
Why?
Well, a friend lent me a copy of The Velikovsky Heresies: Worlds in Collision and Ancient Catastrophes Revisited, which among other things provides a shocking amount of evidence to support Velikovsky’s theory that Venus is actually a comet caught in orbit between Mercury and Earth.
I'm not a chassid of Velikovsky and don't have a stake in him being right. In fact, he wasn't Torah-observant, so his theories can't all be correct. But if he was correct about certain things, then he was correct.
But then I started coming across more weird stuff.
For example, there are mounds of entire articles dedicated to Venus’s surface.
But the thing is...we can’t see Venus’s surface—not with telescopes, nor with specially designed spacecraft put in orbit around Venus, nothing.
The only concrete picture we have of the Venusian surface are a couple of photos photographed by specially designed spacecraft just before they were cooked and pressurized to death by Venus’s hellish environment.
Yet any article on Venus will go on and on about:
- Venus’s large and populous volcanoes
- its massive lava flows
- its total absence of tectonic plates and therefore subduction zones
- its surface that keeps “refreshing” itself to look “young”
- how its surface is soooo hot and pressurized (around 450 C/850 F and 90 times the pressure of Earth, so it's like standing at the bottom of an Earth ocean)
- how Venus has soooo many craters—none of which are smaller than 2 km, oddly enough
- and how its ongoing “greenhouse gas” effect is a warning to Earthlings.
(And some of this stuff is contradictory, as you'll soon see.)
And gosh...how do scientists know all this stuff—especially since they can’t see past Venus’s clouds nor can they land a spacecraft easily on Venus’s surface (and when they have done it, it didn’t work as well as it should have and the spacecraft died pretty quickly after landing)?
First of all, the spacecraft that actually landed on Venus measured its pressure and temperature.
Second of all, scientists mapped out Venus’s surface by pinging radar waves all over it from special spacecraft. While they couldn’t ping all of Venus’s surface, they managed to ping the vast majority of it.
Here an oversimplified explanation of how that worked:
- A wave that took a long time to bounce back evidently must have hit a low point on the surface (like the bottom of a crater).
- A wave that took a much shorter time to bounce back must have hit something tall, like the peak of a mountain.
And while there’s a margin of error in this kind of mapping, it seems to be considered accurate enough.
Very nice, you might be saying. But do pings also tell us whether there is lava? Or erupting volcanoes? Or tectonic plates and subduction zones?
And what are those anyway?
Okay, so first of all…
Tectonic Plates
Tectonic: moving
(On Venus, scientists think there are tectonics—meaning, they think the ground apparently moves around a bit, which is what formed those rifts and mountains indicated by the radar pings, but their information indicates that Venus’s surface is all one big thing, and not split into different “plates.”)
Subduction Zones
When that happens, one plate might slip under the other. (This is one of several ways earthquakes occurs.)
Volcanoes and mountain ranges are thought to usually form this way, through this act of subduction. Subduction zones are large areas in which the plates meet and interact this way, by shoving one plate edge under another plate edge.
Except how do they know?
They don’t!
Why are scientists so sure that Venus has volcanoes?
(I mean, there were no volcanoes nor lava in the Venera photos, right?)
There are 6 Reasons:
2) In a place where the radar pinged a map of rifts rising from the ground, scientists detected places where the surface got much hotter, then cooled down again.
3) At one point, they spotted a sharp rise of sulfuric oxide in Venus’s atmosphere, followed by a gradual drop.
4) They spotted lightning in Venusian clouds that reminded them of the kind of lightning produced by volcanoes here on Earth.
5) Venus’s surface doesn’t show much erosion or as many craters as an old planet should.
In fact, Venus’s surface looks downright “fresh” or “young,” which is extremely irritating to scientists because a young Venus is exactly what Velikovsky described and they hate Velikovsky like how ISIS hates infidels.
Also, scientists cling to their faith in an old Universe that takes millions of years to form, and a young Venus shakes this faith.
6) You will constantly read about “mantle plumes” on Venus, which many scientists believe to be the source of Venus’s volcanoes. On Earth, volcanoes are generally (but not always) considered to be caused by tectonic plates shoving one under the other (subduction).
Very simplistically speaking, plumes consist of hot stuff that simply rise from the hot inner core to the surface forming a mushroom-shaped “plume” along the way.
