Knowledge

Is everything made on Earth made up of things from Earth?

Nope! There’s actually a really good historical example of this. Before humans knew how to extract iron from iron ore (which occurred around 1,200 BCE) a few groups of people were already using iron tools. Look at this example of iron fastened to the end of a harpoon [1,2] :

How did they do this? King Tut was buried with an iron dagger even though no one knew how to smelt iron back when he was alive [3]:

So where did this iron come from? There’s no natural iron just sitting around on the ground waiting for people to use it. smelting iron from iron ore is immensely difficult. However, there’s a huge amount of iron in space!

These iron-rich meteorites would be found by ancient people and processed into useful tools. Nobody could heat a furnace to the required temperature to cast and forge iron, so these meteorites were “cold worked” (i.e. simply hammered into the required shape at room temperature). So there you go! Not everything made by humans is from stuff in the Earth’s crust.

Meteors fall on the planet with regularity, so a not insignificant portion of the planet is made up of stuff that originated “off world”. If you want a concrete example, I give you these:

Those pistols are a matched pair of 1911’s made entirely from a meteorite (with exception of the magazines and barrel). They’re selling for $4.5 million if you’re interested.

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