I have been fortunate enough, in this lifetime, to be The keeper of parts of our Universe. The article below expalins this honor well - Meteorite Magazine, August, 2009. Cosmic Perspective - Temporary Custodians Our respective fates here on planet Earth are all inevitable. Sooner or later - and whether we like it or not - each of us will eventually assume room temperature. Seemingly against all odds, we are born, we experience a few decades on the big ball (if were lucky), then we die. Our atoms are once again stirred back into the terrestrial soup, and thats about all she wrote. Those of us fortunate enough to experience these few decades here on the big ball from a seat within the international meteorite communitys theater see things from a rather unique perspective, as these objects of our fascination are, for the most part, older than the big ball itself. For more than 4.5 billion years, they have roamed in the vastness of outer space, entering our atmosphere by mere happenstance only very recently in relative terms. If those 4.5 billion years flashed before your eyes in a high speed movie at the rate of one year per second, it would take you almost 15 decades - almost certainly more than any of us will have - to watch it. Just 206 years ago - about 3 ½ minutes from the end of this hypothetical 150-year-long movie - the worlds scientific community was finally convinced by Jean-Baptiste Biots landmark report of the LAigle witnessed fall that rocks do, indeed, fall from the sky. The subject of meteorites, in terms of human comprehension, is but a single fertilized cell in the womb which has yet to divide even once. As humankinds reach into the vastness of space continues to expand like the universe itself, the international community of meteorite collectors will no doubt grow by orders of magnitude.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 12:50:59 +0000
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