Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

WORLDS IN DERISION 181
This premise, that manna and insects came from Venus to the
Earth, is suspect at best. We now know that the surface of Venus has
an incredibly high temperature, over 900° Celsius (1,600° Fahrenheit),
hot enough to melt lead. It’s difficult to imagine what kind
of bug could survive such withering heat. It’s also hard to see how
manna—a life-sustaining compound—could form on Venus. After
all, the atmosphere of Venus is mostly carbon dioxide and sulfuric
acid. If a few billion tons of these substances gets dumped into the
air here on Earth, the effect would hardly be conducive to life. Quite
the opposite.
There are other physical effects of a Venusian near miss. Despite
its differences, Venus does have some similarities to the Earth.
They have almost exactly the same mass and diameter. That means
they have about the same gravity. For the air of Venus to flow
onto the Earth, there would need to be about an equal pull from
both planets on the air, with a little bit more of a pull from the
Earth. Even being outrageously generous, their nearly equal gravity
means that Venus would have to be closer than 1,000 kilometers
(600 miles) from the surface of the Earth.
Imagine! A planet the size of the Earth passing just 1,000 kilometers
overhead would be just about the most terrifying event I
can imagine. Venus would literally fill the sky, blocking out the
Sun and stars. Even at interplanetary velocities it would be vastly
huge in the sky for days or weeks, and would be brighter than
hundreds of full Moons.
Yet, no mention of this incredible spectacle is made in ancient
texts.
Worse, the tides from Venus on the Earth would be huge, kilometers
high. The earthquakes would have been more than terrible;
they would have destroyed everything, and I mean everything. It
would make the sweatiest vision of biblical apocalypse look like a
warm spring day. That close a pass by something like Venus would
have sterilized the surface of the Earth, killing every living thing on
it. Had it happened, Velikovsky wouldn’t have been around to
write his book. To his credit, Velikovsky assumes that there would
have been earthquakes and the like, but he underestimates the
effect of such a near passage by a factor of millions.