The Formation of the Solar System

[Peter]

In Wal Thornhill’s November 18, 2012 Electric Universe posting, Science’s Looming ‘Tipping Point’, he claims that “all the evidence supported an earlier analysis that we are the descendants of deeply traumatised survivors of prehistoric celestial ‘doomsday’ experiences” and that “healing the compulsion to revisit doomsday-inspired insanity requires that we face the reality of our chaotic past on this planet”. However, he disregards the mythological stories about the birth of Venus from the head, the thigh or the sexual organ of Jupiter when he writes about the formation of the satellites of the gas giants.

He maintains that “brown dwarfs captured by a bright star will have their power source stolen, lose their radiance and become gas giants” and that “the capture process of a brown dwarf involves drastic electrical readjustment from being an anode to a cathode, which the captured star achieves by a cometary-type electrical expulsion of matter from its heavy-element core and atmosphere, forming satellites and rings”. However, in what I consider the most revealing report about the birth of Venus, the Japanese myth, the Sun Goddess and the Impetuous Male, it was when the Sun Goddess confronted the Impetuous Male that that Venus and 3 smaller deities were born (see Raymond Van Over, Sun Songs, Japanese Creation Myth).

In this myth the Impetuous Male, who appears after the Sun Goddess and the Moon Goddess and seizes supreme power, had a fierce temper, was given to cruel acts and was continually weeping and wailing until he was expelled after a relatively short period in power, is unquestionably Jupiter.

The myth says that the Impetuous Male did not rule for long because the Sun Goddess armed herself with 3 swords and approached until she was standing opposite him. In the encounter that ensued the Sun Goddess produced a Deity from each of her 3 swords and the Impetuous Male, while encircled by a necklace of 500 jewels, gave birth to a son. After giving birth to his son the Impetuous Male voided excrement under the seat of the Sun Goddess and fled. The Sun Goddess drew herself up to avoid the excrement and took up her abode in the cave of heaven.

The name the Japanese gave Jupiter suggests to me that as the Sun approached Jupiter it displayed what appeared to observers on the Earth to be an erect male sexual organ (other myths mention the erect male organ). The swords of the Sun Goddess and the erect penis of the Impetuous Male must have been plasma phenomenon that developed as the Sun and Jupiter came close to one another. A similar feature has actually been photographed in the double-star system, TMR-1, with a filament of plasma stretching from what appears to be a planet to its primaries (see Thornhill, SIS Review 2000, p 71). In my opinion Thornhill should write about material being drawn out of the weaker of the converging Suns rather than being ejected.

In the Thunderbolt picture of the day for 20/11/12 Stephen Smith says that Mercury is probably no more than 10,000 years old which suggests to me that Mercury may be one of the 3 other deities born at the same time as Venus. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is probably made up of the excrement voided by the Impetuous Male.

I believe that Venus should be considered a much younger sibling of the Earth not a twin with Neptune or Uranous the parent of the Earth. It is likely that the Earth was born when the first 2 of the Gas Giants of our system came together and that when young had a molten surface and dense atmosphere similar to that of Venus at the current time. I think that eventually after Venus cools much of its atmosphere will condense to form oceans.

[Trevor]

One thing we all probably agree about is the likelihood that some ancient myths and legends have their origin to natural catastrophes, including ones of cosmic origin. However, when it comes to matters of detail, there will be less agreement. Velikovsky derived his Venus scenario from myths and legends, and Saturnists such as Talbott and Cochrane have rejected it on the same basis. The problems with using myths as primary evidence for specific cosmic models are obvious: most myths exist in several variant forms and, in any case, the relationship between mythological characters and particular cosmic bodies may not be clear.

According to Robert Graves, in "The Greek Myths", the well-known story of Pallas Athene springing fully-armed from the head of her father Zeus after he had swallowed her pregnant mother is only one of several myths from Greek sources relating to the birth of this goddess. Plato identified Athena with the Libyan goddess Neith, who had no biological father. Apollodorus wrote that Athene, daughter of Zeus, was brought up by the river god, Triton, and added the name "Pallas" to her name after accidentally killing the daughter of Triton, whose name was Pallas. Other sources say that Pallas, a winged giant, was the father of Athene; some that her father was Itonus, a king in Phthiotis; or that Poseidon was her father, but she disowned him and begged Zeus to adopt her.

