It was one summer afternoon when I found myself, quite by accident, in the American Museum of Natural History, standing before an unassuming chunk of rock with a captivating story. This was the Shergotty meteorite, a traveler from a different world – Mars. It was at once commonplace in its rocky demeanor, and yet otherworldly in its origins.
Even in this unlikely venue, the spirit of competition had found me, or perhaps it was I who had sought it out. For the Shergotty meteorite, too, had been a player in the grandest of races – the cosmic race – traversing the space between Mars and Earth.
What, indeed, was more fitting to the spirit of Gotham than this quiet contender, which had quietly outpaced every athlete, every racehorse, every boxer with whom I had ever tried to compete? It had completed a journey of a magnitude that no human could ever dream of matching, flung from a world 140 million miles away, making its silent voyage through the abyss of space, landing here, on our own humble Earth.
I felt an odd kinship with this Martian chunk. Here was the Shergotty meteorite, the outsider in our midst, born of a distant world and fallen to Earth.
I observed the crowd that surrounded me, mostly children eager to touch this piece of another world, their faces lit with awe and curiosity. The inherent explorer in each of us, eager to step into the unknown, to push the boundaries of our understanding, was mirrored in their wide-eyed excitement.
The meteorite itself was dark rough, testament to its journey across the cosmos. Its exterior was etched with scars from its fiery descent, a testament to its battle with Earth’s atmosphere. Behind the glass case, it seemed to hum with a sense of dormant energy, of stories untold.
In the quiet, cool recesses of the museum, I imagined the meteorite’s silent journey. A voyage that was at once destructive and transformative. How had it looked in the throes of its alien birth, ejected violently by some celestial cataclysm? How it must have endured the long, solitary journey through the harsh void of space?
It was a physical testament to a truth we all must confront – that change, sometimes violent, is a necessary part of any journey worth undertaking. The rock had been shaped and reshaped by its interplanetary voyage, much like a boxer being molded by the rigors of training and competition, or the ‘everyman’ athlete attempting to compete against the world’s best.
And yet, it was just a rock. Or was it? That’s what was so beguiling about it. To the uninformed, it was merely a piece of space debris. But to the keen eye, the eye trained in the language of geology, it was an unprecedented storyteller, a book penned in the alien hand of Martian geologic history, a tale of a planet entirely different than our own.
I stood before the Shergotty meteorite for a long time, contemplating these things. My time as an athlete in borrowed gear had trained me to appreciate the determination, the tenacity, the sheer audacity of the meteorite. It had braved the darkness of space to tell us a story. And it was our privilege, our responsibility, to listen. For this was not merely a stone, it was a testament to the boundless potential of the universe and our capacity, as explorers, to strive ever forward into the unknown.
WORDS: The Biology Guy.
IMAGE CREDIT: SCINQ.