Plasma physicist and nuclear weapons specialist John Brandenburg has an out-of-left-field theory about two gigantic hydrogen bomb-type nuclear explosions that supposedly took place on Mars within last hundred million years. He points to overabundance of radioisotope Xenon 129 that results from fission of heavy nuclei as evidence. Xenon 129 is a signature of nuclear explosions and exists in Earth's atmosphere because of the atmospheric nuclear testing and plutonium production that had gone on in the twentieth century. It is also made in supernova explosions as a result of intense neutron bombardment and is therefore embedded in asteroids and meteoroids within the Solar System. John Brandenburg claims that the only way the amount of Xenon 129 that is inferred from 1976 Viking Mars mission data and verified by mass spectrometer on Curiosity rover could have been produced in the distant past is by the way of nuclear explosions. No meteor showers could explain this because meteors contain both Xenon 129 and 132 in equal quantities and the amount of Xenon 129 contained within them is tiny and gets released only at very high temperatures. Mars has 2.5 times more Xenon 129 than Earth's atmosphere prior to 1937 (no nuclear production) and the meteorites. He points to two sites on the Red Planet where the hypothetical explosions took place: in the Northern plains in Mare Acidalium at approximately 50N, 30W, near Cydonia Mensa and in Utopia Planum at approximately 50N 120W near Galaxias Chaos.
He was a recent guest on The Space Show, where he reiterated his theory. It's a long podcast and nukes on Mars talk starts at 47 minutes into the show.
Here is a link to his paper and his website.
He also gave a presentation to a packed auditorium at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) 2016 about a different theory of his:
Mars in one Month: The GEM theory of Energy and Momentum Exchange With Spacetime and Forces Observed in the Eaglework Q-V Thruster
Wacky, but interesting, no?
Related Stories
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6966
The discovery of evidence for ancient sea-floor hydrothermal deposits on Mars identifies an area on the planet that may offer clues about the origin of life on Earth.
A recent international report examines observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of massive deposits in a basin on southern Mars. The authors interpret the data as evidence that these deposits were formed by heated water from a volcanically active part of the planet's crust entering the bottom of a large sea long ago.
"Even if we never find evidence that there's been life on Mars, this site can tell us about the type of environment where life may have begun on Earth," said Paul Niles of NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston. "Volcanic activity combined with standing water provided conditions that were likely similar to conditions that existed on Earth at about the same time -- when early life was evolving here."
Mars today has neither standing water nor volcanic activity. Researchers estimate an age of about 3.7 billion years for the Martian deposits attributed to seafloor hydrothermal activity. Undersea hydrothermal conditions on Earth at about that same time are a strong candidate for where and when life on Earth began. Earth still has such conditions, where many forms of life thrive on chemical energy extracted from rocks, without sunlight. But due to Earth's active crust, our planet holds little direct geological evidence preserved from the time when life began. The possibility of undersea hydrothermal activity inside icy moons such as Europa at Jupiter and Enceladus at Saturn feeds interest in them as destinations in the quest to find extraterrestrial life
Did they find any Xenon-129?
Also at BGR.
Ancient hydrothermal seafloor deposits in Eridania basin on Mars (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15978) (DX)
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:47PM (6 children)
No.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:07PM (5 children)
" John Brandenburg claims that the only way he knows of that the amount of Xenon 129 that is inferred from..."
FTFH.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @01:43AM (1 child)
What, no Illudium PU-36?
(Score: 2) by rylyeh on Wednesday October 11 2017, @07:36AM
"It's been stolen!"
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 1) by pdfernhout on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:10AM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor [wikipedia.org]
"[Example on Earth:] The natural nuclear reactor formed when a uranium-rich mineral deposit became inundated with groundwater that acted as a neutron moderator, and a nuclear chain reaction took place. The heat generated from the nuclear fission caused the groundwater to boil away, which slowed or stopped the reaction. After cooling of the mineral deposit, the water returned and the reaction restarted, completing a full cycle every 3 hours. The fission reaction cycles continued for hundreds of thousands of years and ended when the ever decreasing fissile materials no longer could sustain a chain reaction.
