Impact: How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong

Very entertaining writing about how meterorites carry iron & other important stuff from other planets, like Mars, to the Earth.

Impact: How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong by Greg Brennecka is a highly recommended, humorous, approachable examination of how meteorites have influenced us from the formation of our planet to the development of human culture.Brennecka, a cosmochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, shares stories and facts that will entertain and inform readers about the most important rocks on Earth. Starting with the formation of the universe, he presents how, by transforming the early atmosphere and potentially delivering the complex organic molecules needed for life, the constant assault by meteorites is what has made Earth the planet we all live on today. Of course this change also includes killing off the dinosaurs. Meteorites have influenced and terrified humanity while influencing culture since the start of civilization. Brennecka covers the numerous ways meteorites have become part of our culture.The text is written in a very accessible, humorous style. Included are numerous cartoon illustrations of various scientific concepts and photographs of historical meteorites and artifacts. The writing style will make it suitable for popular science readers of all levels of expertise. There is an appendix with more technical information for advanced readers. It is safe to say that those with a greater scientific background will want to look elsewhere for a more complex and thorough scientific examination of meteorites, however this is a fine choice for those who are new to the study of meteorites and would enjoy the humorous presentation.Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins

I like science, which is why I was excited to read this book. And it's nice to read science that is well written for a popular audience. But this book puts humor first, making it seem like silliness instead of science, so much so that sometimes it stopped the flow of reading and I began to have trouble trusting his facts. He says, for example, that "until recently in human history, there was not an overabundance of appreciation for what was happening in and above the sky from a scientific perspective." Umm, so we're not counting Stonehenge or Mayan calendars. And, indeed, the time period between the demise of the dinosaurs and the beginning of recorded history is generally ignored. In short, I was disappointed.

Way more information than I was expecting and written in a conversational way. This book tells the history of meteor strikes which I thought would be boring, but was an indication that there's a lot more to meteors and meteorites than I knew about. There are hundreds of different kinds of meteorites some mostly iron, and some with a lot of water, and some with carbon-organic molecules. You might ask how could a meteorite have water in it when it was white hot coming through the atmosphere? It was only that way for a few seconds and the interior didn't get hot. And the meteorite was at minus 250 Celsius in space. Anyway I recommend the book. In academic style also, there's a huge bibliography for each chapter.

This insightful and entertaining book traces how meteoric impacts throughout the Earth's history have affected geology, the biosphere, and human culture. It's a fascinating look at how impacts have affected our past and are likely to affect our future. Easy to read and understand, it's a good choice for anyone interested in this field.Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

I wish I'd ready the preview instead of the reviews. Far from just a humorous tone, it seems like every other sentence is a snarky metaphor, some of which are downright condescending. It's a high level overview, written for a teenage audience, so if you're looking for an adult book on meteor science, look elsewhere.

