A TikTok user has shared his conspiracy theory about Mars, saying that humans once existed on the planet but that a nuclear war left the place uninhabitable.
The video, which has gone viral, also suggests that a nuclear winter triggered by nuclear war is to blame for Mars' red color.
It has earned over 230,000 likes and has been posted over 10,000 times. It has been viewed approximately 979,200 times.
This is What the Conspiracy Theory Said
A user named crackheadjoedirt suggested the conspiracy theory in response to another user's question, "What's a conspiracy theory that absolutely blows your mind?"
"Mars isn't naturally red," according to crackheadjoedirt. The first thing that would happen, he explained, would be a nuclear winter. If enough nukes were to go off on a planet, that would be a disaster.
"Nuclear winters can last anywhere between 100 years and a thousand depending on how much ash is in the atmosphere," he said.
He quoted a scientific analysis that says Mars once had flowing water on its surface billions of years ago, implying that it had natural resources.
Is There Any Truth to the Claim?
This is where the theory falls apart since the time period in question is billions of years, not the hundreds to thousands of years that nuclear winter is supposed to take to clear up. It's unknown where this number for nuclear winter came from.
According to a Newsweek article, this conspiracy theory isn't really credible. A nuclear winter takes hundreds to thousands of years to clear up, according to the study, while the time cited by the subject is billions of years.
Why is Mars Red?
ZME Science said the red color of Mars is produced by rust iron oxide on the Martian soil, not by radioactive waste. Since these ions are often blown into the atmosphere, the Martian sky has a pink and orange hue.
We don't know how all the iron oxide ended up on the planet's surface, but we do know that it formed 4.5 billion years ago when debris, gas, and dust started to combine. There was a lot of iron in these materials, which had been forged in the cores of long-dead stars.
A different hypothesis based on evidence from the 1997 Pathfinder flight claims that a large portion of the iron oxide comes from meteorites. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Albert Yen first suggested the data.
Sky On Mars is Red, Too
Rayleigh scattering is a mathematical effect that causes the Earth's sky to look blue. Blue rays tend to originate from both angles and shorter wavelengths of light, such as violet and blue, are scattered further from the atmosphere's molecules.
The same is true on Mars, where dust in the planet's light atmosphere scatters red photons, causing the sky to look red. On Earth, this will happen when the air is highly poisoned or suffocated with smoke.
Surprisingly, sunsets on Mars tend to be blue.
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