Fission of uranium normally produces five known isotopes of the fission-product gas xenon; all five have been found trapped in the remnants of the natural reactor, in varying concentrations. The concentrations of xenon isotopes, found trapped in mineral formations 2 billion years later, make it possible to calculate the specific time intervals of reactor operation: approximately 30 minutes of criticality followed by 2 hours and 30 minutes of cooling down to complete a 3-hour cycle.[6] A key factor that made the reaction possible was that, at the time the reactor went critical 1.7 billion years ago, the fissile isotope 235 U made up about 3.1% of the natural uranium, which is comparable to the amount used in some of today's reactors. (The remaining 96.9% was non-fissile 238 U.) Because 235 U has a shorter half-life than 238 U, and thus decays more rapidly, the current abundance of 235 U in natural uranium is about 0.70–0.72%. A natural nuclear reactor is therefore no longer possible on Earth without heavy water or graphite.[7]"
Some have even suggested: "Published in 2010, a controversial hypothesis about the origin of the Moon proposes that the Moon may have been formed from the explosion of a georeactor located along the core-mantle boundary at the equatorial plane of the then-rapidly rotating Earth, 4.5 billion years ago.[12][13]"
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2) by rylyeh on Wednesday October 11 2017, @07:40AM
This sounds like the logical explanation.
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:25PM
Yeah, but this dude is claiming a tightly packed hydrogen shell around the naturally occurring uranium deposit... one is unlikely, two is unlikely squared.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by jimtheowl on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:53PM (12 children)
1) "The new images of the Face at Cydonia Mensa confirm eyes, nose, mouth, helmet structure with additional detail of nostrils and helmet ornaments being clearly seen in new images with details at appr oximately 1/10 scale of the face."
- I see no such confirmation, but more importantly, there is no reference provided regarding where this "confirmation" supposedly comes from. In fact, the list of reference provided at the end of the paper is unindexed.
2) "New imagery confirms the pyramid structure seen in Vikingimages of the the D&M pyramid and new high resolution images show evidence of collapsed brickwork."
- The D&M pyramid does look interesting, but again, there is no provided evidence for “collapsed brickwork” or anything else.
I thus quit reading at that point. If someone has the time to dig through the bullshit to find if there is something solid to look at, feel free to point it out.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:58PM
I'd rather see stories found by bots than ACs'
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:03PM (8 children)
Classic disinfo technique.
Someone gonna notice this in the public data sooner or later, we are willing to pay money to have it to be later, therefore pay a guy a lot of money to link it to something utterly unrelated yet ridiculous like the earth being flat.
The conclusion mutters some stuff about entrenched opinions and there is a lot of truth to that. If a mars rover ran over a lichen that slowly visibly grew back, we would have to wait for all the present scientists to die off and be replaced until the result would be accepted.
The paper is highly detailed. Something "nuclear fission" happened on Mars. The sci fi occams razor seems to be self destructing civilization thermonuclear war, but I'd propose nuclear powered space alien (space probe? or "manned"?) visitation. And knowing the neighbors would flip their shit when they discover it a couple million years later, there's probably an interesting time capsule buried at ground zero. Which was already a 1960s novel /movie plot, but it just seems so reasonable...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:19PM (3 children)
Yes, I like VLm's theory much better, because it has less details, and so is easier to swallow. And VLM is much more sane than this guy, even if he's a little bit Nazi.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:38PM (2 children)
a little? Who exactly do you think is to the right of me? Although politics doesn't really matter in the context of physics, tech, conspiracy theory, historical examples of weaponized conspiracy theory, etc. Aside from the lefties endlessly think the nazis though the earth was hollow and Antarctica would make a great "conquer the world base" although I don't understand the point of going to Antarctica is you have a perfectly good base in Germany.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:35PM
You mean the loonies, left / right doesn't matter. I'm getting tired of the constant political barrage as a casual thing here.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Wednesday October 11 2017, @10:04PM
The reason has something to do with a pyramid, which indicates a lost civilization, which implies technological secrets, which lead to power. Do your research.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 11 2017, @11:56AM (3 children)
The same scientists who would immediately publicize any evidence of life on Mars to justify their lives' work? Nonsense.
Occam's razor would be that we simply don't know why the alleged xenon isotope imbalance has occurred rather than conclude that it's aliens.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 11 2017, @02:29PM (2 children)
There's quite a lot of isotopic evidence, not just one Xenon isotope, that seems to fit one way we know of, to generate exactly that peculiar signature, but it requires at least an industrial era civilization to produce at great effort, and unless the biologists and geologists have gotten it horribly wrong we were not here to do it, so somebody else did it ... I mean I'm just saying "magic" and "miracle" is possible but its fascinating that the least unlikely, least unrealistic cause is aliens setting off bombs.
Its an interesting "active SETI" idea for a paranoid space faring culture to plant something artificial but noticeable along the lines of "you must be this tall to go on this carnival ride" and then see what the young species does in response. If they produce a Klingon conquering fleet of space battleships, however pitifully crude babys first 1.0 spacecraft, then the paranoid old civilization can nuke em from orbit just to be sure because thats a species thats gonna be a PITA.
