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Containing my excitement in case this is an early April Fools joke... but if this has anything to it at all it will call for an entire re-reading of many ancien

Containing my excitement in case this is an early April Fools joke... but if this has anything to it at all it will call for an entire re-reading of many ancient texts, particularly the Sumerian, which describe war on Mars (primarily between contentious relatives a la Macbeth [a story in itself repeated in almost every culture independently]), a migration to Earth, and in the devastation, the complete destruction of a planet in our solar system, the remnants of which allegedly became our asteroid belt. This story has been repeated in a handful of ancient cultures in very specific detail. We are the aliens! explosion

pyrois 12y ago
The linked paper does not suggest that Martians built nuclear reactors on Mars, which then melted down. The paper suggests that there were "large fireballs in the atmosphere such as Tunguska-like events , with mid-air explosions, but of much greater energy release than Tunguska".
- jerf 12y ago
  It is worth pointing out that at least the "natural reactor" theory is not crazy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor Though it is unclear to me how such a process could go critical, in much the same way that one of the biggest challenges with building a real bomb fission bomb is not so much getting it to explode, but keeping it from exploding gently. Whether we have the data to parse out something to this level of detail on Mars when we're still arguing about what killed the dinosaurs on this planet I'm substantially more "meh" about. But it is not, intrinsically, impossible or stupid. The same goes for the alien hypothesis... but even taking the possibility seriously, I'd submit that A: we don't have enough evidence to eliminate the possibility that Mars could have once had an intelligent civilization but B: even moreso, let me underline that, even moreso, we have no evidence to suggest that it ever did. Such speculations would be pure science fiction right now. Right now we still know very little, full stop. And I'd observe that the stories about these civilizations, viewed through modern technological eyes have some really weird aspects to them, such as, why would a civilization with technology capable of destroying planets (and, in this case, really, really destroying them, Death Star-style, not merely sterilizing the planet which is literally ten+ orders of magnitude easier [1]) only settle on Earth after the disaster? We're not planning on waiting for Earth to go bad before heading to Mars... we're pretty much only blocked on the requisite tech and on cosmological scales the instant we have it we'll be there. There's little reason to believe that a technological civilization of that scale would actually be destroyed even by its home planet going up in smoke. I'd submit the most likely hypothesis is that they were indeed written by humans thousands of years ago, who ultimately had no idea what technology was going to look like. (Heck, even we futurists are still only grasping at smoke in terms of what we'll have 50-100 years from today, to say nothing of trying to guess thousands of years ago....) [1]: http://qntm.org/destroy http://qntm.org/destroy
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
    The alien genocider theory doesn't pass the smell test. Why have they not bothered to come get us yet? We have our own nukes. They waited a little too long, or so it would seem. Now, if they wiped out Mars with a designer black hole, or something of that nature, I'd say that we're still not too big for our britches for them to come do the same... but if they're just lobbing atom bombs, then they're overdue. It's almost certainly some sort of natural, random event. If not another Oklo, then something not so different from it.
    - jerf 12y ago