Answers to the False Beliefs
It’s made up of mostly carbon dioxide with some nitrogen and other stuff, moves around Venus faster than Venus can rotate, and its noxious and volatile cloud cover is dozens of kilometers thick.
In fact, all of Venus is vastly different than Earth — except its size and distance from the Sun.
Using Earth as the model for what's going on with Venus isn't very reasonable.
So to answer each belief from above:
1) Venus’s atmosphere is so different and so much more volatile than Earth’s.
If a part of a cloud heated up, even if the area it covered resembles that of an Earthly volcano, that doesn’t prove—and hardly indicates—that a volcano caused that hotspot.
With all those volatile chemicals around, you can assume that hotspots could be caused by the weather.
Really, if you can't know, then the weather is a logical assumption.
What’s more, scientists don’t know how hot that hotspot really was.
2) Jumping to conclusions based on very little evidence
Infrared imaging of one area: “It is the most tantalizing evidence yet for active volcanism,” says Eugene Shalygin from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. (See HERE.)
First of all, they’ve been talking about Venusian volcanoes for decades...yet this very recent 2008 observation is the best evidence they have?
So what have they been so confident about all this time?
And remember, they can’t see anything or measure anything.
(Also very important: They don’t know the chemical composition of Venus’s lower layer of clouds...just the upper layer. So maybe there are explosive things in there? See HERE.)
Also, the heat was discovered in only one small area of the entire planet (or comet!).
This is a far cry from assuming that Venus is dotted with active or even once-active volcanoes.
Furthermore, MUST heat mean lava? Does it really have to?
- Could it also mean steam?
- Or gases?
- Plasma?
- Or maybe a weather anomaly threw something hot from Venus’s sky (like from that unknown lower layer)?
- Or perhaps a not-yet-discovered Venusian dragon belched?
If you read the whole article on hot lava flows on Venus (which was published by the European Space Agency in 2015), I’d like to direct you to the many speculative unscientific statements (emphases mine):
"hot regions on the surface below are probably much smaller"
"the team calculate that the feature may only be around 1 square kilometre in size, with a temperature of 830°C"
"Rift zones are results of fracturing of the surface, which is often associated with upwelling of magma below the crust. This process can bring hot material to the surface, where it may be released through fractures as a lava flow."
"Some models of planetary evolution suggest that Venus was resurfaced in a cataclysmic flood of lava around half a billion years ago."
"Although changes in wind patterns could have caused this, the more intriguing possibility is that episodes of volcanic activity..."
"This heat has to escape somehow, and one possibility is that it does so in the form of volcanic eruptions."
"is likely to have an internal heat source, perhaps due to radioactive heating."
Anyway, this is incredibly pathetic.
3) Using Fiction Plot Techniques as Science
Most unscientifically, they state the following regarding the rise and drop of sulfuric acid in Venus’s atmosphere:
“Although changes in wind patterns could have caused this, the more intriguing possibility is that episodes of volcanic activity were injecting vast amounts of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.”
Okay, so based on everything they know, there are two possibilities for a rise and drop of sulfuric acid:
- Changes in wind patterns
- Volcanic activity
So rather than researching which possibility is more realistic—or even provable (remember, they can detect wind patterns to a certain extent)—they go for the possibility which is more intriguing.
Basically, they say, “Volcanoes are more fun than wind, so let’s go with volcanoes.”
How rational! How objective! How scientific!
4) They didn’t actually spot lightning.
Instead, they detected “visible flashes in the atmosphere” and “localised emissions of radio waves”…which could just as easily result from sulfuric acid droplets because they are extremely and electrically charged. (See HERE.)
5) Making Stuff Up
Rather than taking whatever handful of actual facts they possess about Venus and running with that, we see that scientists start inventing “facts” out of thin air.
Many articles about Venus blather about how Venus’s surface “refreshes” itself via lava flow even though there is no hard evidence for lava or even volcanoes—except for some interesting spots of extreme heat in certain areas of Venus, which lie about rifts in ways that sometimes Earthly lava does.
Rather than considering the idea of a young Venus (which is what the evidence they DO have actually points to), scientists turn themselves inside out to make up stuff with absolutely NO evidence.
For example, even if there is volcanic activity on Venus, it doesn’t mean there is so much that it “refreshes” the entire surface of this Earth-size object.
