ELP

Meteors,

Meteors, a subject science fiction loves to use. Meteors are something many people fear and dread, but if it weren’t for meteors earth wouldn’t exist.

But first lets put something straight, the difference between meteors, asteroids, and comets. Asteroids are small inactive bodies of rock, carbon or metal that orbits the sun. Comets are similar but made up of dirt and ices. It is quite hard to distinguish an asteroid from a comet. A meteoroid is a particle from a comet or asteroid, while a meteor is a meteoroid observed as it burns up in the earth’s atmosphere. Most meteors are the size of pebbles and usually burn up in earth’s atmosphere.

Meteors/asteroids contain everything needed to make a planet. In fact earth was once an asteroid, circling the sun. Back then it was what people would imagine Armageddon would be like. A hot piece of rock with lava everywhere, a place life like us couldn’t imagine to live in.

The best theory to why the moon was created was a large asteroid the size of mars smashed into the earth sending materials and gas everywhere. Soon this whole mess was pulled in by the earth’s gravitational pull and created the moon.

It has been theorized that water came to earth because of an asteroid of comet. The theory is that when the earth was created it was too volcanic and hot to have any water stay there. Any at the time would have been evaporated. They say that a comet (which consist of gas and ices while a asteroid consist of rock) collided with and brought water in earth’s later stage.

So even though we might dread universal collisions with earth, it is because of these collisions that earth and life exist today. 

As for avoidance goes, the main tactic most people know about is a deflection. But an actual deflection would take years of preparation. And by that I don’t mean we already started, preparation could only start when an asteroid is spotted.