For a long time, the origins of these strange stones remained a mystery. Some people, unwilling for scientific or theological reasons to believe that fragments of the universe could be dislodged and fall down, insisted that meteorites came from the earth. (Those skeptics included Thomas Jefferson, who once argued that, although it might be hard to explain how else a meteorite landed in Connecticut, it would be considerably harder “to explain how it got into the clouds from whence it was supposed to have fallen.”) Others believed that meteorites came from space but disagreed about exactly which part. Only in the twentieth century did the mystery resolve itself. We now know that while some meteorites come from the moon or Mars and a few probably come from comets, the vast majority of them—on the order of 99.8 percent—originate over a hundred million miles away, in the asteroid belt: a kind of vast circumstellar junkyard, filled with the shattered remains of protoplanets that formed some four and a half billion years ago, in the infancy of our solar system.
Every once in a while, one of those bits of debris gets nudged out of its orbit, typically by a collision with another asteroid or by the gravitational influence of Mars or Jupiter, and begins heading toward the earth. For seven hundred, a thousand, two thousand years, it carries onward in its strange new course, loosed from order, a wild streak in the cosmic tidiness. Once it enters our atmosphere, at speeds of up to a hundred and sixty thousand miles per hour, its surface begins to vaporize from friction, leaving a trail of incandescent gas streaming behind it—the shooting part of a shooting star. By the time it has reached the lower atmosphere, much of its original mass has burned away and the fireball has extinguished itself, turning a previously flamboyant object into a plain dark rock plunging toward earth. Unless it is enormous, it will not set anything ablaze when it lands, or, for that matter, bear any obvious signs of its fiery journey. So efficiently does its surface melt away in transit that its core typically remains as cold as outer space. As a result, if you ever happen to be near a meteorite when it falls, you can pick it up right away without fear of being burned.
But that is advice you will almost certainly never need. To say that Billy was lucky to find what he did is to understate the matter dramatically: a meteorite falls on any given square mile of the earth roughly once every twenty thousand years. In all likelihood, the last time one landed anywhere near where his did, the cornfields he knew were roamed by mastodons.
That seems like a lesson in the rarity of falling stars, but it is really a lesson in the immensity of our planet. Some forty-two thousand meteorites strike the earth every year (more, if you count those that weigh under ten grams), but virtually all of them land undetected, somewhere on the ninety-seven percent of it that is either covered by water or sparsely populated. Scarcely more than a hundredth of one percent—perhaps five or six per year—are observed while falling and promptly recovered. The odds of finding one that way, as Billy did, hover around one in a billion.
It would be a shame, then, to lose it again: I will have more to say later about what became of that meteorite, and what became of the boy who found it. But in the meantime, it is worth saying a thing or two about how he found it, and about that problem more generally—about how, given the immensity of the earth and our own comparative tininess, any of us ever find anything.
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Broadly speaking, there are two ways to find something: by looking or by luck. Sometimes our discoveries happen so purely by chance that it almost seems as if they found us, careening out of nowhere into our lives. Thus have people stumbled on tyrannosaurus bones in southern Alberta, a lost Caravaggio painting in a French farmhouse, a first edition of Leaves of Grass in the gardening section of a used bookstore. Other times, we find things because we deliberately went looking for them, searching square foot by square foot the fields of the world. The ruins of Troy, the polio vaccine, our distant relatives in rural Estonia: such things aren’t found without serious and ongoing effort.
These two means of finding—by searching or by serendipity—are not mutually exclusive. Only by great good fortune did Billy happen to be present when a meteorite plummeted to earth; only by spending hours walking the land was he able to find it. That experience is representative of many discoveries. Although it sounds paradoxical, we must often search extensively for something we first came upon by chance. In 1974, for instance, several farmers digging a well in the Chinese province of Shaanxi accidentally unearthed something remarkable: fragments of a clay sculpture that had been buried more than two thousand years earlier, as part of the funeral rites for the first emperor of China. That turned out to be one of archaeology’s all-time greatest finds, but it has taken half a century and entire generations of scholars and workers to unearth even a fraction of all the rest: the roughly eight thousand life-size soldiers, horses, chariots, and other figures that together make up the Terra-Cotta Army.
As a practical matter, then, looking and luck often operate in tandem. Psychologically, however, they could scarcely be more different. Finding something that we labored to locate makes us feel that the world is at least partly subject to our will: that we can exert ourselves to discover something, and that the discovery itself is a warranted reward for our work. By contrast, finding something by chance makes us feel that we are subject to the will of the world. Much as inexplicable losses make us invoke things like goblins and wormholes, unexpected finds make us invoke things like fate, karma, destiny, and God. Curiously, we are most drawn to explanations like these when our discovery is particularly astonishing; it is a strange feature of how our minds work that the more wildly improbable some welcome development is, the more it feels like it was meant to be. Confronted by a surprising find, we also feel ourselves confronted by the governing forces of the universe.
As grand as that claim sounds, you have probably felt this way about your own lucky finds; in my experience, it is almost impossible not to. Many years ago, for instance, at a time when I was living and working in Costa Rica, a friend came to visit and spent a week hiking with me in the Osa Peninsula, a spectacularly wild region of jungles and beaches and mangrove swamps in the southwestern part of the country. On our first day, the trail led us across a wide brown river and through a stretch of tangled forest until we emerged abruptly onto the coastline. It was low tide, and the ocean had retreated to reveal an uncanny landscape of huge stone slabs, roughly rectangular and seamed in between by narrow channels of white sand. We took off our backpacks and left them on the beach and walked out far enough to lie down next to each other, each on a giant stone of our own. We lay there talking for an hour or so, until it began to rain, the drops startling our faces and making dark little cartoon ka-pow!s on the stones. When we stood up, a sheer curtain of storm was headed toward us across the ocean, and so we retrieved our backpacks and hiked onward, and only much later, after the weather had cleared and we found ourselves on another beach, did my friend realize that while we were lying there talking, she had taken off her sunglasses and set them down beside her on the rock, which is where they had remained when we’d made our hurried departure in the rain.