Greg Brennecka’s new book 𝙄𝙢𝙥𝙖𝙘𝙩 covers the impact meteorites have had on human culture. Iron before the iron-age left many a mark. So did observed airbursts overhead and craters on the ground. Meteoritic beads have been found in burial sites going back 6,000 years, and in King Tut’s tomb, along with his meteoritic rings and dagger.“Meteorites are, by almost any measure, far more diverse than any rocks formed on Earth.”This line from Appendix 1 of Greg Brennecka’s 𝙄𝙢𝙥𝙖𝙘𝙩 struck me. Here's a visual array of the April additions to the FV collection to illustrate the point. Which is your favorite? +More quotes from the book:“Meteorites represent the origins of Earth and humanity. Meteorites are ancient and largely unchanged — certain types have never been melted since they formed over 4.5 billion years ago, and thus are excellent time capsules for the genesis of the Solar System. The most primitive types of meteorites are so pristine we essentially sample an unadulterated version of our parent molecular cloud from which the Solar System formed.”- Starting composition of the Sun and planets- Ancient clocks and thermometers, embedded in stone- “Diamonds older than the sun among the cosmic dust and galactic garbage”- Amino acids, DNA and RNA base pairs, and large amounts of water- “the texture and minerals present in many meteorites are essentially impossible to re-create on Earth.”- Paleomagnetism: the sun had an intense magnetic field in the early years- “Meteorites record a gradient in their isotopic compositions related to how far out from the sun they formed.”Luna launch: “The moon exists because of a really, really big meteorite. When the Earth was a mere toddler, less than 150 million years after the birth of the Solar System, the impact flash-melted the entire surface of the Earth and large portions of its mantle. The impactor itself, a Mars size body that have been names Theia, was completely obliterated as it violently introduced itself to a fledgling Earth. The material that was ejected from this collision eventually coalesced into what we call the Moon, producing a brilliantly tidally locked, lower-density-than-Earth extra-large satellite for us to marvel at 4 billion+ years later.”- Sterilized Earth and reset the atmosphere to be rich in hydrogen, carbon monoxide and water (the source of our abundant water remains unknown; it may have come from Theia, liberated from the Earth’s mantle from Theia’s impact, or delivered by subsequent comets and water-rich meteorites. Or all three).- “Four billion years ago, Earth was spinning much faster and the Moon was much closer to us. These differences caused much larger tide fluctuations to happen more frequently: up to ~50m changes every five hours.”- “Ocean tides produce local differences on a repeated basis, which happens to be the perfect mechanism for concentrating organic material. Without the Moon and the tides it creates, this crucible for carbon concentration would barely exist.”Dino-busting: “One moment there were creatures as big as 100 tons strutting their stuff around, and then, in a blink of geologic time, no living animal on Earth was larger than a basset hound.”Ongoing nourishment: “Every day in our modern world, an average of more than 100 metric tons of meteoritic material is added to Earth.”- “Living things use only 21 amino acids to perform their daily functions, and many amino acids discovered in meteorites were previously unknown to exist. More than 80 types of amino acids have been identified in a single primitive metworite.”- “The realization that organic molecules exist at all in meteorites is mind-bending enough, but the fact that such a complex and highly diverse suite of molecules — including life-essential things like sugars, alcohols and amino acids— exist in abundance in many kinds of meteorites is almost incomprehensibly thought provoking.”- Other essential ingredients for our biology, like reactive phosphorous and soluble iron may have come from meteorites, as it is in “vanishingly short supply, particularly in places like the ocean, where organisms get a lot of the nutrients they require from seawater.”- “The well documented increased influx of extraterrestrial material around 450 million years ago caused a global increase of marine productivity (seeding the oceans with iron). If such a productivity bump was intense enough, it would have caused a significant drawdown of global CO2 levels, lowering global temperatures. As such, increased meteoritic delivery may have been the indirect cause of the most intense ice age of the last 500 million years, the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event, which wiped out ~85% of marine species at the time.”Free Sample Return from Mars: Martian meteorites could not have been launched by volcanos on Mars, as some initially thought. The escape velocity is 11,000 MPH “so the only realistic way they got off Mars was from large impacts to the surface of the planet” — more meteorites, hitting Mars.- “It is only through the study of Martian meteorites that we can quantify the amount of water that was present in the past, and how much has been lost over time.”- We have 300 samples “from 4.1 billion years old to a scant 160 million years ago; in other words, for nearly the entirely of Mars’s history.”- No plate tectonics remixing and melting the surface- “With the recent space exploration interest success by private companies such as SpaceX, and the continued interest and accelerated collaboration between governmental space agencies, the possibility of returning samples from Mars is becoming ever more tangible” and they will be chosen rocks from chosen locations, like old lakebeds and riverbanks.How might meteorites heave jump-started life on Earth? IWell, a big banger early on wiped out all possibility of life on Earth; the meteor impact that dislodged what is now our moon also created a magma ocean across the planet that would have been a destructive 1000°C bake of any complex organic molecules that might have existed prior. But then came the water and carbon-rich CM meteorites, adding an estimated 275 metric tons of carbon compounds to Earth every day!And where did these complex organic molecules come from? The abiotic assumption is that they were basic molecules trapped in ice water beyond the orbit of Jupiter, where it is cold enough for ice to persist, and maintain the proximity or organic clusters. UV radiation energized the formation of more complex molecules from the basic molecules.“And if it was not incredible enough that the organic building blocks that our deep ancestors turned into life were delivered by meteorites, consider that the ubiquity of the raw materials, energy required, and simplicity of creation means that complex organic molecule-rich bodies are almost certainly commonplace in the Universe. If life formed on Earth due to organic materials that formed abiotically in outer space, then that suggests that any planetary body in the Universe with reasonable conditions for chemical reactions and a little luck has a reasonable opportunity to develop life. This is the idea of molecular panspermia.” — 𝐼𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑡, p.136.