If we're being observed its probably a good idea to act in a reasonably sane manner when provided with a really weird artifact like this.
Another novel interpretation is a fraction of billion years ago some neighbor thought it would be intimidating to us, and perhaps anyone else, to observe the nuking of a distant planet, to keep someone (us?) in their place. Kinda like how the USA nuked a bunch of pacific islands, not because we thought badly of the islanders, we didn't really think of them at all, it was more of a demonstration for others far away and for all time of what we can do when we feel the need. "Now I'm not saying you can't send infectious interstellar nanobots to our planet, because clearly you can and have, but before you send the next wave, turn your telescopes to the uninhabited fourth planet in the Sol solar system, jus sayin..."
Or a sci fi book plot thats a bit over done is you transmit a SETI signal hundreds of millions of years ago "Yo for a good time make a plutonium sphere 100 Kg mass its perfectly safe and a good time but wait theres more for this limited time SETI offer, if you order and build it today, it also provides eternal life, infinite gold, bitcoins, and lots of light" and that's one way to test gullibility or something like that. I'm just saying if there's space aliens then there's probably Ferengi, probably more of them than Klingons, and getting blown up is probably morally and ethically better than getting economically screwed by the Ferengi.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 12 2017, @02:13PM (1 child)
I disagree. There's a lot of spin here on the current isotope evidence, but I strongly disagree that it fits in "one way".
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 13 2017, @12:17PM
Well, what is there? fission byproducts (appears to be no negative info so far), random chance (appears unlikely, but possible), creationism as a test of (which groups?) faith, and the ever popular "unknown".
Another interesting sci fi book plot... benevolent aliens know there's a a rough patch that industrial civs go thru when they invent nuclear weapons but before they have robust multi planetary solar system scale civilizations where they can get wiped out, so policy is any planet with life more advanced than algae gets a lifeless neighbor planet nuked the crap out of so the young civilization can get scared straight by paranoia about world wide nuclear war, which would hurt a bit until you get multiple planets at which time people can avoid diversity which causes wars by simply moving to planets too far away from each other to fight. OR they're anti-benevolent aliens and they observe this strategy usually backfires. Hmm. Either would make an interesting book.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:15PM
And, there is no mention of the canals, or of John Carter! What kind of scientists are they letting into the academic journals these days? Oh, he wasn't? Presentation? His own web site? Did he take into account the Electric Universe Theory? Well, at least it is not an aristarchus submission.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:27PM
Loved the NdGT recap of an early astronomer's publication accurately charting the Newtonian movement of the planets, followed up by an in-depth line of deductive reasoning that led to the widespread cultivation of hemp on Jupiter....
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:55PM (1 child)
Citation needed.
If anything the quantities of each found on our meager detection efforts on mars suggest that our exhaustive (cough) clean-room measurements (cough) of meteors is a total failure.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:30PM
What would statistical sampling practice say about the completeness of our knowledge of what meteors can, and cannot contain?
I mean, we've recovered about 0.00000000001% of the available material out there, that's pretty good, in statistical terms, right?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:28PM (1 child)
Back in 2014 [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:22PM
Wow our site has come so far, that now it even has the main features of the old site, such as stories which dupe themselves into the past!
(Score: 4, Funny) by gawdonblue on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:32PM
It's time for UN sanctions.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:45PM (1 child)
Next you'll hear that it was North Korean missiles travelling back in time.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:40PM
I miss the old cold war days when it was them commie Russians.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:47PM (10 children)
He is (or was, at least) a plasma physicist, and he is a really sharp person. He is also one of the originators for the Face On Mars. I can truly say he is a firm believer in ancient martian civilizations. He has always been investigating the research fringes: anti-gravity, "free" energy, etc., so it doesn't surprise me that he's looking into the basis for the em-drive (his GEM theory goes back to at least the early 2000's).
If you have a science background, go back and look at that 2014 paper posted by the AC. The first half of the paper is very solid, based upon observation and physics backing. He makes a very solid argument that some kind of thermonuclear reaction happened on Mars. Unfortunately, instead of going into the potential causes for those reactions, the paper makes a right turn and takes the leap of faith that it is the result of a thermonuclear war, which psychologically is reinforced by his 40-year belief in the evidence of ancient civilizations.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:04PM (1 child)
I speak to the aliens too and have detonated nukes on Titan, Phobos and Callisto. Unfortunately I'm not very sharp and can't claim to be a Physicist :-( But I keep trying.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Wednesday October 11 2017, @10:11PM
Of course you have, but have you ever seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it...felt it!
