241: Chapter 241: Mars is unreasonable as a planet...

Suddenly seeing this paper from the last century, Xiao Yu's pupils shrank instantly, and her steel body tightened.

Jiang Zhe nodded slightly and asked back with a serious expression: "Xiao Yu, Mars is dead; it has no plate tectonics, no volcanic activity, no mantle convection, and no biological metabolism."

"Every bit of its atmosphere, every single molecule, has been preserved intact for billions of years."

"So, you tell me—"

He squinted his eyes and pointed to the four characters [Unable to Know] on the screen.

"That high-concentration Xenon-129 isotope in the Martian atmosphere, which is clean, clear, and identical to the Earth nuclear explosion fingerprint you just heard me describe..."

"It!"

"Where did it come from?"

As the words fell, Xiao Yu's pupils contracted sharply. She opened her mouth, wanting to speak but holding back.

She really wanted to say it was naturally produced; but just a minute ago, Xiaoyu's brother had told her that nature could not produce such a fingerprint.

She wanted to say it might be a meteorite, but she also knew that meteorites couldn't bring isotopic fingerprints; meteorites would only crash into dust.

In the end, she couldn't say anything.

At this moment, in the live broadcast room, it was as if everything had vanished in an instant; there wasn't a single bullet comment.

With ten million people online, there wasn't a single bullet comment!!!

After a long while, the bullet comments in the live broadcast room exploded.

"My scalp is tingling!"

"So NASA detected it in 1976?"

"And then they wrote 'Unable to Know'?? "

"No, this paper has been sitting there for nearly fifty years; has no one connected it to a nuclear explosion?"

"Is Xiaoyu's brother the first one?? "

Inside Principal Fu's office.

Ren Xiaoyao stared fixedly at the paper on the screen, gasping for air, "This is the paper, this is it!!!"

Principal Fu, Director Wang, Xiao Wang, and Old Yu all looked at him in unison.

"I saw it when I was in graduate school!" Ren Xiaoyao couldn't help but swallow hard, his eyes trembling, "My advisor mentioned it at the time, saying the Martian Xenon-129 anomaly was an unsolved case, and no one knew where it came from. Later, the astronomy community stopped talking about it."

Speaking of this, he shook his head.

"No one dared to mention it. Because if someone mentioned it, they would have to answer one question: where did this 129 come from?"

As the words fell, everyone in the office was dumbfounded.

...

Inside the History Staff Quarters.

The moment Professor Liu Guangyi saw the paper, he was struck as if by a heavy blow, "This is it, this is it!"

"Xenon-129! Martian atmosphere, Viking, the paper I read before is this one!"

Professor Chen Runzhi, Professor Wang Shouren, and Qian Mingyi all gasped in unison.

Their eyes were fixed on the four characters [Unable to Know].

...

National Astronomical Observatory.

It was more silent here than anywhere else.

Everyone's face was filled with madness, shock, and disbelief.

Director Wang Weiguo sat in his place, countless thoughts flashing through his mind in an attempt to explain, but every reasonable explanation seemed pale.

The researchers looked at each other, but no one spoke first.

Those voices from before—impossibility, too sci-fi, insufficient evidence—had completely faded away!

After a long while, a young researcher spoke with difficulty:

"Director Wang, could it be possible that it was generated by Mars itself; for example, residual nuclear reactions from the birth of the planet?"

Director Wang did not speak.

Professor Zhang Qinian said with a deep expression: "No, it's not."

"Every planet, at its birth, indeed has radioactive elements inside, which decay, generate heat, and produce various isotopes. But..."

He hesitated for a moment before continuing: "The magnitude of that 129, the ratio of that 129, that clean Xenon-129 fingerprint that is completely consistent with the nuclear fission yield spectrum..."

"It is absolutely impossible for it to have been left over from its birth."

"If it were, it would have been diluted and mixed long ago; if it were, it would have been mixed with other Xenon isotopes and impossible to separate."

