Religion and Extraterrestrial Life

Post Reply New Topic

Not Igor, Immanuel Velikovsky. His concepts have been pretty totally debunked by astronomers as outrageously not conforming to known cosmological capabilities. I knew his daughter, Ruth, briefly back in the early 1940's and met Velikovsky momentarily when I picked up Ruth one evening to go to a club meeting. But I never spoke to him.

Emanuel Velikovsky was a Crank. Anyone who uses Biblical Scripture as serious evidence for the past state of our planet is already half way to cloud coo coo land. He used the scripture about Joshua at Gilboah (the sun and moon stood still). If the Sun stood still it would mean the stopped rotating (do the physics and you will see that did not happen) or the Earth would be falling directly toward the sun.

ruveyn

Come on, ruveyn. You're an engineer. The Earth could revolve or not and still stay in orbit. But if it did stop revolving the momentum of all the stuff on the surface would fly off and spin around the the planet and all the seas would wash around as well. In the old film about a story by H.G.Wells "The Man Who Could Work Miracles" that is graphically shown. Of course Velikovsky was full of baloney.

Precisely my point! The earth could not stop rotating. What force could make the earth stop so quickly. Tidal friction is slowing the earth down but that will take billions of years to fully put the earth in a tidal lock with the sun.

The earth could not stop revolving around the sun either. What force could slow it down in its orbit around the sun? Only a collision with a very large planet (many times the size of Jupiter) could do that. And this would not match the biblical account in any way. Any catastrophe that would eliminate the apparent motion of either the Sun or Moon with respect to the Earth would destroy all life on earth in a very short time.

As I said. Emanuel Velikovsky was a Crank.



ruveyn

-Points to the Might and Magic series as examples for the ET = demons concept-