Was There a Natural Nuclear Blast on Mars?

Originally posted by whatukno
Oh no, can't be a naturally occurring nuclear reaction anywhere in the universe. Oh no, can't possibly happen!

You don't have enough gravity on Mars to sustain and confine a fusion reaction like you can with a star.

Doesn't work that way. Besides, the article explicitly describes what would only be the residuals from a fission reaction anyway, and in uranium at that. Maybe the Ur7** had a nice uranium engine hood.

reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan


This is absolutely correct. Given enough time the probability of even an improbable event occurring increases close to 100%. Now the question is only if this is possible, not if it is probable.

I honestly don't fully understand the physics behind this and am not up to date on the newest discoveries with the skill to fully determine if they are correct.

With that said I'm wondering how everyone is so sure that there can't be a naturally occurring nuclear event on a planet? We're pretty confident it happens in stars but we still don't know why for 100% so how can we say it can't occur on a planet?

Originally posted by Unity_99
Natural? Search soul memories. Many here have mars as their past. There was nothing natural about that. That is the same group in opposition as we're facing here, and there was a war and the bad guys won. Odd choice for name, I remember. I am awake.

edit on 3-4-2011 by Unity_99 because: (no reason given)

When discussing scientific principals I'm not sure it is appropriate to use soul memories as an arguing point. I can honestly say I don't disagree with you and if you start a thread about "Soul Memories of other Worlds" and U2U me I will participate and even flag it!

Originally posted by bigfatfurrytexan

Originally posted by R3KR
The chances of this happening would be like winning the lotto while being struck by lighting at the same time.

But you could imagine that over the course of a few billion years, someone would likely be able to win the lotto while being struck by lightning.

Actually, it's a lot worse than that.

You can set up and sustain a reaction just the far side of criticality with natural uranium, if it's concentrated enough, and you've got a moderator. So maybe, just MAYBE, you could get an Oklo sort of thing with non-refined uranium, if by some happenstance you had an unnaturally high grade uranium oxide deposit with no reaction poisoning contaminants, and IF it were in some porous form that could be filled with fairly pure water or coal to act as a moderator.

Generally, you don't have metallic uranium. Even a good ore isn't straight uranium oxide. But uranium forms soluble compounds, so maybe, just maybe, in a perfect setup, you could leach an ore body in some way so as to form a pure blob of uranium oxide dense enough to start a natural reaction but yet porous enough to be infiltrated with a moderator like water. Then I could see it becoming *just* critical and staying that way for a long time.

Maybe.

On the other hand, Dr Brandenburg thinks this thing was 1000 gigatons. That's a big frickin' bang. In order to get that, you'd need very highly refined uranium - 95% U235 or thereabouts. That doesn't happen in nature - raw uranium is maybe 0.7%. There really isn't a natural process to separate U235 from raw ore, and you can't get raw uranium to go "bang", it's hard enough to get it to sustain itself in a lab reactor unless you resort to using deuterium as a moderator.

But, let's say that there's a mysterious process that on Mars, separates out U235 and deposits it in a nicely shaped solid lump. When it reaches enough mass to become a gnat's arse past critical, it will self-heat, melt, and splat itself across the landscape in a small fizzle yield. Well, that didn't work.

So back up - you've got a lump of mysteriously pure U235 juuuuust short of criticality. For fun, we'll assume that the same mysterious process that formed weapons grade U235 on Mars also deposited a nice reflector around the lump - let's say that it's the DU, so you've got a lump of U235 shaped like a long obround, surrounded by a very dense U238 block, and there's a perfect cylindrical shaft about two obround depths that the U235 obround sits in. At the bottom of the shaft, the cylinder opens out into a sphere about the size of a soccer ball, maybe a bit smaller.

Over on the other side of the planet, another perfect obround U235 lump just short of criticality is formed - we'll also suppose since it's friggin' ridiculous by this point, that the arse end of it has a nice 6" U238 plug on it and somehow, let's say there's a volcano - it is ejected into near orbit of Mars. Then, it reenters without becoming deformed or scattering, and somehow goes into this shaft in a perfect slam dunk at about 2000 fps, strikes the other obround, and they fall to the bottom of the pit and elastically deform into a perfect sphere with a nice U238 reflector.

That'll give you a bit more than 2 masses - the shape deformation from obround to spherical will help bump your alpha up, then the compression due to the collision will increase the density of the mass, which also increases the criticality by a factor of maybe the density increase to a power of 1.4, 1.5 somewhere in there, depending on how good the reflector is. Hell, let's say the shaft is U238 lined with beryllium and you get a density related criticality gain of x^1.6.

It still won't come close to 1000 gigatons. You might get a few megatons.

I'm just not seeing how you get enough mass together, compressed enough, and refined enough, for it to happen naturally EVAR. Thus does he say it defies natural explanation - and it does IMHO.

The other problem would be that no one in their, or its, right mind would try to make that big a device out of uranium, the design would be pure unadulterated hell. You'd get more bang for your gleepsars if you used a fusion weapon. But to get the ejection and residuals he sees would suggest it had to be pretty much straight uranium, although I could see it being a really farkin' huge fusion bomb with a gigantic U238 shroud.

