A quick lesson about Life The Universe and Everything

Long long ago far out in space something happened, either stars collided or there was a supernova explosion, from the debris of this event our Solar System was created. The main gas cloud condensed to become our Sun with the rocky remains becoming the inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Other gas clouds became the outer gas planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune with the left over rocks becoming Pluto and possibly other small planets and rock fields beyond.

The formation of the Earth was extremely violent and took place over many millions of years as gravity pulled huge rocks and chunks of iron together. At one time another smaller partly formed planet collided with the still young Earth, the remains of this collision became the Moon.

The Earth eventually began to cool but it had already became so large that the pressure within would keep the core molten. It is this molten core that has made the Earth as we know it by releasing the gasses that became the atmosphere and driving tectonic plate movements, volcano's and Earthquakes. The rotation of the Earth and the atmosphere combine to make the weather. All of these things come together to hide the violent birth of the Earth by eroding and covering the impact craters created by the continued bombardment of the planet. If you look up at the Moon you can see the evidence of this, it is easy to see it's crater covered surface. The Moon has no atmosphere or tectonic action so if an impact happens the resulting crater lasts forever unless it is covered by another impact.

One scientific theory is that the materials for life itself were brought to the Earth by some of the comets or meteors that impacted the planet.

One of the impacts that we know about took place approximately 65 million years ago. It hit the Earth in what is now the Gulf Of Mexico and was partly to blame for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

There are a few impact craters that are visible on the Earth and one of the best known and clearly visible is the Meteor Impact Crater in Arizona, USA. There is no tectonic activity nearby and the dry desert conditions cause very little erosion so although the iron/nickel meteor impact happened over 50,000 years ago it looks like it is still new.