Sorry, wrong link from the rabbit hole. Iodine-129 is “naturally produced in small quantities” [1].
The paper restricted itself to transuranic radioisotopes, but it’s unclear why. The operant question would be, if we found 129I on Mars, would that be evidence of technological civilisation?
It’s great to find somehow who knows about some of these unorthodox ideas and can also explain them well technically. Have you ever assembled information on this topic into a reddit post somewhere? I think you should.
Basically you are aware of the Silurian hypothesis and also the lost Mars civilization hypothesis. I’m guessing you also know of the recent cryptoterrestrial hypothesis [1] and how that might relate.
These are all admittedly fringe ideas but they have way more evidence and merit to them than people realize. reddit is a more appropriate place than HN to discuss these ideas because of the very speculative nature.
To rephrase your comments today are excellent contributions to such a discussion and if you haven’t already considered collecting them together and post on your favorite fridge sub and please let me know.
> admittedly fringe ideas but they have way more evidence and merit to them than people realize
To be clear, I don’t buy these hypotheses. But they force us to ask questions that show the limits of our technology. If Mars had water 4 billion years ago, and an alien civilisation existed, my naïve guess is we’d find buried evidence of it. Weathering happens differently on Mars. But to know the answer is maybe not puts boundaries on what we can conclude from the data we find there, as well as our interpretation of our Fermi paradox observations.
I think you probably do subconsciously but you don’t want to admit it as they carry stigma which your background and training probably insists you avoid.
Im regards to Mars we have very little idea what is going on there. There is serious paper proposing fungi like life has already been observed but we haven’t recognized it. My understanding is a significant number of serious astro biologists think it’s likely there is currently life on Mars.
I’m definitely unaware of any archeological digs on Mars.
Since we are on the fringe topics I’ll mention that another related thought experiment is assume an advanced earlier Mars or Earth civilization moved to the Saturn system and currently resides there leveraging its abundant resources. Would we have actually detected it already?
Back of the envelope I estimate if the world economy were fission powered the rate of I-129 production would be six orders of magnitude higher than the natural rate. The power from U-238 spontaneous fission in the entire earth is maybe 20 MW.
The paper restricted itself to transuranic radioisotopes, but it’s unclear why. The operant question would be, if we found 129I on Mars, would that be evidence of technological civilisation?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-129