CLUES OF ORIGINS: 3/4: Impact: How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong Hardcover – by Greg Brennecka (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Rocks-Space-Culture-Donkey/dp/0063078929/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
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.
1998 MAIN ASTEROID BELT
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Greg Branaka, a |
| 0:07.0 | staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore Labs and the author of Impact a new book |
| 0:15.1 | about asteroids and things that fall to Earth but reasoning backwards like a |
| 0:19.5 | detective no as a detective Greg is going to take us to the asteroid belt and what the asteroid belt and other objects in our solar system called planets, not all of them are planets, but it's important to mention that the building blocks of planets are everywhere. |
| 0:37.0 | What they tell us about the formation of our solar system. |
| 0:40.0 | So far, Greg, my understanding is the planets have moved. |
| 0:43.2 | Why is the asteroid belt where it is after Mars? |
| 0:47.3 | What does it represent? |
| 0:49.9 | That's a great question, and you're right, the planets have moved over the course of |
| 0:53.4 | history of the solar system and particularly the large planets |
| 0:56.7 | Jupiter and Saturn they encompass a huge amount of mass in our solar |
| 1:01.7 | system that's out not not in part of the sun and |
| 1:05.0 | their kind of gravitational interactions with the sun are what caused things to kind of |
| 1:09.8 | move around because they're movement of the planets. |
| 1:14.4 | The asteroid belt is where it is because of this movement of the planets. |
| 1:18.2 | There are different resonances, basically kind of zones that are gravitationally |
| 1:22.4 | well set up to be. |
| 1:25.0 | And that's one of the zones where a lot of the sweepings from the asteroid, or |
| 1:28.8 | sweepings from the solar system ended up in that asteroid belt. |
| 1:32.2 | And the asteroid belt is the origin of many of these rocks that fall on Earth, |
| 1:38.0 | and not entirely, but many of them. |
| 1:41.0 | And they're very large asteroids, and then they're small asteroids. of them |
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