The iron. Metallic meteorites are composed of 90% iron, 5% nickel and the rest of other elements. Iron on Earth is not so easy to obtain. Pure or nearly pure iron is inaccessible to humans because it is only found in the core of the planet. Iron is not a native element of the earth’s crust. There are no iron masses in the crust. There are no iron mines. Iron in industry is a by-product of smelting rocks that contain iron atoms mixed with atoms of other elements. Many tons of certain types of rock have to be processed to get a few tons of iron. Iron so to speak has to be baked to make it exist.
So, in past centuries when someone found large pieces of metal, they won the lottery. They didn’t know where it came from and they didn’t care either, all they knew was that they had free iron.
From the Egyptians who used it to make ornamental weapons for their pharaohs or to the Spanish conquistadors who organized expeditions in Argentina to exploit the meteorites that we now call Campo del Cielo, one of the largest, if not the largest meteor shower known to date. . Although that happened many thousands of years before when there were no witnesses to those falls.
In other words, buried out there, submerged in a swamp or exhibited in a museum without knowing it, there are a lot of kilos of iron from space that humans transformed into weapons or everyday objects. A sword, a gun, a dagger, a shovel, a hoe, a spoon…
In various parts of the world there is rusty and abandoned scrap metal, made from iron that once passed through our atmosphere from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.
Maybe there’s some old rusty hoe out there who, if he could talk, would say: “I was once part of the core of a planet that no longer exists and I came to this planet 50,000 years ago.”
