DrMarcFries

Stretch your arms all the way out, and let's imagine that the distance from one fingertip, across your body, and out to the other fingertip represents 4.5 billion years. That's the age of most meteorites. Now, take a nail file and make a single swipe across the fingernail on your middle finger. If the distance across your outstretched arms is 4.5 billion years, then with that nail file swipe you just erased ALL of recorded human history. But your average meteorite has been around for the entire outstretched-arms distance - for 4.5 billion years!

Ever heard of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the man who wrote The Little Prince? In the '20s and '30s he was a French Aeropostale (air mail) pilot, flying wood-and-fabric airplanes to deliver the mail to far-flung corners of the world. He was once forced down on a small, high plateau in Africa by mechanical troubles. Stranded, he walked around the plateau. He noticed that the plateau was too tall to ever have been visited before, and that it was composed entirely of light-colored rocks. There in the moonlight, he found an odd, dark rock that had no place there. Saint-Exupery identified the rock as a meteorite, as the only way it arrived was from the canvas of stars above, "just as a blanket spread under an apple tree receives only apples". He went on to find three meteorites there in the darkness, and to identify them as such back in the 30's was quite the intellectual accomplishment.

heheheh

Heheheh Meteors like today's must have occurred during Mayan times as well. You have to wonder what they must have thought about such events.

Asteroids, meteoroids, and meteorites (rocks that actually reach the ground) are NOT radioactive. On Earth, rocks usually are radioactive if they are part of a radioactive element's ore. That requires the movement of a lot of hot water in the Earth's crust, and that process does not happen on asteroids. Meteorites are safe to handle.