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This is John Batchel, conversation with Simone Markey of the Southwest Research Institute

on his work and an article in Nature magazine about the late collision accretion of the planetesimals

of the early solar system in which Earth is a happy member. The late collision accretions,

planetesimals sometimes as large as more than a thousand kilometers wide,

collided into the inner rocky planets, that's Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury.

And depending upon how it was hit and how much hit, at what speed and how big it was,

it had very much changed the nature of the planet, the last 1% colliding.

For example, here, Venus, the speculation is that it was hit by a very large planetism, going perhaps 40 kilometers a second.

That's fast.

And that created conditions that lead to a very hot planet with a very thick atmosphere. No water. Well, Simone is going to explain here. This is randomness, billiards, whatever metaphor is appropriate.

The Earth is lucky.

...