      "Why have they not bothered to come get us yet? We have our own nukes. They waited a little too long, or so it would seem." Oh, any alien genocider that may or may not exist would still be thoroughly unimpressed by our ability to fight back. Anything that could cross the stars in any period of time since civilization started need simply ram Earth to wipe humanity out as we know it. Call it a 10000 kilogram craft travelling at one-thousandth the speed of light from Alpha Centauri, setting sail 4000 years ago or so; if that simply rammed Earth it would be ~150,000 Hiroshima bombs [1]. That's pretty conservative for a genocider's capabilities, really, too. Obviously they're not right here, so anything that can travel here in time to get us is also a weapon that can wipe us out. (This is to say nothing of the extreme opposite end of the scale and what a mature nanotechnology ought to be able to, even without Drexlerian extremes. I sometimes ponder "Our entire civilization was uploaded in its sleep ~3000BC and the real Solar System has long since been converted to computronium, and the simulated universe is lifeless to keep the processing simple." Pick your date of upload to suit your taste.) To be clear, while I remain open-minded my current "top-probability" pick for resolution to the Fermi Paradox is "life is far more rare than science currently guesses". But it's still fun to discuss the alternatives and it's not like I could put that even remotely near 100%... it's just my best guess in a field where we have virtually no data, and YMWV. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=10000kg++*+%2830000km%2Fs%29^2+%2F+63TJ https://www.google.com/search?q=10000kg++*+%2830000km%2Fs%29... - 63TJ is the Hiroshima explosion size.
    - roywiggins 12y ago
      They're too busy trying to keep warm on Planet X, which has an extremely eccentric orbit that keeps them well out into the far reaches of the Solar System most of the time. They're kept warm by engineering a blanket of aeresolized gold particles in their atmosphere. They came to Earth the first time and enslaved us to mine for more gold. After the rebellion, they decided it was too hard to keep us under control and withdrew to their planet, which has since retreated into the cold depths. Soon, it will return and they will need more gold... [This is all based off the nonsense Planet X theories that were going around. There was a good serialized YA novel that mined the ideas for plot, along with other Ancient Aliens nonsense, to quite good effect)
crystaln 12y ago
As much as I'd like to entertain this idea, we have a pretty clear evolutionary history on Earth. It seems unlikely that humans have any direct Martian origin. It is very possible that aliens once lived on and destroyed Mars, though we have no evidence to support that theory. Over the course of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, obvious traces of them would have disappeared. Who knows - maybe we will find something under the surface.
- nashashmi 12y ago
  Do I need to remind you that no clear connection has been traced between Humans (and its evolutionary path) to any other creature? Attempts have been made to get closer to a common ancestor but all have failed. P.S. Not that I support the OP's line either.
  - roywiggins 12y ago
    We share a common ancestor with every single known living thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_ancestor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_ancestor
    - nashashmi 12y ago
      Those are theories. But time and time again, researchers have sought to trace where the evolution path branches off. So far: no dice. And that means a theory of humans coming from another evolutionary path not found on earth still may hold merit. Because it has not been disproven yet.
      - roywiggins 12y ago
        The odds are heavily stacked in favor of a universal common ancestor. We share like 99% of our DNA with chimps; how do you suppose we got that, if we didn't share an ancestor? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20463738 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20463738 > Among a wide range of biological models involving the independent ancestry of major taxonomic groups, the model selection tests are found to overwhelmingly support UCA irrespective of the presence of horizontal gene transfer and symbiotic fusion events. These results provide powerful statistical evidence corroborating the monophyly of all known life.
el_zorro 12y ago
I'm going to ignore so many things in this post and just point out that there is not enough material in the asteroid belt to create another planet. All said, the asteroid belt is about 4.5% the mass of the moon, or a quarter of Pluto [0]. [0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass+of+the+asteroid+belt http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass+of+the+asteroid+be...
- doubleyou 12y ago
  Thank you! What an embarrassing bout of ignorance on my part... I should have done just a little bit of research...
huxley 12y ago
Were these ancient texts as summarized in "Worlds in Collision" by Immanuel Velikovsky?

