Abstract
How old are the craters on the Moon? We know that from about 4.6 billion years ago, when the Sun and planets were formed, until around 3.8 billion years ago, the young solar system was a tough neighborhood. Much of the original debris remained on the loose even after the planets and larger moons and asteroids had condensed out of the primordial ooze. The smaller chunks were many many times as numerous as they are today. But through collisions with the large bodies and with each other, they thinned out, and the last few billion years have been much quieter and less prone to catastrophic events. Most of the Moon’s surface as we see it today was already in place two or three billion years in the past.
I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.
Bhagavad Gita
Spoken by J. R. Oppenheimer upon the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Trinity, New Mexico
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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Upgren, A. (1998). Calamity!. In: Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6072-6_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6072-6_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-306-45790-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-6072-6
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