No Greek sources associate Pallas Athene with the planet Venus, or with any other cosmic body. Velikovsky, in "Worlds in Collision", used indirect arguments to make this link. So, for example, he wrote, "Plutarch identified Minerva of the Romans or Athene of the Greeks with Isis of the Egyptians, and Pliny identified the planet Venus with Isis." Such arguments may be suggestive, but cannot be considered decisive, particularly in the light of other evidence. The Romans had separate names for Venus as the evening and the morning star, but neither of them was Minerva (the Roman equivalent of Pallas Athene). Cicero wrote, in "De Natura Deorum" (book 2, chapter 53), "The star of Venus is called Fosforos in Greek and Lucifer in Latin when it precedes the Sun, but Hesperos when it follows it." It is generally supposed (rightly or wrongly) that Lucifer and Hesperos were referred to by the Romans as the "star of Venus" (a description, not a name") because of its beauty, Venus (the Roman equivalent of the Greek Aphrodite) being the goddess of love and beauty.

In view of the above, it would seem perfectly legitimate to use mythological evidence as the starting point for a catastrophist hypothesis, but this can only be taken so far without supporting physical evidence. Velikovsky himself appreciated this point, and put a great deal of effort into seeking (and getting others to seek) physical evidence which would have bearing on his model.

With that in mind, it must, unfortunately, be pointed out that the final suggestion in Peter's imaginative posting doesn't seem likely to happen, given what various probes have revealed about Venus over the past few decades. It's now generally agreed that the atmosphere of Venus consists of 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen, with just trace amounts of water vapour and acidic gases being present. Carbon dioxide cannot be converted to a liquid form by cooling, unless tremendously large pressures are applied. To obtain liquid carbon dioxide at 20 degrees centigrade, the pressure applied would have to be 56 times that which we currently experience at the surface of the Earth. Liquid nitrogen can be obtained by cooling, but only if the temperature is brought down to below minus 196 degrees centigrade. Thus there doesn't seem any likelihood of oceans ever being present at the surface of Venus in the foreseeable future. However, although it seems that this particular aspect of Peter's scenario can be ruled out, that doesn't automatically extend to his other ideas.

[Peter]

Currently it is thought that the Earth was formed out of the same cloud of gas and dust as the Sun as first suggested by Laplace over 200 years ago. It is thought that as most of the gas and dust within the cloud clumped together at its centre to form the newborn Sun other material collected as a swirling disk rotating about the new star’s equator. Over time the material of this rotating disk is believed to have agglomerated together and eventually assemble into planets, one of the inner most of which was the Earth. However, in the years since the publication in 1950 of Immanuel Velikovsky’s book, Worlds in Collision, with its thesis that the ancient mythological stories record real experiences of mankind, a number of like-minded scholars have determined that the earliest records from all round the world say that, in the beginning, that is as far back as man can remember, there was no Sun, no Moon and no stars visible in the heavens (Dwardu Cardona, AEON, III:3, 1993 & SIS Review, 2000). If they are correct the Sun is a relative newcomer to our system and the Earth could not have been formed out of the same cloud of gas and dust as the Sun.

The experts on mythology believe that the myths of diverse people tell of a time when the Earth was a satellite of Saturn or rather a proto-Saturn, which at that time was probably a brown dwarf star. Saturn, a planet that comparatively few can now identify in the night sky, was, they say, an obsession of the ancients and features in almost everyone’s mythology as once having been the chief amongst Gods with his reign remembered as a golden age (Harold Tresman & B O’Gheoghan, SIS Review, 1977, 2:2). They maintain that mankind’s earliest memories imply that the Earth was in a polar aligned association to the proto-Saturn with its northern hemisphere permanently facing the brown dwarf star whose ever-visible light was apparently enough to prevent the observation of all other astronomical bodies (Cardona, SIS Review, 2000 and God Star, Trafford Publishing, 2006, chapter 10). The proto-Saturn was alone in the darkness. This was a timeless era; there was no way for mankind to measure time; it was before the beginning of time.

The Bible tells us that God then said "let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night" (Genesis, 1:14) and God "made two lights the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night" (Genesis, 1:16). It was the approaching Sun that divided day from night. The myths of one American tribe, the Sai of New Mexico, record that “when the Sun was far off, his face was blue; as he came nearer, his face brightened” (Raymond Van Over, Sun Songs, Mentor Book, 1980, Spiders Creation). As the Sun came closer the Earth experienced sunlight for the first time and the Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians all renamed the now less brilliant proto-Saturn, the Sun of the Night. Egyptian mythology says that the Sun of the Night, Atum-Ra, shed an emerald light and, like the Moon nowadays, became much more visible after the Sun set.

