Mars has long been a subject of exploration for countries across the world. It has been long debated whether Mars had life and if so — for how long. Now, a new conspiracy theory has been going viral on TikTok that claims that Mars had once housed humans on it. But thanks to some nuclear war that eventually erased life from Mars. A video by TikTok user ‘Crackheadjoedirt’ says that human beings had once lived on Mars and then in a nuclear war, the Red Planet was rendered uninhabitable. The war led to a nuclear winter that has made the surface all red. The false, but the entertaining viral video came in response to the question ‘What’s a conspiracy theory that absolutely blows your mind’.
“If enough nukes were to go off on a planet the first thing that would happen is a nuclear winter. Nuclear winter is an aftermath of nuclear blasts causing ash that is so thick that it blocks out the sunlight,” the TikTok user said in a video adding, “After all the natural resources are drained up from the nuclear winter, the planet turns red from dust. My theory is that we’ve come from Mars after we drained all of its natural resources and destroyed it with nuclear bombs.”
The TikTok user also cited a study by scientists which claims that Mars once had flowing water on its surface billions of years ago and that could naturally mean it had natural resources.
However, according to a report by Newsweek, this conspiracy theory definitely “falls apart” because it takes hundreds to thousands of years for a nuclear winter to clear up whereas the time quoted by the subject is some billions of years.
Studies also suggest that the current volume of water discovered on Mars was reached around three billion years ago, whereas humans capable of walking on two legs happened only four million years ago.
The Martian surface contains a high volume of rust iron oxide causing the planet to look red and the Mars sky also has a pink and orange colouration because these particles are often blown into the atmosphere.
Scientists have also claimed that there could be two probable reasons why Mars lost its water bodies — either the water was lost into space because of ‘space escape’ or it was absorbed by the rocks, where water contents are still found by scientists.