Yevaud said: <font color="yellow"> And - no offense - I always find the explanations of the EPH theory to be extraordinarily weak. For example, only 1/1000 of the mass of an Earth remains, and the entire remainder "vaporized?" Ahhhh, no, I don't think so. </font><br /><br />You may not *think* so, but what are you basing this thought on? According to Van Flandern:<br /><br /><i> Consider what would happen if the Earth exploded today. Surface and crustal rocks would shatter and fragment, but remain rocks. However, rocks from depths greater than about 40 km are under so much pressure at high temperature that, if suddenly released into a vacuum, such rocks would vaporize. As a consequence, over 99% of the Earth’s total mass would vaporize in an explosion, with only its low-pressure crustal and upper mantle layers surviving. </i><br /><br /><font color="yellow"> And a great deal of the EPH is based on a rudimentary scan of Bode's law - which is not a physical law. It's a relationship, which is not the same thing. </font><br /><br />The EPH is based upon many lines of observational evidence, including the fact that:<br /><br />*Asteroids occupy the entire volume of phase space (the full range of positions and velocities) between Mars and Jupiter that is stable against planetary perturbations over millions of years. And their mean relative velocities, averaging 5 km/s, are too high to result from collisions, fragmentation, or planetary perturbations. <br /><br />*The distribution of asteroid orbital elements contains “explosion signatures” similar to those first catalogued for fragments of artificial Earth satellites that blew up in orbit. <br /><br />*The cosmic ray exposure ages of stony meteorites are generally only some millions of years, not billions – distinctly shorter than the mean time between collisions. <br /><br />*Comets, which are spectrally, photometrically, and chemically similar to asteroids, have all their major properties explained better by an e