Great forces compelled a plume molten rock from the mantle to rise, bursting through the crust and pouring onto the surface. Tumbling in a seething torrent of molten clinopyroxene were red hot crystals of peridot. As the river of lava flowed over the surface it lost heat to the atmosphere above it and to outer space beyond, cooling and freezing the forest green crystals into a matrix of a lighter shade.
There it sat for nearly half a billion years. The average human could re-live their entire life fifteen million times while the tendril of basalt waited under the blowing sand.
Some things are unlikely to happen on any given day. The chances that your planet will be hit by an extraterrestrial impactor kilometers in size are astronomically small today or at any time in your life. But if your life spanned 5 million centuries you would see that day arrive.
The moment the cosmic invader struck the ground its energy was transferred into the planet's crust.
The ground exploded and the rock was accelerated upward through the airless void of the comet's wake. In seconds it had reached a speed of Mach 15. In the span of each second it gained 5 thousand meters of altitude. Escape velocity. The speed at which what goes up must not come down.
The stone tumbled away from its homeworld until the brightly lit orb that had been its home for so long became a mere speck that faded into the black airless void, unprotected from the assault of chemisty-altering radiation from its star and from the explosive deaths of ones much more distant.
After a million years adrift And in another of those inevitable coincidences that are the hallmark of such passages of time an object drifted into the rock's billion kilometer orbit around the star at precisely the right time. It was a sphere of magnetized metal, encased in stone with a thin coating of liquid water and a wide diversity of complex carbon compounds adhering to its surface. The sphere was shrouded by a protective layer of gas and plasma. It was an alien planet, larger than the stone's homeworld.
The rock collided with the atmosphere. A basaltic diver in a hypersonic cannonball. The heat of its bow shock melted and ablated its sunbaked surface leaving a glowing wake of rock vapour along its path.
The force of the intense deceleration tore fragments from its surface as it plunged deeper into an atmosphere much denser than that of its home.The rock slowed dramatically to the relative crawling speed of a race-car. It was at this speed that it slammed into the barren surface of the rocky desert.
It remained there for only 140 thousand years while a promising form of life spread across the continents of this new world. A species with a thirst for knowledge and the skills to quench it would discover this nondescript green stone on the desert pavement of Southern Libya and solve the mystery of its origin.
This is a piece of that stone. Its name is Dar Al Gani 476 and it came from another world.
I told this stone's story because I plan to retrace its journey. After a million years apart I plan to bring this stone back to its homeworld and in the process to expand the frontiers of humanity, challenge my perceived limitations and take the whole world with me as I share the experiences of my long voyage.
Its homeworld is within our reach. It is The New World of our epoch.
With your support and a bit of luck I'll be going to Mars.
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