From P. E. L. BROOKER
It is interesting to compare Ken Croswell’s piece about Mercury with
the previous week’s article by John Gribbin, ‘Is anyone out there?’.
To explain some of Mercury’s anomalies requires the assumption that
the planet suffered ‘random acts of violence’ from one or more other bodies.
The Gribbin article dismisses Venus as a possible cradle of life simply
because it happens to be too close to the Sun and is therefore too hot.
This totally ignores one of Venus’s greatest anomalies, which is its slow
and retrograde rotation. If theories of planetary formation from an accretion
disc around the Sun are correct, Venus must surely have suffered some extremely
large ‘random acts of violence’ to have modified its spin so much. Could
this not also have had an adverse effect on its potential to develop life
or, depending when such an impact occurred, have destroyed any that already
existed?
P. E. L. Brooker St Albans, Hertfordshire
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