"The 129 in the Martian atmosphere!!!"

Speaking of this, Professor Zhang shook his head with difficulty, "It is too clean, clean as if... it was left behind a few hundred million years ago."

As the words fell, the conference room fell into silence again.

Inside Qingfeng Temple.

Zheng Ming's head hung down, his eyes somewhat dull.

Watching the countless bullet comments floating on the big screen, all from astronomy enthusiasts from various places, and even professional professors expressing their opinions.

After seeing those bullet comments, he felt like the sky was collapsing.

Fang Xu squinted his eyes, remained silent for a long time, then picked up his phone and dialed Lin Mo's number again.

"Lin Mo."

"What is it again? I'm writing a report."

"Ask you something." Fang Xu spoke slowly, his voice somewhat unconvinced, "Xenon-129, is it possible that every planet has it?"

Then, he spent a few dozen seconds briefly telling Lin Mo what he had seen and heard.

Lin Mo also remained silent for a long time before continuing, "You really are watching something. Tell me, who are you listening to?"

Fang Xu did not respond.

Lin Mo did not continue to press, just sighed, his voice very serious, "Okay, I will answer you—no."

"The Moon doesn't have it—the lunar soil brought back by Apollo, the lunar atmosphere—if you, Fang Xu, call that thin gas an atmosphere—the concentration of Xenon-129 on the Moon is low enough to be negligible."

"Venus doesn't have it either—the former Bear Country's Venera probes, and later the Venus Express, all measured the Venusian atmosphere. The Xenon isotope distribution is very normal; it doesn't have the abnormally enriched 129 like Mars."

"What makes you think that the anomaly on Mars was generated by itself?"

Fang Xu's expression was slightly stunned.

Lin Mo on the other end of the phone continued to speak: "Let's talk about Earth. Earth's atmosphere also has Xenon-129, and the concentration is indeed not low—do you know how the academic community explains it, besides man-made nuclear explosions?"

"How does the mainstream astronomy community explain it?"

"Those old guys say—Earth definitely had this anomaly before, but Earth has plate tectonics, has subduction zones, and Xenon is a heavy gas, so that 129 was cycled into the mantle, hidden away, and can't be seen."

Speaking of this, Lin Mo's tone was somewhat amused, "Listen to that, can this explain itself?"

"No." Lin Mo asked and answered himself, "But so what? We can't drill into the mantle to take samples, nor can we go back billions of years to measure Earth's early atmosphere. So this hypothesis just hangs there; no one can falsify it, and no one can prove it."

"But Mars is different."

"Mars is dead; it has no plates, no subduction, no circulation; its atmosphere is a glass bottle sealed for hundreds of millions of years."

"Whatever is inside the glass bottle, that's what is there."

"So!"

Lin Mo paused for 2.5 seconds before saying in a stern tone: "The thing you are watching now, I don't know who is talking, and I don't know how far he has lectured, but I can tell you clearly!"

"That Xenon-129 anomaly on Mars is real; it was not generated by Mars itself."

"Its fission fingerprint is real."

"It has visible differences from the Xenon isotope distribution produced by natural fission reactors, such as Oklo in Africa."

"And the most critical point!"

"That nuclear reaction did not happen on the surface of Mars."

Fang Xu's pupils contracted sharply, and he asked, "It didn't happen on the surface of Mars, what does that mean?"

"It means that the precursor to those Xenon-129, Iodine-129, decayed into Xenon-129 within the Martian atmosphere."

"If the explosion had occurred on the surface of Mars, the vast majority of the radioactive dust would have fallen onto the surface and settled into the soil; the atmosphere would only have captured a small portion of the volatiles."

"But what did NASA's Viking in the last century measure? Atmospheric samples, and it was high-concentration, uniformly distributed, and unfiltered full-atmosphere enrichment."

"This means that the bomb back then—I don't care if it was a bomb or something else—was detonated outside of Mars, or in the upper layers of the Martian atmosphere, or perhaps even near Mars' orbit, hundreds of millions of years ago."