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:37PM (6 children)
No. He doesn't.
His ONLY basis for saying so is that meteors have a different composition of isotopes. Like anyone has actually sampled that in the wilds of free floating space over the fullness of time!!!
He writes just enough that seems plausible to seduce the inskeptical mind. There's one of those born every minute.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:33PM
I just love it when we have Fine Articles that allow me to be in complete and harmonious agreement with frojack.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:30PM (4 children)
No. You are wrong. And you seem to be very confident of your wrong-ness.
His ONLY basis is not based upon meteors. I only skimmed his paper, and the very first paragraph in his "Evidence for Large Thermonuclear Explosions in Mars Past" is quoting in situ measurements by the Curiosity rover. And I know that isn't sufficient to convince you (because you apparently feel that not only are clean rooms not clean, but they somehow selectively permit noble gases that aren't in high abundance on Earth to dirty up quadropole mass spectrometers (because, you know, those argon and xenon molecules just stick to everything!)), but that paper also compares its results to Viking data as well as gamma ray spectrometer measurements from the Mars Odyssey orbits.
The paper with the measurements argue that the abundance of radiogenic argon to non-radiogenic argon is evidence "for significant loss of the primordial martian atmosphere early in the planet’s history, followed by partial degassing of Ar". Brandenburg argues that you also see these kind of mixing ratios for argon as well as xenon following fast-reacting nuclear events. You may not like his conclusions, but they look pretty scientific to me. They are just as compelling as "this must mean that the atmosphere selectively lost non-radiogenic isotopes to radiogenic".
He runs with his conclusion to a whole different level, but that is an entirely different argument.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Wednesday October 11 2017, @11:16AM
Frojack being put into his place by an AC is interesting:)
But you are right of course. There is a lot of evidence, certainly frojack did not a good job of addressing his argument.
To me, it looks suggestive, and even although the theory sounds wacky, we do need an explanation for the isotope distribution mentioned. However, although I regularly work with (lighter) isotopes, I am no geologist and cannot judge his theory in the background of what we know about isotope distributions on earth and other planets.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:42PM (2 children)
Back at you, let's look at the "evidence".
Mars is not an asteroid. It tells us nothing about the isotope distribution on the asteroids that impacted Mars.
So we have here an alternate explanation that doesn't involve "nuclear events". I'll note that excess xenon 129 can also come [sciencedirect.com] from the solar wind.
Also, how much xenon 129 are we speaking of? Even by assuming the lowest amounts, I still get tens of thousands of tons of it. That's a pretty big bang to produce that much (you would be converting a similar amount of mass to energy in the process), and way larger than anyone would need to sterilize the planet. Ten thousand tons converted to energy is somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion megatons of TNT in energy release - about ten times larger than the estimated energy release of the asteroid that is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 11 2017, @02:48PM (1 child)
Hard sci fi book plot (I love those things):
Aliens find it easy to generate antimatter using fission reactors in a gravity field. Perhaps an uninhabited planet. Because its easier to work in unpolluted location, than at the bottom of a sewer, they store all their fission waste for centuries, millennia maybe, in two waste storage facilities. The energy cost of launching antimatter is not ridiculous. Especially if you do the space elevator thing or some kind of mass driver launcher.
All goes well until the terrorists blow up both waste storage plants releasing tens of thousands of tons of Xenon and all kinds of crap. Just two little thermonuclear bombs smuggled into the radioactive waste facility with synchronized timers. I mean, its not like they can ban the incoming flow of radioactive material (like a miniaturized h-bomb) if the point of the facility is planetary scale fission waste repository.
Afterwards all the usual space opera stuff settles down and the aliens are like "F this solar system" and they take their ball and go home leaving nothing but an uninhabited industrial wasteland.
Its an interesting, plausible idea. Gravity is kinda handy for all kinds of engineering processes. Maybe its a species that can't live permanently multi-generationally in zero-gee (maybe humans are the same way... jury is still out). Fission is 24x7 and can be made inherently safe, or lets face it, its not the alien's planet and Mars is uninhabited (probably), so maybe its more convenient. Maybe anti-matter generation is an inherent power density issue, like the transmission cables to carry the power are the true limiter. I mean, take the gloves off, no Fs to give, whats the system-wide maximal power density of a "spare no expense or risk" complete fission plant? vs solar which will never get much above kilowatts per sq meter. Maybe if you're like screw the budget and screw ALAR radioactive safety, you could get gigawatts per sq meter out of a plant and maybe antimatter generation requires that kind of power density. Or manufacturing portable homemade black holes or WTF they thought would be fun and requires a high power density to operate. Maybe fusion reactors "just don't work". Or the aliens were too dumb, kinda like we've been so far, or maybe the "so far" is 100K years of industrial civ and they just abandoned their legacy fission plant planet once they got fusion.