6) Scientists aren’t even sure whether “mantle plumes” even exist.
No, really!
It’s just a theory.
Isn’t that shocking?
You read about mantle plumes all over the place, but there is no proof. In fact, The Geological Society of London organized The Great Plumes Debate in 2003.
Gosh, how did we miss that one?
Anyway, the prestigious Nature magazine published a whole paper dedicated to the possibility of mantle plumes on Venus. See a detailed summary of that HERE.
Yet we don’t even know if mantle plumes are real.
Seriously. Do a search on "mantle plumes" and see what comes up.
Notice that the entire experiment took place in a laboratory using nano-sand, water, and a heating plate. (Just like Venus!—sarc) The little they know about Venus was too much to put through their computer.
Please also note the following quote from the article:
“The team believes that a phenomenon underlying plate tectonics on Earth also creates Venus’ coronae: mantle plumes.”
More on Tectonic Plates
In fact, Venus’s lack of plates seems to be one thing that all scientists agree on as fact, but I couldn’t find out how they got that information. However, I did discover why they are so bothered by it:
Lack of tectonic plates indicate a young Venus.
According to science, tectonic plates take 1 billion years to form. And after those 1 billion years, it takes even more time for the plates to form subduction zones (which would then lead to volcanic activity).
So the fact that Venus lacks tectonic plates hints at Venus being VERY young and new, relatively speaking—which is exactly what Velikovsky said it was.
Okay, I’m going to quote now from one of the most recent reports on Venus, a Nature abstract, published in April 2017:
“Why Venus lacks plate tectonics remains an unanswered question in terrestrial planet evolution.”
“There is observational evidence for subduction—a requirement for plate tectonics—on Venus, but it is unclear why the features have characteristics of both mantle plumes and subduction zones.”
And what is the deal with mantle plumes?
We don’t even know if they really exist!
Anyway, the abstract goes on to described some fun laboratory experiments they conducted to see if what they propose could even be possible.
Then it says something very cool at the end:
“Scaling analysis suggests that this regime with limited, plume-induced subduction is favoured by a hot lithosphere, such as that found on early Earth or present-day Venus.”
Oh, and this one is funny. Also published in Nature in April 2017:
Planetary Tectonics: Sinking Plates on Venus
“Unlike Earth, Venus lacks discrete, moving plates. Analogue model experiments suggest that observed hints at plate recycling do indeed indicate current, localized destruction of the Venusian surface.”
The title announces Venus's sinking plates, then the abstract mentions Venus's lack of separate mobile plates altogether.
Actually, the abstract kind of contradicts itself from one sentence to another.
I thought that Venus had NO plates.
You can read thousands of articles online stating that Venus has NO TECTONIC PLATES.
Notice also that the above isn’t a real discovery.
It is just a bunch of model experiments that merely indicate destruction/recycling of Venus’s surface (which remember, scientists MUST believe in...or else! Or else they must admit that Venus’s surface is pretty new).
Electric Venus
Venus is electric.
When the European Space Agency is not pretending that wind currents are volcanoes, they are able to actually detect real stuff—like the fact that Venus is the only planet with a strong electric field. (Maybe because Venus is actually a comet?) They estimate it at 10 volts.
In contrast, Mars and Earth’s electric field is estimated at less than 2 volts.
(Actually, they don’t even know this! They can’t detect the electric field of Earth or Mars, so they ASSUME it is less than 2 volts. All they seem to know is that Venus’s field is 5 times that of Earth’s.)
Scientists are very happy about this 2016 discovery because now they can go back to their beloved Old Ancient Venus belief, postulating that Venus indeed had oceans and all that fully-developed-planet stuff, but then its electric winds stripped that all away.
Note: It could be that the original researchers writing up the papers would like to be completely forthright about everything, but their papers won’t get published unless they invent suggestions and turn things away from anything Velikovsky proposed. After all, science is and has always been highly politicized. Furthermore, there is a lot of nasty cutthroat competition for prestige and funding going on within the Ivory Towers.
OTHER COOL STUFF ABOUT VENUS
- It looks like the atmosphere (all its clouds and stuff) rotating around Venus has sped up. (In 2006, everything in Venus’s “sky” moved at 300 kph, but later the atmosphere whizzed around at 400 kph. Sometimes it takes 3.9 days to complete one journey around the planet, other times it takes 5.3 days.)