"Then, that explosion cloud carrying Iodine-129 diffused, settled, mixed with the Martian atmosphere, and then over millions or tens of millions of years, the Iodine-129 slowly decayed into Xenon-129, finally dissolving uniformly into this Mars."

Speaking up to this point, Lin Mo was silent for a while.

Fang Xu was also stunned and fell silent because of it.

For a long time, Fang Xu scanned the incredulity on the faces of Zheng Ming, Wang Chongyang, and Celestial Master Zhang, before opening his mouth to continue asking: "So, you mean..."

"Yes, what I mean is,"

"No matter how you try to get around it, how you try to make excuses, or how you try to cover it up with natural causes—that thing is simply not something that could grow naturally."

Hearing this, Fang Xu gasped, his eyes trembling.

The three people beside him had faces full of disbelief and incredulity!

On Celestial Master Zhang's face, which had been calm from the beginning to the end, a look of astonishment appeared for the first time, "Immeasurable Heavenly Venerable!"

Zheng Ming wanted to speak but stopped, eventually reason defeated fantasy, "Wait, wait a minute; even if it was a nuclear explosion, that doesn't necessarily mean it was done by an alien civilization, right?"

"What if it was that twin star of Mars that had a problem itself?"

"What if some kind of chain reaction occurred inside it, and it blew itself up?"

"Wouldn't that also be a nuclear explosion? It would just be a natural nuclear explosion, wouldn't that also produce Xenon-129?"

"And Xiaoyu's brother has been saying it was done by a super civilization; he can't prove it was done by a civilization!"

Speaking of this, Zheng Ming's eyes suddenly lit up, as if he had grasped something, "He only proved that a star exploded next to Mars, only proved that the explosion produced a nuclear fission fingerprint, but he didn't prove that it was bombed by someone!"

"What if that star blew itself up? What if it was a natural death?"

Fang Xu was stunned for a moment, his originally somewhat dejected eyes then lit up.

"Right, he indeed didn't prove that point."

"He proved the explosion, proved the nuclear fingerprint, proved the debris sputtering; but he didn't prove that it was a weapon."

"If it was a natural nuclear explosion inside a celestial body, although the probability is extremely low and theoretically controversial—it could still be a natural phenomenon."

"So, as long as he cannot provide direct evidence that 'it was done by a civilization'..."

Comforting himself to this point, Fang Xu's face returned to a calm expression, "This hypothesis remains a hypothesis, just a very brilliant hypothesis!!! Just a Martian civilization hypothesis derived from the solar fission hypothesis!"

Once these words were said, Zheng Ming smiled and then bumped fists with Fang Xu.

Just at this moment, inside the big screen.

Xiao Yu slowly regained her senses from the shock, carefully read the paper from beginning to end, and finally she looked up at Jiang Zhe, "Brother, this paper?"

"Yes, as you can see." Jiang Zhe nodded slightly and said with a determined expression: "NASA gave the answer last century. It's just that no one noticed."

"So? Near Mars, did a super explosion really happen once?"

Jiang Zhe did not answer directly, just nodded gently, "What can be proven is that a big explosion happened. Whether it was a celestial explosion or done by a super civilization, Brother won't guarantee that this was done by a super civilization."

Hearing this sentence, Zheng Ming, who had just recovered his spirit, looked stunned, feeling as if his words and actions just now were like hitting cotton.

Jiang Zhe never firmly stated from beginning to end: "This must have been done by a super civilization."

Jiang Zhe continued to explain: "Xiao Yu, if you want to know more, then you must take your eyes off Mars and look further away."

Xiao Yu unscrewed the mineral water and took a sip, then asked with a puzzled expression: "Further away?"

The corners of Jiang Zhe's mouth curled slightly, and he asked a completely irrelevant question: "Xiao Yu, Brother will ask you one more question."

"Do you think Mars, as a planet, is reasonable?"