because Velikovsky believes in the reality and identity of both sets of events, his book displays a sustained confusion of carbohydrates and hydrocarbons; and at some points he seems to imagine that the Israelites were eating motor oil rather than divine nutriment during their forty years’ wandering in the desert.
Reading the text is made still more difficult by the apparent conclusion (page 366) of Martian polar caps made of manna, which are described ambiguously as “probably in the nature of carbon.” Carbohydrates have a strong 3.5 micron infrared absorption feature, due to the stretching vibration of the carbon-hydrogen bond. No trace of this feature was observed in infrared spectra of the Martian polar caps taken by the Mariner 6 and 7 spacecraft in 1969. On the other hand, Mariner 6, 7 and 9 and Viking 1 and 2 have acquired abundant and persuasive evidence for frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide as the constituents of the polar caps.
Velikovsky’s insistence on a celestial origin of petroleum is difficult to understand. Some of his references, for example in Herodotus, provide perfectly natural descriptions of the combustion of petroleum upon seepage to the surface in Mesopotamia and Iran. As Velikovsky himself points out (pages 55–56), the fire-rain and naphtha stories derive from precisely those regions of the Earth that have natural petroleum deposits. There is, therefore, a straightforward terrestrial explanation of the stories in question. The amount of downward seepage of petroleum in 2,700 years would not be very great. The difficulty in extracting petroleum from the Earth, which is the cause of certain practical problems today, would be greatly ameliorated if Velikovsky’s hypothesis were true. It is also very difficult to understand on his hypothesis how it is, if oil fell from the skies in 1500 B.C., that petroleum deposits are intimately mixed with chemical and biological fossils of tens to hundreds of millions of years ago. But this circumstance is readily explicable if, as most geologists have concluded, petroleum arises from decaying vegetation, of the Carboniferous and other early geological epochs, and not from comets.
Even stranger are Velikovsky’s views on extraterrestrial life. He believes that much of the “Vermin,” and particularly the flies referred to in Exodus, really fell from his comet—although he hedges on the extraterrestrial origin of frogs while approvingly quoting from the Iranian text, the Bundahis (page 183), which seems to admit a rain of cosmic frogs. Let us consider flies only. Shall we expect houseflies or Drosophila melanogaster in forthcoming explorations of the clouds of Venus and Jupiter? He is quite explicit: “Venus—and therefore also Jupiter—is populated by vermin” (page 369). Will Velikovsky’s hypothesis fall if no flies are found?
The idea that, of all the organisms on Earth, flies alone are of extraterrestrial origin is curiously reminiscent of Martin Luther’s exasperated conclusion that, while the rest of life was created by God, the fly must have been created by the Devil because there is no conceivable practical use for it. But flies are perfectly respectable insects, closely related in anatomy, physiology and biochemistry to the other insecta. The possibility that 4.6 billion years of independent evolution on Jupiter—even if it were physically identical to the Earth—would produce a creature indistinguishable from other terrestrial organisms is to misread seriously the evolutionary process. Flies have the same enzymes, the same nucleic acids and even the same genetic code (which translates nucleic acid information into protein information) as do all the other organisms on Earth. There are too many intimate associations and identities between flies and other terrestrial organisms for them to have separate origins, as any serious investigation clearly shows.
In Exodus, Chapter 9, it is said that the cattle of Egypt all died, but of the cattle of the Children of Israel there “died not one.” In the same chapter we find a plague that affects flax and barley but not wheat and rye. This fine-tuned host-parasite specificity is very strange for cometary vermin with no prior biological contact with Earth, but is readily explicable in terms of home-grown terrestrial vermin.
Then there is the curious fact that flies metabolize molecular oxygen. There is no molecular oxygen on Jupiter, nor can there be, because oxygen is thermodynamically unstable in an excess of hydrogen. Are we to imagine that the entire terminal electron transfer apparatus required for life to deal with molecular oxygen was adventitiously evolved on Jupiter by Jovian organisms hoping someday to be transported to Earth? This would be yet a bigger miracle than Velikovsky’s principal collisional thesis. Velikovsky makes (page 187) a lame aside on the “ability of many small insects … to live in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen,” which misses the point. The question is how an organism evolved on Jupiter could live in and metabolize an atmosphere rich in oxygen.
Next there is the problem of fly ablation. Small flies have just the same mass and dimensions as small meteors, which are burned up at an altitude of about 100 kilometers when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere on cometary trajectories. Ablation accounts for the visibility of such meteors. Not only would cometary vermin be transformed rapidly into fried flies on entrance into the Earth’s atmosphere; they would, as cometary meteors are today, be vaporized into atoms and never “swarm” over Egypt to the consternation of the Pharaoh. Likewise, the temperatures attendant to ejection of the comet from Jupiter, referred to above, would fry Velikovsky’s flies. Impossible to begin with, doubly fried and atomized, cometary flies do not well survive critical scrutiny.
Finally, there is a curious reference to intelligent extraterrestrial life in Worlds in Collision. On page 364 Velikovsky argues that the near-collisions of Mars with Earth and Venus “make it highly improbable that any higher forms of life, if they previously existed there, survived on Mars.” But when we examine the Mars as seen by Mariner 9 and Viking 1 and 2, we find that something over one-third of the planet has a modified cratered terrain somewhat reminiscent of the Moon and displays no sign of spectacular catastrophes other than ancient impacts. The other half to two-thirds of the planet shows almost no sign whatever of such impacts, but instead displays dramatic evidence of major tectonic activity, lava flows and vulcanism about a billion years ago. The small but detectable amount of impact cratering in this terrain shows that it was made much longer than several thousand years ago. There is no way to reconcile this picture with a view of a planet recently so devastated by impact catastrophism that all intelligent life would thereby have been eliminated. It is also by no means clear why, if all life on Mars were to be exterminated in such encounters, all life on Earth was not similarly exterminated.