Obviously no myth can tell us anything about the birth of our world, because mankind was not around at the time. Once geologists had demonstrated that the Earth had a long history that pre-dated the evolution of mankind scientists investigating the origins of the Solar System took no notice of the mythological creation stories. However, because the mythological stories, effectively eyewitness accounts of what happen, tell of the birth of Venus as the Sun sized control of our system, they provide sufficient information to develop an alternative theory about the evolution of the Solar System to the one outlined above.

According to Wal Thornhill’s “electric universe” theory, stars are formed by a magnetic pinch effect that compresses plasma and are anode discharges in an electric universe. He maintains that stars have no internal heat source, their brightness being directly related to the electric stress impinging on their surface (Thornhill, AEON VI:1) and heavy particles, created by the electrical discharges on the surface, migrate towards the star’s centre to form dense cores. He thinks that planets and moons are born as a result of the ejection of dense matter from the core of a star or gas giant under certain stressful electromagnetic conditions (Thornhill, SIS Review 1994).

As more and more powerful telescopes have been developed it has been found that there are many more red and brown dwarf stars around than had previously been thought and that multiple stars systems are more common than single stars. Recent years have also seen the discovery of over 150 planets that are large enough to be classified as red or brown dwarf stars were they not themselves orbiting a star; in some cases surprisingly closely (New Scientist, 26/3/05). Thornhill thinks that the giant planets that orbit close to their primary were formed by fission of an electrically over-stressed common parent while those that orbit at a distance were former stars attracted in by electromagnetic forces. If this is correct it would appear that our system with its 4 gas giants evolved as firstly 2 stars were drawn together and then, one after another, 2 more and then finally the Sun. The Earth was probably born when core material of the weaker of the first 2 stars was drawn out by the electromagnetic exchange between it and the stronger that changed its nature from anode to cathode.

Creation myths have an almost universal theme; a God created the world, but unhappy with his creation, destroyed and re-created it a number of times. It was the arrival of the Sun that was responsible for the repeated destructions, witnessed and survived by mankind, each of which brought a World Age to an end and contributed to the geological shaping the world we know.

The mythological and Biblical record tells us that the Solar System was seriously destabilised as the Sun approached. First the Earth was thrown out of its polar association with the proto-Saturn (Cardona, SIS Review, 2000), the primordial deity known to the Greeks as Uranous, and was captured in a more distant orbit and then, 10 generations of mankind later, the destabilised proto-Saturn experienced a massive coronal mass ejection flare-up. Following this it would seem that the Earth was captured in an orbit of Jupiter, known to the Greeks as Zeus, where it remained for 3 generations as the Sun continued to approach. As the Sun came closer Jupiter displayed what observers on the Earth thought was a massive erect male sexual organ reaching towards the approaching Sun and then Jupiter gave birth to Venus (Raymond Van Over, Sun Songs, Japanese Creation Myth). Following the birth of Venus, Jupiter, now reduced in size and lacking a solid core (New Scientist, 24/7/04, page 9), was captured in orbit of the Sun together with the new-born Venus, the Earth, Mars and the other former stars, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. Venus was initially in an orbit that regularly came dangerously close to the Earth, but after a series of damaging encounters with the electromagnetic field of the Earth it was shepherded by electromagnetic forces into a safe, almost circular orbit between the Earth and the Sun, albeit not before the Earth also suffered a series of damaging encounters with Mars.

[Peter]

Ancient Myths and Religions

Myths are the name we give to the stories that early man told his descendants about cosmic events experienced by the Earth. Early man’s attempts to understand and explain what happened, we call his religions. Modern religions have evolved as great thinkers have tried to make sense of these early ideas and find a purpose behind it all and, in particular, a purpose for mankind.

It would have only taken a generation or two for the story of a cosmic catastrophe to become virtually impossible to convey successfully. How could a survivor of the change in the Earth's orbit from around Jupiter to around the Sun explain the Gas Giant to a child who had not seen it or indeed any planet except as a small star in the night sky? He could say that Jupiter was overhead. He could say that Jupiter was enormous. He could say that Jupiter was a heavenly body, but what would the child understand and what would he tell his children? How could he explain that other heavenly bodies orbited Jupiter as well as the Earth and that when some got too close to Jupiter they suffered discharge strikes and were destroyed. Whatever was said must have sounded like an account of battles between Gods.

