Re: Holidays, continued, with ouch

Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think they were still going on the trope that the planets
had spun outward from the Sun, one by one. So Venus must be
much younger than Earth,

I don't think that was ever a mainstream theory. The two main
theories were:

* Kant's theory that the sun and the planets condensed, at roughly the
same time, from a rotating cloud of dust and gas. This originated
in the 18th century, and is considered correct today. But for for
about a centry, it was eclipsed (so to speak) by the alternate theory:

* Planets were created by a grazing collision between two stars.
Since such collision must be extremely rare, stars with planets must
be extremely rare.

I'm not sure which theory was most popular in 1951.

and have dinosaurs, which (according to current thinking) must have
spent their time wading in swamps 'cause their legs couldn't bear up
their weight.

Of course dinosaurs didn't appear until Earth was 95% of its present
age. So if the age of planets was proportional to their distance from
the sun, Venus would be in its Archaen eon, part of what used to be
called the Precambrian. And indeed Venus currently has an oxygen-free
CO2 and N2 atmosphere, as Earth supposedly had at that time.

And Mars must be older than Earth, and inhabited by ancient wise
Martian elders in their bone-chess cities, dark they were and
golden-eyed, and all those other memes that still strike us to
the heart.

ObSF: S.M. Stirling recently wrote a pair of novels in which Venus
and Mars had turned out to be exactly like that. The Venusians
ride triceratops through their swamps. Martians play a game that's
exactly like chess only much more so.

And Jupiter, if inhabited at all, must harbour such ancient Elders
as to be probably incomprehensible to us, and ... so on.

Don't forget the asteroid belt, which is the remains of a planet that
was blown up in some ancient war.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
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