pyrois 12y ago

The linked paper does not suggest that Martians built nuclear reactors on Mars, which then melted down. The paper suggests that there were "large fireballs in the atmosphere such as Tunguska-like events , with mid-air explosions, but of much greater energy release than Tunguska".

jerf 12y ago
It is worth pointing out that at least the "natural reactor" theory is not crazy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor Though it is unclear to me how such a process could go critical, in much the same way that one of the biggest challenges with building a real bomb fission bomb is not so much getting it to explode, but keeping it from exploding gently. Whether we have the data to parse out something to this level of detail on Mars when we're still arguing about what killed the dinosaurs on this planet I'm substantially more "meh" about. But it is not, intrinsically, impossible or stupid. The same goes for the alien hypothesis... but even taking the possibility seriously, I'd submit that A: we don't have enough evidence to eliminate the possibility that Mars could have once had an intelligent civilization but B: even moreso, let me underline that, even moreso, we have no evidence to suggest that it ever did. Such speculations would be pure science fiction right now. Right now we still know very little, full stop. And I'd observe that the stories about these civilizations, viewed through modern technological eyes have some really weird aspects to them, such as, why would a civilization with technology capable of destroying planets (and, in this case, really, really destroying them, Death Star-style, not merely sterilizing the planet which is literally ten+ orders of magnitude easier [1]) only settle on Earth after the disaster? We're not planning on waiting for Earth to go bad before heading to Mars... we're pretty much only blocked on the requisite tech and on cosmological scales the instant we have it we'll be there. There's little reason to believe that a technological civilization of that scale would actually be destroyed even by its home planet going up in smoke. I'd submit the most likely hypothesis is that they were indeed written by humans thousands of years ago, who ultimately had no idea what technology was going to look like. (Heck, even we futurists are still only grasping at smoke in terms of what we'll have 50-100 years from today, to say nothing of trying to guess thousands of years ago....) [1]: http://qntm.org/destroy http://qntm.org/destroy
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  The alien genocider theory doesn't pass the smell test. Why have they not bothered to come get us yet? We have our own nukes. They waited a little too long, or so it would seem. Now, if they wiped out Mars with a designer black hole, or something of that nature, I'd say that we're still not too big for our britches for them to come do the same... but if they're just lobbing atom bombs, then they're overdue. It's almost certainly some sort of natural, random event. If not another Oklo, then something not so different from it.
  - jerf 12y ago
    "Why have they not bothered to come get us yet? We have our own nukes. They waited a little too long, or so it would seem." Oh, any alien genocider that may or may not exist would still be thoroughly unimpressed by our ability to fight back. Anything that could cross the stars in any period of time since civilization started need simply ram Earth to wipe humanity out as we know it. Call it a 10000 kilogram craft travelling at one-thousandth the speed of light from Alpha Centauri, setting sail 4000 years ago or so; if that simply rammed Earth it would be ~150,000 Hiroshima bombs [1]. That's pretty conservative for a genocider's capabilities, really, too. Obviously they're not right here, so anything that can travel here in time to get us is also a weapon that can wipe us out. (This is to say nothing of the extreme opposite end of the scale and what a mature nanotechnology ought to be able to, even without Drexlerian extremes. I sometimes ponder "Our entire civilization was uploaded in its sleep ~3000BC and the real Solar System has long since been converted to computronium, and the simulated universe is lifeless to keep the processing simple." Pick your date of upload to suit your taste.) To be clear, while I remain open-minded my current "top-probability" pick for resolution to the Fermi Paradox is "life is far more rare than science currently guesses". But it's still fun to discuss the alternatives and it's not like I could put that even remotely near 100%... it's just my best guess in a field where we have virtually no data, and YMWV. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=10000kg++*+%2830000km%2Fs%29^2+%2F+63TJ https://www.google.com/search?q=10000kg++*+%2830000km%2Fs%29... - 63TJ is the Hiroshima explosion size.
  - roywiggins 12y ago
    They're too busy trying to keep warm on Planet X, which has an extremely eccentric orbit that keeps them well out into the far reaches of the Solar System most of the time. They're kept warm by engineering a blanket of aeresolized gold particles in their atmosphere. They came to Earth the first time and enslaved us to mine for more gold. After the rebellion, they decided it was too hard to keep us under control and withdrew to their planet, which has since retreated into the cold depths. Soon, it will return and they will need more gold... [This is all based off the nonsense Planet X theories that were going around. There was a good serialized YA novel that mined the ideas for plot, along with other Ancient Aliens nonsense, to quite good effect)

crystaln 12y ago

As much as I'd like to entertain this idea, we have a pretty clear evolutionary history on Earth. It seems unlikely that humans have any direct Martian origin. It is very possible that aliens once lived on and destroyed Mars, though we have no evidence to support that theory. Over the course of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, obvious traces of them would have disappeared. Who knows - maybe we will find something under the surface.

nashashmi 12y ago
Do I need to remind you that no clear connection has been traced between Humans (and its evolutionary path) to any other creature? Attempts have been made to get closer to a common ancestor but all have failed. P.S. Not that I support the OP's line either.
- roywiggins 12y ago
  We share a common ancestor with every single known living thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_ancestor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_ancestor
  - nashashmi 12y ago
    Those are theories. But time and time again, researchers have sought to trace where the evolution path branches off. So far: no dice. And that means a theory of humans coming from another evolutionary path not found on earth still may hold merit. Because it has not been disproven yet.
    - roywiggins 12y ago
      The odds are heavily stacked in favor of a universal common ancestor. We share like 99% of our DNA with chimps; how do you suppose we got that, if we didn't share an ancestor? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20463738 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20463738 > Among a wide range of biological models involving the independent ancestry of major taxonomic groups, the model selection tests are found to overwhelmingly support UCA irrespective of the presence of horizontal gene transfer and symbiotic fusion events. These results provide powerful statistical evidence corroborating the monophyly of all known life.

el_zorro 12y ago

I'm going to ignore so many things in this post and just point out that there is not enough material in the asteroid belt to create another planet. All said, the asteroid belt is about 4.5% the mass of the moon, or a quarter of Pluto [0]. [0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass+of+the+asteroid+belt http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass+of+the+asteroid+be...

doubleyou 12y ago
Thank you! What an embarrassing bout of ignorance on my part... I should have done just a little bit of research...

huxley 12y ago

Were these ancient texts as summarized in "Worlds in Collision" by Immanuel Velikovsky?