In the Adam McKay movie Don’t Look Up, politics divides America when a comet threatens Earth with an extinction event. The Netflix film is not the first where a comet or meteor plays the villain for Hollywood, and even in the world of science, memorable meteors tend to be those which caused cataclysmic disruptions, pushing dinosaurs into extinction or plunging the planet into a snowball state. Even NASA’s backgrounder titled The Probability of Collisions with Earth notes that “This all sounds pretty scary.”
But NASA also points out that no human in the past 1000 years is known to have been killed by a meteorite. And without the countless strikes that have shaken our planet, the young Earth would have missed out on chemical compounds crucial for its development into a future blue-green paradise.
The theory that Earth’s oxygen and hydrogen arrived by meteor has now been given an even firmer footing by a group of international scientists headed by geologist Mario Fischer-Gödde from the University of Cologne. They have documentated an extraordinary rock found near the Greenland capital of Nuuk, and their discovery is not only central to the story about Earth,
