Good morning John.

Our planet crashes through on average around 50 tons of stuff a day. Space is pretty empty, but Earth is pretty big and it doesn't take much to create a visible shooting star. The little fleck of sky that you see winking down at you is probably no bigger than a grain of sand. That's almost everything we run into, little rocks that got flung off comets or remnants from collisions of various bodies in the solar system.

A thing that's hard to remember about the Earth is that it's rocky surface is mostly very young geologically speaking. Tectonic activity constantly eats up and replaces the surface of the planet so the average rock you might pick up outside probably will not be much older than 2 billion years old and there's a really good chance that it's younger than dinosaurs. But the little specks of dust and metal that we run into every day, nearly all of them, are older than the oldest rock on Earth. That's not precisely true though, because there are lots of rocks on Earth that are not from Earth-- they've recently fallen here. And the oldest particles on earth are embedded in a meteorite and those particles are over 7 billion years old. For context, that's about two billion years older than the Sun.

What percentage of those bits of dust that we run into every day are that old. I don't know. I don't think anyone does. We don't get to learn about them because they get zapped up by the atmosphere. We just get to watch them. Sometimes to find out about space we have to go to it, but in the form of shooting stars it can come to us. Indeed 0.2% of meteorites, those are meteoroids that actually land on earth, are from the Moon or Mars. When those bodies themselves get hit by big meteorites it throws out a bunch of dust and rocks that can eventually make their way all the way here. There are probably also bits of Venus and Mercury that have landed on Earth, but we've never found one. And yes, some of the shooting stars that we have run into are probably bits of Earth that were thrown up millions of years ago by massive collisions. In fact, Apollo 14 seems to have brought a rock back from the moon that is actually from Earth. It might, in fact, be the oldest Earth rock since it was flung there more than four billion years ago.

Anyway, I just wanted to look at some shooting stars today, just the little ones, the regular ones, not big fireballs or meteorites, not the newsworthy ones. Just tiny bits of ancient dust from comets or asteroids or planets zipping into the thin but dense blanket of our atmosphere, hitting it so hard and fast that they heat up until they and the gasses around them visibly glow and they're billions of years of existence becomes just another little beauty for us to be grateful for.

John, my author copies are in, physical copy with the actual words that are gonna be in the book in the book. They look really nice together as well, you can see this one is a little longer, it's not by design. It was just a lot of story to tell. It also just go it's first review from the library journal, they say, "Throughout this adventurous, witty and compelling novel, Green delivers sharp social commentary on the power of social media and both the benefits and horrendous consequences that follow when we give too much of ourselves to technology." It's fair.

I'm super excited and also pretty nervous, hence the watching shooting stars videos. Thank you by the way to Thomas Lindemann who let me use all of his footage that he takes of shooting stars. I'll Link to his channel in the description where there will also be information about the digital book tour we're doing and how to pre-order the book.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday