William sent in the link to a news story at MSN. It is also at https://phys.org/news/2026-03-meteor-falling-cleveland-states.html … who, in this instance, are quick off the draw. We are told a 7 ton meteor sped across the sky above Cleveland in Ohio on March 17th. It broke apart in a thunderouse boom – fairly high in the atmosphere. The same fireball was seen in other states, at 9.00am – from Wisconsin to Maryland. NASA later confirmed it was a meteor 6 feet in diameter. It was first seen over Lake Erie and went on to unload an energy of 250 tons of TNT when it broke apart. These things are dangerous if they explode in the lower atmosphere.
At https://phys.org/news/2026-03-ryugu-asteroid-samples-dna-ma.html … stepping up from a meteor to an asteroid we are back into Ryugu, and more information on the samples brought back from it by a Japanese mission. All the essential ingredients to make DNA and RNA, underpinning life on Earth, have been found in those samples. The discovery, on Bennu as well as Ryugu, demonstrates this process is common throughout the solar system and reinforces the hypothesis the building blocks of life could have arrived on Earth on meterors and asteroids. On the other hand, if those building blocks of life were abundant when the solar system formed, the Earth itself may have had its share of the relevant material for the origin of life. What is not determined is why life began – and what kicked it off? The building blocks themselves are not life – but only the ingredients that is required in order to become life. It is not necessary to construct another consensus view that will take years and years to dislodge. We don’t know. That is all any of this means.