[meteorite-list] "money from the sky"

[Alexander Seidel]

> Just yesterday I took a look into my encyclopedia from 1957, the most
> popular one of it's time, found in many bookshelves -there I read about
> the age of the Earth: estimated 3 billion years...

This has been corrected to about 4.56 billion years nowadays, as far as the accepted age of the solar system is concerned, but then again there may still be quite a few people around, who for whatever reason are inclined to think and believe quite differently, something I will not follow here...

Anyway, what still amazes me after all those years of collecting: you can hold a piece of iron or rock in your hands which is that (or almost that) old, a sliced surface having been unseen and untouched before (well, apart from the saw operator, of course :-)), a pristine type-3-stone virtually unchanged for billions of yrs ever since its ingredients got together in an accretion process just on a scale of a few early millions of years, nothing but an eyeblink compared to the age of the solar system - you can even buy it for moderate prices and own it, and must not necessarily go to a museum to have a look at this stuff under thick glas. And all of this far beyond the age of the oldest touchable unchanged material on Earth which is available. 

That´s what makes up one of the meteorite aficionado´s dreams... 

Alex
Berlin/Germany