Up until the 1960's, no one took seriously the continental drift theory. (I recall my MIT undergraduate advisor being so excited by continental drift; having read about these theories while still in grade school, I yawned!). Up until the 1980's, no one took seriously the asteroid theory of dino destruction. Up until a few years ago, no one took seriously some of the collision theories of the origin of the Moon. While Velikovsky probably had no serious scientific reason to suggest such drama, it has become clear that the cosmos isn't the "steady state" boring place that scientists had assumed so confidently earlier in my lifetime. (Electrical engineering in the 1950's had also become stuck in a "steady state" paradigm, but that's a whole nuther story.) That's the problem with chaotic systems-- they look peaceful/rhythmic until they aren't. Once you have >2 bodies and there isn't a multiple-orders-of-magnitude hierarchy in masses/energies/etc., then expect chaos. What seems to have become clear from the large number of computer simulations of our solar system is that it *looks* peaceful *now*, only because during the early stages, most of the bad actors were ejected from the system. So, if you ignore a large number of ejected planets flying around the galaxy in all directions, then the vast majority of little solar systems will appear to be relatively peaceful places. So what happens in the off chance that one of these ejected planets -- perhaps from another solar system -- happens to wander nearby to us? At 12:19 PM 4/6/2016, Marc LeBrun wrote:
="Henry Baker" <hbaker1@pipeline.com> Could there have been some sort of orbit-crossing event -- perhaps the one that created the Moon -- that could have dramatically shifted either the Earth's or Venus's orbital position?
Amusingly, this thread has somehow begun to sound downright Velikovskyan (especially in view of the original planetary electromagnetism discussion)
For a Good Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision http://www.amazon.com/Stargazers-Gravediggers-Immanuel-Velikovsky-ebook/dp/B 00ALQVMS2 http://www.varchive.org/ce/cosmos.htm