The Patriarchs kept written records, but did not have the language to explain what they had experienced. Copyists and translators could not have understood what the original writer was trying to convey, because it was so beyond their imagination. Even Moses, who lived through the Exodus event, could not have understood the written record he had of the Flood let alone the earlier “expulsion” catastrophe. Traditions handed done verbally must have suffered even more distortion than the written records.

The fact that the tale of a time before there was a Sun survives in so many peoples' traditions is remarkable. It is because ancient religions tried to explain what had happened that we still have a record of a time before there was a Sun.

How could one explain this state of affairs to someone who had only known night to follow day and season to follow season. It must have sounded like bliss. The terms Garden of Eden and Golden Age make sense if survival was difficult after a cosmic event had changed conditions and survival required hard work and luck.

The early verses of the Bible make no suggestion that the planet overhead was worshipped; it is referred to as the lesser light set in the heavens by God in verse 16 of chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis. It seems that it was just there until the vortex developed between it and the Earth. The appearance of the vortex and the events that followed changed things. The survivors could tell their children what they saw and what happened, but needed a reason for why they and their World should have suffered so. They were obviously being punished for something they had done, or perhaps not done, by the directing intelligence responsible for the destruction. Just as modern man takes some comfort from the thought that he is responsible for global warning, because if he is, then he may be able to do something to correct it, ancient man thought he was being punished and that by living virtuously he could prevent further punishment.

The story about how living conditions changed was comparatively easily told and has been preserved in the myths of many different cultures. However, the discharge vortex between the Earth and Saturn was much more difficult to describe to someone who had never seen a planet let alone a plasma discharge. While the Earth was still orbiting Saturn the concept of a link between the Earth and the Gas Giant could have been passed down, but it must have become increasingly incomprehensible to succeeding generations. It is amazing that the reports of the Axis Mundi, the Polar Column, the Cosmic Tree and the Tree of Life have survived as identifiable descriptions of the discharge between the Earth and Saturn with Birkeland current features recognisable to plasma physicists.

The concept of a planet having a male sexual organ would have been easier to convey. The likening of the vortex to a sexual organ possibly accounts for the humanising of the planets by later generations and for the development of ancient Phyallic cults. The birth of the Moon / Aphrodite from the Earth as Ouranus’ sexual organ was severed confirmed the female nature of the Earth / Gaia and it is likely that it was the observance of the birth of the Moon that started Earth Mother cults (see my Workshop 2007:2 paper "Birth of the Moon").

The descendants of the survivors of this early catastrophe may have understood what their elders were talking about when they said Ouranus. The Gas Giant was still their dominant heavenly body, although it was much smaller and instead of remaining stationary overhead, appeared to circle the Earth. It probably made more sense to think of it as the son of the earlier, larger heavenly body. However, the Earth was in orbit round it and they would have thought it as normal to see it in the sky as we think it normal to see the Moon there. The renamed planet came to be associated with cold, because of the deterioration in the climate when the Earth's orbit changed, and with time, because time could now be measured in more than days. It is not evident that at this stage the planet was worshipped, but the Hebrew tradition that says Adam established the worship of the Moon suggests that it probably was (see Velikovsky, The Pre-Adomite Age, WWW.Varchive.org).

After the Earth had changed from orbiting Saturn to orbiting Jupiter, the descendants of the survivors would still not have needed to be told what a Gas Giant was, because there was still one overhead dominating their world. However, they would have had difficulty in explaining how they came to be orbiting a different planet, despite commemorating the flare-up of Saturn in their festivals of light. They knew that their previous dominant planet had been displaced by a greater planet, because they had seen the defeated Saturn shrouded in, or tied up in, its newly formed rings. It was clearly God's work as was the Flood that followed the explosion of light and the 40 days of rain. Mankind was being punished once again for his misdeeds. According to the Biblical text, neither the planet overhead nor the defeated Saturn was God. God had made the planets, the Sun and the Moon and the stars and controlled their actions. The planets were his instruments; his Angels of Destruction.

