Of course, Earth is a giant space rock made of lots of smaller space rocks, so you’d think that Earth would be just as metal rich as asteroids. In fact, using a metal detector is the quickest way to find space rocks (were you so inclined). So it’s not a coincidence that the oldest worked iron show clear signs of being from space. After billions of years stewing in our water and oxygen atmosphere, any pure iron that might have existed has rusted away and combined with rocks and minerals long before any person could have found it. But metallic iron doesn’t naturally exist on Earth.
You can literally dig it out of the ground, dust it off, and start making jewelry. Metal working was invented before smelting, which is fine for gold since “metallic gold” exists on Earth. The pretty lines in the cut are “Widmanstätten patterns”, which form when iron and nickel are allowed to cool slowly over millions of years.
Left: Tutankhamun’s incredibly rare and valuable iron knife with it’s cheap-as-dirt gold sheath. It may have come from somewhere else and been given to the child king as a gift, but that wouldn’t explain the dagger’s peculiar alloy: a literally other-worldly 11% nickel impurity. First, iron smelting (turning ore into iron) is complicated and energy intensive, which is why Egyptians didn’t start doing it until 8 centuries later. When Tutankhamun died 34 centuries ago he was buried with an iron dagger, which is noteworthy for a couple reasons. The oldest known examples of iron tools showed up during the bronze age, before the invention of iron smelting. While Earth has a lot going for it, it’s about the worst possible place to look for a lot of the resources that make our civilizations possible and the absolute bottom of the list for places to be cavalier with pollution. Earth is tiny compared to the sum of planets, moons, and smaller bodies in the solar system. Everything humanity does directly impacts the Earth and, while that sounds like a simple truism, it doesn’t have to be. But unlike Easter Island, we have to do absolutely everything “in house” and effectively no access to the outside world. Today, despite still having only a tiny forest and not nearly enough farmland to support it, Easter Island has a larger population and more infrastructure than ever before in its history.įor those of you reading between the lines, Earth is an island too. Not to leave, but to reap the benefits that come from access to different, unimagined environments, and to dilute the impact you have on your little island. There are a few options available: you could stick around and try very hard to cultivate the few remaining resources available, to fix everything before being adventurous, or you could start building boats.
Now imagine that you and everyone you’d ever known or heard of were living on Easter Island in the waning days of its civilization.
Consider Easter Island, or Iceland, or England each are isolated places that were once covered in vast forests with abundant animal life and which are now famously barren (those poems about the beauty of the windswept English moors should rightfully be about vast not-windy forests). Physicist: Why bother going out to mine asteroids? Why not stay home? The answer is a little grim.
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