Impact
How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A Short History of Nearly Everything meets Astrophysics for People in a Hurry in this humorous, accessible exploration of how meteorites have helped not only build our planet but steered the evolution of life and human culture.
The Solar System. Dinosaurs. Donkey Kong. What is the missing link? Surprisingly enough, it's meteorites. They explain our past, constructed our present, and could define our future.
Impact argues that Earth would be a lifeless, inhospitable piece of rock without being fortuitously assaulted with meteorites throughout the history of the planet. These bombardments transformed Earth’s early atmosphere and delivered the complex organic molecules that allowed life to develop on our planet. While meteorites have provided the raw materials for life to thrive, they have radically devastated life as well, most famously killing off the dinosaurs and paving the way for humans to evolve to where we are today.
As noted meteoriticist Greg Brennecka explains, meteorites did not just set us on the path to becoming human, they helped direct the development of human culture. Meteorites have influenced humanity since the start of civilization. Over the centuries, meteorite falls and other cosmic cinema have started (and stopped) wars, terrified millions, and inspired religions throughout the world.
With humor and an infectious enthusiasm, Brennecka reveals previously untold but important stories sure to delight and inform readers about the most important rocks on Earth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brennecka, a cosmochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, takes a look at the past, present, and future of meteorites in his chatty debut. "Rocks flying around the cosmos not only built our physical world...they also have had an inordinate influence on the various non-concrete constructions of civilization," he writes, and shares a slew of fun facts. In 1992, for example, a meteorite fell "through the trunk of a cherry red 1980 Chevy Malibu" and became infamous, and the car was resold for a $4,600 profit 20 years later; people in Uganda have been known to eat pulverized meteorites, believing they might "possibly be a God-sent cure" for AIDS; and a meteorite might have been responsible for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Other anecdotes are more heavily scientific, and are where Brennecka hits his stride, as with his suggestion that the amino acids common on many meteorites might have "helped usher in the origin of life" on Earth. The abundance of filler and corny jokes, though, can be distracting (a meteorite storm in France in 1803 "likely resulted in numerous pairs of soiled underpants"). Despite a couple wobbles, it's a fine intro for star-gazing newbies.
