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joke? immanuel velikovsky has made himself quite a reputation positing such events. calling himself a "scientist" he's claimed that venus was "ejected" from jupiter 3500 or so years ago whereupon it cruised around the solar system with a whole bunch of near misses of larger bodies before settling into its current orbit.

the majority of his "proof" for all this are biblical stories about astrological events. for instance, velikovsky posits that the friction of venus passing closeby earth raised the surface temperature of this planet " sufficient to make the vermin of the earth propagate at a very feverish rate" thus resulting in the plagues in exodus. that's just a sample.

wildly improbable to say the least - but velikovsky has managed to sell millions of books to the heroically undereducated public flogging this theory. a nutbar... but a rich nutbar.

right. sensical talk about velikovsky can be had here.

Not sure who Velikovsky is ..

Immanuel Velikovsky. His first three books were published in the '50's. I ran across them in the late '70's. His basic thesis was that some ancient myths may be based on actual observed events. Result, he was widely reviled as a crank by defenders of the Holy Writ of both Organized Religion and Organized Science, and apparently still is today. Subsequent discoveries have proven he was wrong about a few things, right about a few others.

Iirc (from over 20 years ago), he never suggested the Noah's flood story as written was accurate. More like .. point out the widespread prevalence and similarities of flood stories in various cultures, plus something such as the existence of seashell bearing strata found high in the Andes, how that didn't fit current theory (Darwinian-type gradualism), suggest a possible explanation that included the anomalous data rather than ignoring it.

According to the Mayan Prophecies it's more to do with the cycles of the sun rather than asteriods, although whether that's coincidence or not is another matter.

What, a bad astronomy site with no Velikovsky links? Velikovsky was a famous crank who believed that many important historical events can be explained by near collisions with Mars and Venus. For example, when Moses led his people out of Egypt, one of the ten plagues was that the rivers ran red with blood. Naturally, Velikovsky argued that this was actually Mars dust. He became famous partly because Einstein actually bothered to reply to his letters.

-a

Actually, Europe doesn't have so much on us, as a few hunderd years of "dark ages" were made up.

Obviously you have never read any Velikovsky.

Fair enough. Since most ancient civilizations that lived on fertile flood plains (nile, tigris) equated flooding with rebirth (silt deposit equaling regeneration of soil quality) The flood-wipes-clean-and-gives-birth-to-new-and-impro ved motif makes perfect sense. My complaint is that there are a lot of people who do read the bible literally in the sense of every-word-is-inspired-and-true and use that interpretation to contest sceintific issues. The most notable, of course, is 7-day, 6K-year-old-earth creationists... but there are plenty of other instances of literal-biblist anti-science-isms (anti-science-isms? You heard it here first!) My fave, of course, is good old immanuel velikovsky and his amazing venus-as-asteroid theories to account for everything from the sun standing still to the great flood to appearance of manna from heaven (although I suspect in the last case he confuses carbohydrates with hydrocarbons... I can just see the ancient isrealites mowing down on 10W30!).

But I digress...

Someone's already been working on it, actually:

Society for Interdisciplinary Studies

Very fascinating stuff. I first heard of them from the back of a James P. Hogan book.