The situation was different after the next catastrophe that saw the Earth thrown out of its Jupiter orbit and captured by the Sun. How did survivors describe a Gas Giant to children who could only see one as a distant light like any other star? Saying that there was this heavenly body, much bigger than the Moon; that it took the Earth a year to go round it and that it had vanished off into the distance after it gave birth to Venus would not help them understand. Once the Earth was in orbit round the Sun it would have been virtually impossible to accurately describe a Gas Giant as a planet and explain how it was that the Earth had orbited it not the Sun. It would also have been virtually impossible to describe and explain the cosmic events that resulted in the formation of our Solar System. The idea of World Ages was probably much easier to pass on; God periodically destroyed the World and recreated it with a new sky and a new Sun.

[Peter]

I have not read all of Ev Cochrane’s published works, but I would question his confidence in dating descriptions of Venus to before 2,350 BCE (see his SIS forum posting under the heading polar ice advances). The Egyptian Old Kingdom and the Akkad and earlier Mesopotamian cultures that presumably recorded these sightings depend for their dating on greatly exaggerated Egyptian and Mesopotamian king lists and on Sothis dating. This is an incredibly fragile foundation for Cochrane to rely on.

In my opinion all the reported sightings and the associated myths about Venus post-date the Biblical Flood which in my SIS Workshop 2011:1 paper, World Ages, I date to soon after 2,000 BC. In my paper I described a number of damaging pre-Exodus encounters the Earth experienced with Venus and Mars and showed that I am confident in Velikovsky’s dating of the Exodus (within a decade or so). However, I believe that quite a number of the reports that Velikovsky quoted in support of his Exodus thesis and that Cochrane has mentioned in his writings relate to Venus catastrophes that post-date the Exodus. I believe that the 4 most serious of these caused inversions of the Earth, the last of which I date to Halloween 623 BC.

The impressive images of Venus located between the Earth and the Sun that Cochrane has shown at SIS meetings very likely record these damaging, post-Exodus close passages of Venus.

[Phillip]

Interesting that you invoke the Japanese myth as it could be interpreted in a much less dramatic fashion. The Sun comes up every day and goes down at dusk - what would cause the Sun not to appear? An interesting question as it has parallels with the Exodus event. Now, if the Sun failed to appear for a few days people would get extremely worried and I think that perhaps a lot of so called fertility myth is all about trying to encourage the Sun to shine every day and not repeat the event when it did not shine. In the Japanese story the villain is known as the impetuous male, and what better analogy than with a comet coming close to the Earth and sunshine being inhibited for several days as a result of thick dust and debris caught up in the atmosphere, as well as carbon from fireballs etc.

[Peter]

I can’t believe that Phillip can think that the Impetuous Male of the Japanese myth, The Sun Goddess and the Impetuous Male, was a comet. His explanation ignores all the key elements of the myth which includes the order in which the Gods joined the pantheon. Yes, the Sun did hide for a while in the story, but the most obvious explanation for this was that it was eclipsed by Jupiter for a while prior to its confrontation with Jupiter that resulted in the birth of Venus.

I suggest Phillip look at the myth again, in particular taking note of the order of the Gods appearance. The first time that Izanagi and Izanami circled the holy pillar (surely Cardona’s Axis Mundi) a deity the Japanese called the Leach was the result. Note this was before the appearance of the Sun Goddess and that the Leach soon disappeared. I think that this means that for a while, before the Sun came close enough to give the Earth daylight, a companion star to proto-Saturn was visible in the heavens, but that as the Sun came closer it disappeared. Sometime after the Sun Goddess materialised on the scene the Moon Goddess joined the pantheon; see my Workshop 2007:2 paper, Birth of the Moon, for an explanation for the appearance of the Moon at this stage. The next deity to materialise was called the Leach Child who was not very impressive and did not remain around long.

I am confident that the deity called the Leach Child, like the earlier Leach, was proto-Saturn’s companion star, Jupiter, visible once again as it, as well as Saturn and the Earth, were drawn closer to the Sun. In this Japanese myth the Impetuous Male sized supreme power and rules for only a short time, but in another Japanesen Myth Izanami was terribly burnt when giving birth to the Fire God and the furious grief of Izanagi over this resulted in the birth of many Kami. I take this to be a reference to the flare-up of Saturn that Velikovsky associates with the Biblical flood and with Jupiter placing Saturn in bonds, and to the many moons that were already orbiting Jupiter when the Earth was captured.

