Phil sent me a rock. No, seriously – a space rock! I published the first half of his accompanying letter in tonight’s report, My Mighty Meteorite. This is the second half of his letter to both Ponzi and myself:

What you have here is a piece of shrapnel from this meteorite. Its composition is about 91% iron, 7.1% nickel, 0.46% cobalt, 0.26% phosphorus, and about 1% sulfur. There are trace amounts of gallium, germanium, and iridium (that last was the key element that lead scientists to understand that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a similar but much larger blast).

Most meteorites are stone. They come from asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. When a large body forms in a solar system, all the stuff making it up is at first mixed, like batter. But when it gets big enough, the heavy stuff – the metal – sinks to the center. So you need a big asteroid for that to happen, bigger than the Moon, so that its gravity is strong enough to differentiate it. Then it has to suffer a mighty blow from another huge asteroid, disrupting it, blowing it into billions of pieces.

What you’re holding in your hand is a piece of metal that was once deep within the core of a planetary-sized body that was destroyed by the impact of another planet-sized body, 4 billion years ago. It orbited the Sun, relatively untouched all that time, until that fateful day 30 millennia ago. It’s a piece of outer space brought to Earth in a fiery, violent decent that ended in cataclysm.

And now it’s yours.

[The first half of Phil's letter has been published elsewhere - and if you haven't figured it out by now, I'm very thankful for his gift. It's kinda like space copralite?]

My Meteorite Piece

The Disclosure Project guy (Dr. Steven Greer) was on Coast to Coast last night, claiming that SETI has finally received intelligent signals from outer space. SETI urged to fess up over alien signals, the Register reported in an fair-and-balanced way – noting that Art Bell’s program often breaks stories long before the mainstream media does. Is SETI holding back on us, or is someone trying to sully Greer’s name? Isn’t this the part where the blogosphere stands up and asks insider(s) to step forward and spill the beans… if there are really any beans to spill?

I really want to believe – I really do. But wat concerns me most about these fringe discoveries is that they often come accompanied with an agenda – that is, you have to “buy the DVD” or “come to the conference.” Are these people spreading valid information – or selling snake oil? If they really want us to listen, these experts must find another way to generate revenue! Oh, and… hire real Web designers.

SETI Hears a Who?