- It looks like the rotation of the planet itself has slowed down by 6.5 minutes.
- There are massive wildly spinning vortices at the poles of Venus.
- Despite its nearness to the Sun, Venus’s poles are even colder than Earth’s poles: -157 C/-251F
- In fact, the entire “line” around Venus dividing it between the day section and the night section (officially known as a "terminator") is extremely cold: -175 degrees C. (Could it be global warming? sarc!)
At least, I think that’s the temperatures of the poles and the terminator. It could be that the articles got the order of the “7” and the “5” confused.
Maybe the poles and the terminator are actually the same temperature.
- Venus spins in the opposite direction of the other planets in our Solar System.
- A year on Venus is shorter than a day on Venus: The Venusian year equals 225 Earth days and the Venusian day equals 243 Earth days.
- In contrast to the rest of the atmosphere, the winds closest to the surface are slow and gentle.
There is more cool stuff about Venus, but I'm going cross-eyed from needing to read between the lines of every single article in order to ferret out the actual facts.
So that's it for now!
SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONS
“While Venus lies in the habitable zone of our solar system, something happened in its past to take it from a more lush, verdant world into a dry planet with a runaway greenhouse effect from the abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
He says is as a statement of fact.
And then something happened—for SURE!
There is no evidence, not even the remotest indication, that Venus was ever a “lush, verdant world.”
Yet he states it has if it actually happened.
That's when science definitely takes a detour into mythological storytelling, creating pictures & stories that never happened.
Even stuff I learned as fact as a little girl aren’t really true. Or haven't been proven.
Basically, what scientists have done in the Venus field is to believe with their faith in an Extremely Old Universe—and with no hard evidence—that Venus is millions upon millions of years old.
Then every time they run up against indications that Venus is actually a lot younger (and maybe not even a true planet), they twist around and actually MAKE THINGS UP OUT OF THIN AIR to match their Ancient Venus Theory.
And they say things as FACT. They don’t even tell you all the time “we assume.”
They tell you as FACT:
- Venus WAS as Earth is now—“lush” and “verdant”—but then self-destructed in a “runaway greenhouse effect.”
- Venus has volcanoes.
- Venus has erupting volcanoes.
- Venus recycles/refreshes/destroys its own surface.
- Venus has mantle plumes.
- Venus is millions upon millions of years old
There. Is. NO. Actual. Proof.
In fact, there's even very little evidence—or no evidence at all. And the evidence they do have indicates the opposite conclusions than those which the faithful scientists reached.
Apparently, scientists will do anything to twist science away from the theories of the infidel, Immanuel Velikovsky.
And why are Velikovsky’s theories so threatening?
Because they lead down the road to a Torah narrative.
(They don't actually make it to the Torah narrative, but they do support it much more than other scientific theories.)
Science is No Longer Just For Left-Brains! Creative Right-Brains Finally Have an Equal Shot!
My title will read like this:
FINALLY!: ALL THE PREVIOUS UNKNOWNS OF VENUS COMPLETELY SOLVED & EXPLAINED BEYOND THE SHADOW OF ANY DOUBT!!!
My abstract will read like this:
"Unusually thick-skinned dragons (whose skin we assume may operate similarly to the same anti-pressure suits found on astronauts) may populate the surface of Venus, possibly living in the rifts detected by highly sophisticated radar pings.
We suggest that these dragons exhale—and sometimes even belch—electrically charged plumes, which account for hot spots and flashes of light observed by the Venus Express orbiter.
In addition, very tiny yet powerful ice fairies seem to have vastly lowered the temperature in the terminator layer around Venus. Perhaps other causes exist, but tiny yet powerful ice fairies comprise the more intriguing possibility.
Experiments conducted with detailed SIMS simulations indicate there could be dragons and fairies of this nature inhabiting Venus or its atmosphere. Also, we’ve been inhaling copious amounts of laboratory chemicals and spending entire weeks playing extremely sophisticated video games. So that helps too."
Perhaps it’s because they don’t have a Velikovsky controversy to quash regarding Mercury.
Or perhaps it’s because people who study Mercury are actually less mercurial (ha!) than those who study Venus.