I am confident that the Japanese myths have too much in common with the creation myths of other people to dismiss them as confused versions of the Exodus event which seems to be what Phillip is suggesting. The Exodus event has its own distinctive features that, as Velikovsky pointed out, are recorded by many people from all round the World. I am afraid that Phillip must accept that the Earth has suffered a whole series of catastrophe, not just the one Exodus event.

[Michael Anteski]

In attempting to draw analogies between the cataclysmic accounts cited by Velikovsky and other sources in ancient mythology, certain cataclysm details appear to be particularly repetitious. Ovid's "Metamorpjoses" (Book XI, fable 1) recounts a disaster featuring mythologic figures that can be construed as symbollic of cosmic forces running amok ("horses of the sun" -?gravitational forces in disarray with respect to Earth, which could occur during a cometary brush with a large body; "Aurora";"Phaethon" (the hero of the fable) beholds the world set on fire"; and many other apparently symbollic allusions. Hesiod's "Typhon" narrative contains very similar allusions (in his "Theogony" written in the 8th century BC. The narrative in the Book of Job appears to describe a cosmic catastrophe with very similar details. -A cosmic body almost the same size as Earth such as venus as it approached Earth would not collide with it if one applied certain cosmological theoretics based on the idea that a universal electric ether exists. Many modern scientific theorists are taking a maverick stance vis a vis the standard views of cosmic forces based on Einsteinian relativity and quantum theory. With the electric ether model, similar sized cosmic bodies as the near each other would have their respective etheric electromagnetic fields begin to interact with each other. Each body's magnetic field would be in predominant resonance with its own internal energy, and thus, resonationally, be resistant to the other body's energy field. They would not attract each other energizationally. Even if their inertial momentum were nearly directly in each other' path, their energic repulsion would probably prevent collision. -A somewhat analogous pathway-phenomenon is observable in particle physics, wjhere tiny subatomic particles do not collide, but rather describe curvilinear arcing paths with respect to each other. Such curvilinear dynamics theoretically could result in the electric ether model due to universal resonances among etheroidal and etheric units, besides the particle units approaching each other.

[Peter]

Trevor said on the 21st of November that the final suggestion in my posting about Venus being an infant sibling of the Earth doesn't seem likely given what various probes have revealed about the atmosphere of Venus over the past few decades. However, Tim Flannery in his book, Here on Earth, (Allen Lane 2010) says that “carbon is the indispensible building block of life. Almost all of that carbon was once floating in the atmosphere, joined in a “ménage a trios” with oxygen to form CO2. Billions of years ago, when life was a weak infant struggling to survive, there was more CO2 in the atmosphere than there is today for living things had not yet discovered a means to use it. Today, however, CO2 forms just four parts per ten thousands of the gaseous composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, while a by product of photosynthesis, oxygen, forms 21 per cent. This is the ultimate measure of life’s triumph”. In the next paragraph he says “the continents may be a product of life. This might seem to be a large claim, but it is worth bearing in mind that living things provide 75% of the energy used to transform Earth’s rocks”.

I have no idea when microscopic life will begin to change the atmosphere of Venus, but it could already have started.

[Peter]

In support of my last posting about CO2 in the Earth’s early atmosphere being converted into water the following are quotations from Ellen Parker’s book, Oceans, McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Although Parker's ideas about the birth of a planet follow the consensus accretion theory she says that as the Earth first cooled a “thicker rocky crust forms over the planet’s surface. Cooling causes water vapour in the atmosphere to condense into liquid and droplets rain down. Soon torrential rains douse the planet and the first watery ocean is born. The early ocean is acidic and extremely hot, possibly in the order of 100 degrees C.” After a sentence about volcanic activity she says “a weighty, caustic atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide still surrounds the Earth, but as more water condenses sunlight begins to shine through the dark clouds.”

In her next paragraph Parker says that “carbon dioxide in the atmosphere begins to dissolve in the new ocean and combine with the carbonate ions to form calcium carbonate or limestone. As more and more limestone is deposited on the seafloor, carbon dioxide is increasingly removed from the atmosphere and the skies brighten.”

Although, unlike Flannery, Parker does not attribute the formation of water, calcium carbonates and limestone to life she essentially proposes the same programme for the early evolution of the Earth from a planet with a molten surface and dense atmosphere in which CO2 was a major constituent to the water rich and life supporting planet that we inhabit. The young Earth of her evolution scenario is very like Venus as it is today.