That is, the planets and minor planets orbit the Sun orbit in the same direction on pretty much the same plane. Confused? OK, this is how I explain it to my astronomy classes. Imagine your head is the Sun. If you stick your arms out and start to turn slowly in (ignoring the direction at this time) and stuck ball bearings of increasing sizes on your arms with duct tape at increasing distances from your head, you would have a basic illustration of the Solar System as it turns in space. Imagine then, that each of the ball bearings are turning the same direction: except for Venus. It rotates in the opposite direction of everyone else – and it turns VERY, VERY slowly. When you reach Uranus, let it keep spinning in the same direction, but tip its north pole 98 degrees (90 degrees is like a “90 degree angle” or as you may remember from geometry or trigonometry, a “right angle”.) Uranus is tipped MORE than that…but it’s still rotating the same direction as it did when it was upright…but now it’s spin, relative to the other planets, is backwards (aka “retrograde”).
At any rate, Dr. Grinspoon talks about what it is that has created Venus’ hellish conditions and while he does include its location (closer to the Sun than Earth), the fact that the Sun is brighter and hotter today than it was when the Solar system formed), and a peculiar venology (it can’t be “geology” and “aphrodology” just sounds weird…) that includes a sort of cyclical disruptive plate tectonics (pages 171-173); he doesn’t mention the slow, retrograde rotation. By slow, I mean that a “day” on Venus is 243 Earth days; and the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east…eventually.
It could be that I haven’t reached those pages yet, so we’ll see...
At any rate, Dr. Grinspoon talks about what it is that has created Venus’ hellish conditions and while he does include its location (closer to the Sun than Earth), the fact that the Sun is brighter and hotter today than it was when the Solar system formed), and a peculiar venology (it can’t be “geology” and “aphrodology” just sounds weird…) that includes a sort of cyclical disruptive plate tectonics (pages 171-173); he doesn’t mention the slow, retrograde rotation. By slow, I mean that a “day” on Venus is 243 Earth days; and the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east…eventually.
It could be that I haven’t reached those pages yet, so we’ll see...
AND THEN I DID REACH "THOSE PAGES" A FEW DAYS AFTER WRITING THE ABOVE...Perhaps the biggest “kick-in-the-teeth” is that he clearly lays out what happened to alter our Solar system longer ago than 65,000,000 years: “As the planets approached their final sizes, giant also-rans, the contenders that could have been planets, came hurtling down to Earth (and Mercury, Venus, etc.) at speeds of tens of thousands of miles per hour. These final giant impactors left a trail of destruction throughout the solar system, stripping Mercury of its outer rock mantle, leaving Venus spinning backward, and knocking Uranus on its side And in an event as propitious for us as it was random, a Mars-size protoplanet smacked into the young, still-forming Earth, splashing a massive ring of vaporized rock into Earth orbit, which quickly condensed to make out singular, giant Moon.” (page 82)
In my new novel, EMERALD OF EARTH I have a slightly more fantastic explanation for the current state of the Solar system: Emerald Marcillon’s mother, Nhia Okon, explains to a group of high-ranking military brass:
“The evidence we’ve gathered so far clearly indicates that a massive object, probably a microscopic black hole, grazed Uranus and tipped it on its side….A fleet of invading interstellar warships, using black-hole-energy technology probably experienced a disastrous explosion shortly thereafter. Debris swept through the solar system, probably missing Saturn but raining down on Jupiter and setting off the Great Red Spot hurricane…The worst was yet to happen…Mars had shallow oceans that teemed with microscopic life forms. A large rock, possibly an asteroid knocked from a stable orbit and carried on the shockwave of the explosion, slammed into the planet, blowing away much of its air allowing the oceans to boil away under low pressure…Another asteroid carried on the shockwave struck off the coast of what would one day be the Yucatan Peninsula. The dinosaurs and thousands of other life forms, already environmentally and genetically stressed, were launched into extinction…This is the world of an alien, probably sauroid intelligence native to the planet we now call Venus. They were aggressive and powerful. Spreading through our solar system, we have evidence that they conquered beyond it. The invasion fleet had come to put a stop to it….But the accident that destroyed the fleet and saved the sauroids from certain invasion, next threatened them with the mindless destruction of chance…An object nearly large enough to split Venus in half hit the sauroid moon, knocking it cleanly out of Venus’ orbit, where it drifted until the sun captured it again, the molten scar on its surface glowing red hot for nearly a century. The world we call Venus was pounded by meteorites sleeting through the vacuum of space. A second monstrous object was large enough to reverse Venus’ rotation…The solar system had been reshaped and the intelligences on the new, second planet of the shattered star system were extinct. We are the heirs of those shattered spheres. We are the ones who must piece together the details. We are the ones who must find the bits of technology that we can use to go to the stars...”
I go into both more detail, and the event is a driving point of story's plot.
If you want to find out more, read a bit more below.
Links: PSI's David Grinspoon Appointed to New NASA Post (spacedaily.com)
Links: PSI's David Grinspoon Appointed to New NASA Post (spacedaily.com)
The Kindle version of my Book EMERALD OF EARTH (that incorporates the story above) WENT LIVE on Wednesday (3/20/2024), and is now available here:
The trade paper version will be released at the end of March.
Image: Personal Files
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