by Stuart Atkinson
by Stuart Atkinson
ALL THAT GLITTERS…
Take a quick browse thru some - Maybe even most - of the online catalogues of the major meteorite dealers supporting this fine online publication, and chances are you'll soon come across an item of meteorite jewellery for sale. Gone are the days when meteorites were exiled to spotlit display cases or, worse, drawers; today, people who want their precious pieces of starstone to be rather more visible and decorative can wear meteorites shaped into pendants, lockets, brooches and even rings. Or, if you are the more practical type, you can open your letters with a blade shaped from a meteorite. Want a dagger with a meteorite blade? No problem.
But what new forms of jewellery will be available for the collector in the future? When Gibeon rings and Imilac brooches are so common they induce yawns raether than inspire gasps, what more exciting alternatives will be on offer on the ads pages of Meteorite Times?
Imagine it's the year 2061, and almost 200 million miles away from Earth, the colonists, settlers and scientists of the planet Mars are celebrating the return of Halley's Comet. What forms of meteorite jewellery will they be wearing?
Well, one thing's for sure - there'll be a LOT of meteorites available on Mars to make jewellery out of. With no appreciable atmosphere to slow their fall, and no forests, lakes or oceans to conceal them from view, the planet's dusty plains, ice fields and chasm floors must be generously strewn with them. So a meteorite jewellery maker will not go short of specimens to shape and mould into their own pendants, lockets and rings etc.
But surely there will be only one truly special meteorite that the people of Mars will want to own, in any form - terrestrial rock, Earth rock, blasted off the Homeworld in the distant past to fall on Mars as a shooting star. Sounds like science fiction? Well, no. There's a pretty good chance that, just as we find martian rocks here on Earth, future inhabitants of Mars will recover pieces of terrestrial rock from their planet's surface, possibly even pieces of rock ejected from the impact of the dinosaur-killing "KT Event" itself. It's not hard to believe that Earth rock will be the most in demand by martian jewellery collectors.
This Terrestrial Rock Jewellery - let's call it "T-Jewellery" for short - will no doubt take the form of pendants, brooches, rings and lockets, all the styles and forms we're familiar with, but that's missing the point. Wearing pieces of terrestrial rock on Mars will be a political statement. Think about it. If you're a citizen of Mars, and you're wearing a piece of Earth rock, you're saying that you're proud of your roots, your history and heritage; you're proud to be from - and wearing a piece of - Earth, the original Homeworld. By wearing that brooch, locket or pendant you're declaring that you're loyal to Earth and the past. (You're also declaring you're rich, because T-Jewellery will certainly not be cheap, but I'll leave the financial side of things to other commentators!)
But not all the people on Mars will want to wear T-rock, or want others to wear it. It's very possible, if not likely, that while Earth-born colonists and settlers will be proud to wear pieces of the Homeworld, their children, the native Martians - the first true Martians - will be much less keen. Rather than seeing it as rare and special, they May well see T-rock as irrelevant, just bits of stone from a distant world that means nothing to them, and is just a point of blue-green light in their sky at dusk or dawn. And that will be fair enough. They'll have been born on Mars after all, will have grown to love it in the same way that their parents loved Earth. Earth might not mean anything to them.
It's also possible that some martians might even be offended by Earth rock, and protest against it, and try to stop others wearing it. They May see Earth almost as an occupying force, a distant power meddling in Mars' affairs. When a Martian Independence movement springs up, as one inevitably will, T-Jewellery could be despised, and its owners treated in the same disapproving and contemptuous way fur wearers are today…
But there's a chance that the future population of Mars will be coveting another type of jewellery, made from another type of rock, a more localised one: Mars rock.
No, not just your common or Rock Garden rocks picked up off the dusty plains, I'm still talking about meteorites… Mars meteorites… specifically, pieces of Mars that were blasted-off the Red Planet, fell to Earth as SNC meteorites -
- and then were brought back to Mars again…
Surely these repatriated SNCs would be the ultimate meteorite collectibles on Mars. Such "Prodigal Sons" might be returned to Mars either as mere curiosities, or as a matter of personal or global pride (there might be a campaign by native martians to have all the SNC meteorites returned to Mars, just as the Greeks are campaigning now to get the famous Elgin Marbles returned from the British Museum..?) Either way it would be at great expense, as freight-to-Mars costs will probably still run into the tens of thousands of dollars per kilo by the time comet Halley swings around again. But the cost would be worth it. Imagine the prestige which would go with wearing a piece of Mars that had been away for tens of millions of years, and had travelled hundreds of millions of kilometres? What amazing stories would lie behind each one of the brooches, pendants and lockets studded with or carved out of a returned piece of SNC?
I don't think it's hard to imagine this scene on Mars in 2061: several groups of settlers and colonists are assembled outside their homes on the edge of the Chryse Plain, looking for all the world like dozens of white snowmen huddled together on the purple rock-strewn plains. They’re looking for the blurred smear of Halley's Comet in the twilight sky, and having little success. In one group a spacesuited woman is showing-off her latest gift from her husband - who is one of the crew on the first manned expedition to Europa, and as such will be away from home, from Mars, for almost 5 years. It's a small, oval pendant, brushed gold, and mounted in its centre is a small stone heart. But, she explains excitedly, it's not just any stone, it's a meteorite, a piece of rock blasted off Earth in the asteroid impact which exterminated the dinosaurs almost 70 million years before! Her friends ooh and aah admiringly, lifting the pendant up, studying it in the beams of their helmet-mounted torches… but off to one side her teenage daughter, born on Mars, looks on moodily, disapprovingly, muttering her contempt for the piece of stone hanging around her mother's neck. To her it means nothing, is nothing, just a piece of cold rock from a world which matters about as much to her as any of the countless stars in the sky. Probably less so. "My pendant came from there!" the teenager's mother suddenly exclaims, excitedly pointing over towards the western horizon where, just below and to the left of Halley's Comet, a bright spark of green-and-blue light has popped into view and is dancing and shimmering above the volcanoes. The teenager shrugs. " I didn't…" she says, and walks away…
And what of the far future..? What will the jewellery connoisseur of the 22nd century be wearing, when T-Jewellery has become old fashioned and commonplace?
Perhaps there will be a demand for pieces of Europan ice, little fragments of the crust of Jupiter's enigmatic moon? On its own the ice would be a great curiosity… but if there is life in the slushy ocean which scientists now seem confident lies beneath the icy surface of Europa, perhaps remains of it will be carried upwards on currents, and become frozen into the ice layer itself? If they do, then might future jewellery collectors wear pieces of alien-lifeform bearing Europan ice, just as today we wear pieces of amber with prehistoric insects and plants trapped inside…?
And talking about fossilised remains, how much would you pay for a piece of the asteroid which slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula, ending the reign of the Terrible Lizards 65 million years ago..?
Beyond Europa, other worlds May provide the jewellery collectors of the future with their most valuable pieces. Imagine a hollow, bulb-shaped pendant, filled with gases from Titan's atmosphere… a piece of the nucleus of Halley's Comet, preserved inside a diamond sphere… a chunk of methane ice recovered from Pluto's barren, light-starved surface… the possibilities are endless…!
But before then, before people have even walked on Mars' surface, never mind scoured it for meteorites to carve and sculpt and melt and mould into martian art-ares jewelry, Maybe the recent discovery of huge subsurface ice deposits on Mars will make SNC jewellery more desirable - and available. I hope so. Because when that historic first footprint is pressed into the martian duricrust I want to be wearing a piece of the Red Planet around my neck, look at it, and feel like I'm there too…
Stu
© Stuart Atkinson 2002
