Cold welding is frickin' weird.
Richard Feynman wrote (or said in a lecture - I'm not sure which), "when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to 'know' that they are in different pieces of copper. When there are other atoms, in the oxides and greases and more complicated thin layers of contaminants in between, the atoms 'know' when they are not on the same part."
But two metallic pieces that don't have those thin layers between them - primarily because they've been in space and rubbing against each other - can spontaneously weld together to become a single piece of metal.
It's possible to get that to happen on Earth, but it's not easy because of all the pesky oxygen we have around us all the time.
Metals are way weirder at the quantum level than we think they are, man.
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