Of course, in that case, you have to give up the "natural" part and assume it was a Martian doomsday weapon, but I think that's pretty much implied by Dr Brandenburg anyway, he's just not coming out and stating it.

Natural or not that is the question.

Kind of funny that it happened shortly after we started poking around up there. What's Nature hiding?lol

Originally posted by Agarta
Natural or not that is the question.

Kind of funny that it happened shortly after we started poking around up there. What's Nature hiding?lol

Naw, that happened long long ago. 180 million years ago, by the article. If you got a 1000 gigaton nuclear detonation on Mars now, you'd be seeing people go nuts - it'd be visible at noon.

Who knows? Maybe tektites are ejecta debris from a Martian doomsday bomb and that's why the isotopic mix is so skewed.

reply to post by Bedlam

Sorry missed that part I must have scanned more than I thought trying to take care of my sick son. I will be more focused before I post next.


first line no less sorry.

Originally posted by Jinglelord
reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan

 

This is absolutely correct. Given enough time the probability of even an improbable event occurring increases close to 100%. Now the question is only if this is possible, not if it is probable.

I honestly don't fully understand the physics behind this and am not up to date on the newest discoveries with the skill to fully determine if they are correct.

With that said I'm wondering how everyone is so sure that there can't be a naturally occurring nuclear event on a planet? We're pretty confident it happens in stars but we still don't know why for 100% so how can we say it can't occur on a planet?

Here is what i think:

Man is a beast that is mired in compound ignorance. In other words, we don't know what it is that we don't know. There is so much out there, so many layers to the onion of "reality", which in its own right is not real at all.

So, with that being said, man tends to relate things through analogy. Everything you see you describe, either to others or yourself, in relation to other things that are similar. It is the basic way that the mind works.

So, when we are discussing a massive event on Mars, our knolwedgebase is limited to things like asteroid, nuke, or eruptions (among other familiar events). What we don't consider is events that would be currently unthinkable. And i suppose it does us no good to even try to ponder the unthinkable as it tends to be fiction.

A nuke? I doubt it. A uranium asteroid that achieved criticality on impact? I dunno. A supermassive electrical burst between heavenly bodies that created the Valles Marineris? Or how about a reshuffling of planets with Mars taking up a new residence?

I don't know what it is that killed Mars. But I am pretty sure that we have little to no point of reference for describing the event.

reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan


I think this is a place where most people falter. It is hard for us to imagine that the entire sum of human knowledge if visualized as matter wouldn't even be a visible speck when held against what it is we don't even know to think about or question about our plant alone let alone all there is to know.

When theories like this come out we need to keep this in mind. We also need to remember it is impossible to prove a thing does not exist. You can prove it does exist or you can prove it isn't likely.to exist, but you can't know for sure it doesn't.

Originally posted by bigfatfurrytexan

A nuke? I doubt it. A uranium asteroid that achieved criticality on impact? I dunno.

Well, it could be that a large body composed of frozen xenon-139, uranium, thorium and potassium-40 smacked into Mars at hell's own velocity and scattered over the planet.

That would leave the evidence without requiring the actual bang.

reply to post by iforget

According to Brandenburg, the natural explosion, the equivalent of 1 million one-megaton hydrogen bombs, occurred in the northern Mare Acidalium region of Mars where there is a heavy concentration of radioactivity. Read more: www.foxnews.com...

Wouldn't a blast this large create a massive telltale crater, and even potentially affect Mar's orbit significantly? Similarly to how a rocket propulses itself through the combustion of fuel?

It is weird that an element that wasn't on Earth before we set off nukes is present on Mars. If that statement is accurate, that is.

It's a strange thing... and contorting to come up with a rational, natural explanation is understandable and perhaps perfectly correct... but the other possibility is mind blowing.

Apparently that Doc Brandenburg went off the deep end and thought we should seriously defend ourselves from the possible aliens who set off the nukes... though others suspect that if it was an artificial source for the radioactive particles then it probably came from us humans who either colonized Mars or grew up there (or the proposed destroyed planet that is the asteroid belt).

But either it's weird or it's incredibly weird. Mars had nuclear explosions... hmmm. No wonder folks spend so much time looking at rocks there! If a fraction of the anomalies seen in the solar system outside of Earth are actually artificial... heck, if even one is, then it changes everything.

Curious.

It was naquadah asteroid flung this way by Apophis... saw it in a dream... while asleep with the sci-fi channel on...

It's fox news, guys, nuff said. However, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a nuclear blast happening on mars long ago. Not the naturally occurring kind at least.

bigfatfurrytexan

Originally posted by R3KR
The chances of this happening would be like winning the lotto while being struck by lighting at the same time.

But you could imagine that over the course of a few billion years, someone would likely be able to win the lotto while being struck by lightning.

strangely enough it has almost happened ...lol...

www.nydailynews.com...

I wonder what the physical circumstances would have to be for a nuclear blast to occur naturally. It would probably include a volcano.

Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system and that is on Mars. Could it be that it had the Mother of all volcanic eruptions and set off a chain reaction? I believe Mars was teeming with life at one point, NASA has already confirmed Mars once had oceans. Where there is water there is life. I just hope that NASA will soon announce the discovery of a fossil. That would be a game changer for sure.