PLANETARY DEFENSE GAINING VERA RUBIN OBSERVATORY IN CHILE AND NEO SURVEYOR IN ORBIT: 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
🗓️ 1 March 2025
⏱️ 11 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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel. |
| 0:03.0 | Impact is the book. |
| 0:04.0 | This is meteorites that fall to Earth and what we've learned about our solar system, about life, about water, |
| 0:11.0 | about our understanding of where we come from. |
| 0:15.0 | Impact is the book, How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture and Donkey Kong. |
| 0:19.0 | Greg Branachia, a cosmochemist here. And Greg, you teach me there are three kinds of meteorites that fall to Earth, our classifications. What are they? And you study one particular kind of meteorite, I believe, the C-A-I's. What is that? First, the three kinds. Thank you. Okay. Well, I guess I'll |
| 0:40.8 | have to slightly correct you. There's a lot more than three kinds. I think there's three main |
| 0:44.9 | kinds of chondrites. So I'll just, you know, kind of break it up into that. There are |
| 0:50.0 | chondrites, which are really primitive samples, and then there are achondrites which have melted. There are three types of chondrites. which are really primitive samples, and then they're a conglides which have melted. |
| 0:54.9 | There are three types of chondrites. |
| 0:57.5 | And one of those, you mentioned the CAIs or calcium aluminum-rich inclusions, and you can see why we abbreviate it, that's something that's contained in these carbonaceous chondrites. |
| 1:10.1 | And they're kind of the earliest snapshots of our solar system, so as it was just starting to form. |
| 1:14.6 | So the chondrites are important because they are a journey back to the four billion years ago, |
| 1:21.6 | when the cloud was gathering itself around what becomes the sun. |
| 1:25.6 | That's exactly right. They're very primitive samples. |
| 1:28.3 | These chondrites are so important because they've never been melted. |
| 1:31.5 | They really represent a snapshot of that molecular cloud. |
| 1:35.4 | And kind of as planets and planet testicles were starting to form, the very, very beginning, |
| 1:40.3 | the baby book of our solar system are contained, I guess, within these chondrites. |
| 1:43.8 | All right. The three kinds these chondrites, yeah. |
| 2:02.3 | All right, the three kinds of chondrites. And there are other kinds of asteroids, stony iron, just stony, a chondrites, which has to do with whether the substance inside, test me teacher, has melted or not. And chondrites are unmelted is that correct they've uh that is exactly correct condrites are not melted and a condrites are melted it sounds it sounds |
| 2:07.4 | uh you know like we're really boring at naming well but melting means that there is very little water |
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