Or maybe they just all died, or their civilization contracted and pulled back and never returned to the ruins which eventually leaked all over. Sure a nuclear waste repo that lasts 50Myrs is good, but if they built it 150Myrs ago and it puked its guts out 100Myrs ago, it looks like there was a massive attack 100Myrs ago, even though its just a landfill explosion of several Myrs of accumulated power plant trash. Imagine how awful the mess would have been if the repo failed in only 42Kyrs instead of lasting 50Myrs, I'm not claiming it was inadequately engineered...
Maybe there's a third waste repo that hasn't failed yet and hopefully some dumb excited scientist astronaut doesn't find it and accidentally set it off. Or some Bond movie villain wants to set it off unless he gets 10 million bitcoins ransom, after which he sets it off anyway because 007 is after all, fictional, and madmen are often jerks.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 11 2017, @02:50PM
I would further theorize on the above hard sci fi book plot, if someone would mass spectrometer the asteroid belt, they'd be like "Holy F we've been robbed of our U-235 that should be there" Its just a guess. Would make a hell of a book plot.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:50PM
Since reading the abstract I've been racking my mind as to natural causes of nuclear explosions. Even if he is correct in the premise that the isotopes are of nuclear origin, the ancient nuclear war is complete speculation. What jumps to mind is natural fission occurring on Earth, however I am not savvy enough to say if the same isotopes are generated or if this type of reactor could exist on Mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:01PM (4 children)
but children know nothing. if they knew "something" they would not go to school.
thus the idea that earth (the better place to live was a refuge?) after the "mars disaster"
would kinda mean that, even during all the technological self-destructing feat
of the ancestral-martians, some pre-human-exodus martians were in a place of power
(on mars) to allow/enable the exodus to earth (from which we can now view the supposedly
disaster).
since children know nothing, it would mean that, against all darwinian theory, we "somehow"
do transmit information to our off-spring, thus negating all forms of education.
who the Fuck would teach then?
thus we can safely assume that the thoery that this isotope increase was perpetuated
by sentient beiings residing on earth is plain brain-washing by a system of education.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:28PM (1 child)
Hipster.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:42PM
> The only word you capitalized is "Fuck"
It's he only one that matters
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:08PM (1 child)
What? Nobody is claiming Earthlings had anything to do with Mars irradiation.
WTF? Where's the "-1 Batshit Insane" mod?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:07AM
Come, now, Rumbabutter, if we were to start down that path, where would it end? That's right, with nuclear explosions on Mars. Let it go, JitterbugOleo.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:08PM (1 child)
Marvin got all confused due to that cwazy wabbit and accidentally set off his Pu/Q-36 ESM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:30PM
No, it was the moon nazis testing their weapons.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:33PM
It was Reapers wiping out the Protheans 50K years ago.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 10 2017, @09:17PM
xenon-129 is stable, not radioactive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @11:11PM (1 child)
was posted in back in april: http://lifeonmars.pub/articles/space-show-response/ [lifeonmars.pub]
imo, science can't be ruled out for lack of an independent imagination
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday October 10 2017, @11:31PM
Well, it's the kind of thing that needs an explanation, but that doesn't mean that *his* explanation is the right one. It's sort of like the LGM theory of pulsars, or attributing Tabby's star light fluctuations to a Dyson Sphere being build. The evidence is real, but the explanation is dubious.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @11:35AM
Check http://podcast.sjrdesign.net/shownotes_086.php [sjrdesign.net] podcast; good summary of the problem
1) Xe129 is made by supernovae, but not nuclear explosions (where is data to confirm that is produced by nukes, anyway?)
2) Brandenburg doesn't claim that Xe129 is radiogenic, is he? Meaning produced by radioactive decay, like Iodine 129
3) Xe129 is produced by decay of I129, I129 is a signature of nuke explosions, so Xe129 is evidence of explosions? But Brandenburg specifically mentions Xe129 and says it is made by hydrogen bomb explosions, which are like supernovae explosions
4) Some stony meteorites have 4.5-9.6x ratio of Xe129 to Xe132, higher than 2.5x that Brandenburg is claiming for Mars
5) I129 from Mars mantle converted into Xe129, while Mars atmosphere was blown away by impacts, etc.
6) Mars possibly started with an atmospheric composition similar to solar wind with Pu244 and Xe136, which somehow models to higher ratios?
7) Why are potassium and thorium important in respect to Mars nuke explosions?