Ancient nuclear detonation on Mars?

reply to post by watchitburn


Radiation emanates from single points of many planets where life could not exist.

I think you're taking this to a fanciful level a bit a head of the data.

Originally posted by watchitburn
reply to post by projectvxn

 

Absolutely,
I am not doubting that a nuclear explosion occurred. I just find it hard to believe it happened naturally.

Why? There is plenty of physical evidence that nuclear explosions and explosions of nuclear proportions happen all the time in nature.

Maybe not so much anymore in a relatively cooled down solar system, but certainly in the past, and very possibly as little as a few hundred million years ago.

It would explain how rocks from Mars got here:
Rocks from mars

reply to post by projectvxn


Fair enough, and you may be right.

I just wish there was more information available to explain how a nuclear detonation of that size happens by it's self.

reply to post by watchitburn


High pressures far below the surface within a pocket of uranium in fission would do it..All you need is a "bullet"...In this case, and iridium rich asteroid would be a great bullet..

Same principle applies to fission weapons here on earth. A bullet sphere is fired between two other fissionable half spheres creating a rapid chain reaction.

A natural version of this with enough material could create an explosion in the millions of megatons.

A meteor or comet would explain it better I think.

Yeah, I could see a meteor impacting a uranium deposit, It problably wouldn't even have to be a large meteor that way.

reply to post by projectvxn


Those types of devices are extremely inefficient though, and would require an absurd amount of fissile material to produce a yield that large.

reply to post by watchitburn


Not by itself.


Certainly an asteroid or comet hitting an already hot and under pressure uranium deposit(with the molten rock and earth acting as the "yellow cake") could create the compression necessary to detonate the uranium deposit and BOOM. Biggest light show since the sun.

reply to post by watchitburn


True those are very crude devices. But this is a natural phenomenon we're talking about here. A natural explosive fission reaction. That deposit could have been immense and likely was. There could have been enough there to fill the volume of Olympus Mons.

Doesn't get much more 'crude' than that.

If you're gonna bring up the Death Star as "the only thing you can think of to produce this sort of energy", you should also consider a Warp Core breach.

Or alternatively, base your theories in reality.

I think ancient alien thermonuclear war sounds more fun though.

Despite how unlikely it might be.

reply to post by watchitburn


Me too...Reality sucks some times...

But I think the truth, at least in this case, is just as interesting.

reply to post by babybunnies


Yeah, I was thinking of the Tsar Bomba and how rediculous that thing was at 1/2 yield. Untill I saw the comparison to the 1 mile wide meteor impact.

And I dont know what a "Warp Core" is, also star wars was on yesterday and it popped in my head.

There is the asteroid belt, "near" Mars. Whatever wiped the planet that was there must have sent many big chunks in direction of Mars, creating that 1 million megatons explosion, and depositing that big splat, as seen in the upper right of the planet as seen here?
nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

Look at he many little white craters shape, and direction, on the black "burned" floor.

The article is full of 'what ifs' garbage, Mars isn't 'red' because of a supposed nuclear detonation, it's red from the minerals covering the surface that have been there shortly after Mars cooled because it doesn't have the mass to have maintained an electromagnetic field like earth has, so it's being blasted for billions of years by the sun's harmful radiation with no protection.

From the article;

Still, Beaty expressed doubts, saying the geological conditions on this planet and Mars have existed for millennia -- what exists has existed for a long time, and there are few sudden changes. “Rocks are what they are. [A natural nuclear reaction] could happen in another billion years, but it is not something to make you want to go home to your family and move to the mountains right away,” he said.
Dr. Lars Borg, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, called Brandenburg’s conclusions unsurprising -- and part of known geological processes, not a nuclear reaction.
"We've looked at Martian meteorites for 15 years, and looked in detail at the isotopic measurements .. and not a single person out of hundreds worrying about this have thought there could have been a nuclear explosion on Mars," he told FoxNews.com.

Unstable uranium isotopes are found naturally on the earth, and about 50 times more plentiful largely in India and the USA are deposits of Thorium as well, which begs the question of why we aren't using the more controllable and more power potential thorium in our nuclear power plants instead of uranium and more dangerous plutonium is beyond me.

I think mars was once a planet like earth, with civilisation that came under attack by civilisations from other planets, this is what lead to it being totally uninhabitable, hence the thousands of craters, probably impact craters from weapons, some humans escaped to what we now call Earth and started re-colonisation, this is also around the same time when religions got created such as the bible to give people strength and hope to carry on, this is why you see shapes of UFO's in ancient egyption drawings because these were some of the first people to inhabit earth, our existance and history is shrouded in mystery.

Unfortunately though a lot of people are very close minded and are unable to think outside the box, and can only resort to that fact we were created and not that we came from other places, i understand this is hard for people to understand... but like an old quote says...

Imagination is more important than knowledge...
Albert Einstein

reply to post by Itop1


Have you seen Hoagland's work about Mars? The most intriguing parts of his work is the shows and comic books that he found, made in the 50s and that can be linked to things seen and detected about Mars and space stuff.
The show and comics proposed something in the lines you propose.

reply to post by Illustronic

Unstable uranium isotopes are found naturally on the earth, and about 50 times more plentiful largely in India and the USA are deposits of Thorium as well, which begs the question of why we aren't using the more controllable and more power potential thorium in our nuclear power plants instead of uranium and more dangerous plutonium is beyond me.

That is a damn good point.

Maybe there is someone on ATS who works in a nuclear plant that can give an answer.

Nuclear expolsians occur naturaly. A large meteorite hitting the earth would cause a thermo-nuclear exposion.The tungusta event was a thermo-nuclear explosion.The Impact of a large body hitting a planet and the pressure and heat involved would cause atoms in rock and debris in the impact area to reach critical mass and break apart.The reacation wouldnt even have to be started by Uranium or a fissile material either,under those conditions any atoms would split.
i suspect the same would be true for the event u describe.Nothing unusual there.

Originally posted by Illustronic
The article is full of 'what ifs' garbage, Mars isn't 'red' because of a supposed nuclear detonation, it's red from the minerals covering the surface that have been there shortly after Mars cooled because it doesn't have the mass to have maintained an electromagnetic field like earth has, so it's being blasted for billions of years by the sun's harmful radiation with no protection.

From the article;

Dr. Lars Borg, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, called Brandenburg’s conclusions unsurprising -- and part of known geological processes, not a nuclear reaction.
"We've looked at Martian meteorites for 15 years, and looked in detail at the isotopic measurements .. and not a single person out of hundreds worrying about this have thought there could have been a nuclear explosion on Mars," he told FoxNews.com.

Thanks for pointing out the garbage in the article, it's pretty bad, like the reason why Mars is red, as you said.

The quote you cited also refutes the OP's statement:

Originally posted by watchitburn
So they are saying this detonation was equivalent to 1 Million Megaton yield device.

What are your thoughts?

You need to read more carefully, "they" aren't saying that, "they" are calling BS, it's only one guy saying this and nobody else agrees with him. Didn't you catch the "not a single person out of hundreds worrying about this have thought there could have been a nuclear explosion on Mars" in the story? It seems as though you missed that key point.

reply to post by pcrobotwolf


I seriously doubt that it would shift its orbit that much. Very comets/Asteroids pack more of a punch than that and don't shift the orbits of planets by that much at all. Do you know how much mass these planets have? Alot more than the tiny specks smashing into them. Yes the Surface of the planet will be devastated by a large impact of an object several km's in size but the planet itself is fine.

Unless we bring into the matter a planet the size of mars hitting earth which they believe how the moon was formed and possibly the asteroid belt too. ?