This video was made using insights from vidIQ. Stick around after the
video to find out how we used vidIQ as our secret YouTube weapon while making it!
In 2021, a storm brewed in the digital world, a storm that was an insult to
academia and made its way into the minds of millions upon millions of
regular people. That storm started on TikTok in the shape of a violent conspiracy theory.
Did humans once inhabit Mars, and like we’re trying to do down here on Earth,
make a huge mess of our custodianship by throwing around a load of planet-shattering super-weapons?
Today we’re going to take apart this theory inch by inch, leaving no stone unturned. We
hope the results of our research will educate you as much as surprise you.
Maybe some of you right now are still choking on your Cornflakes after dismissing any possibility
that humans didn’t just grace Mars but blew the hell out of the place. Don’t make your judgments
too quickly. Around the time that video went viral and had the media wagging its many tongues,
scientists were talking about microbial life on Mars and the possibility that the Red Planet might
have been a much busier place in the distant past when conditions were very different from what we
see now. This gave the TikTok theorist, who you’ll get to know in time, a foundation to work with.
Think about this: What if you got your
hands on a time machine, and after a few trips into the distant past, perhaps hanging out with
some swashbuckling pirates or attending a few gladiatorial contests in the great Roman arenas,
you decided it was time to go really far back. Maybe you turned the dial past 66 million years
ago when at some point around that time, dinosaurs and other lifeforms had a really
rough stretch when a meteor as big as a mountain slammed into Earth and kicked up
so much dust and gas into the atmosphere that there was a great extinction period.
Maybe you went back 100 million years just to see the largest animal that’s ever lived on Earth,
the giant sauropod Argentinosaurus, over 100 feet long and weighing in at about 70 tons.
This would have been a scary trip for a time traveler when also possibly confronted by a
T-Rex or maybe the formidable Giganotosaurus or the happy-snappy Carcharodontosaurus.
But there would be more to worry about than getting crushed between the teeth of a large
meat-eating beast. One hundred million years ago, it was really damn hot on the planet. There wasn’t
even ice at the poles. There was less oxygen, but it would still likely be possible for a
time traveler to have a date with a T-Rex. It just wouldn’t have been great in terms of air quality.
Theoretically, humans could have survived as far back as 500 million years ago. Still, back then,
the only life on Earth was likely nothing more complex than multicellular plants and animals.
Conditions weren’t yet ripe for complex life. Maybe 400 million years ago, there were the
first insects, and around 397 million years ago, the four-legged tetrapods came onto the scene.
As you know, animals adapt to their environment. All living things do.
Put a polar bear in a desert, and it will have a tough time. Dump a small child into the middle of
the Atlantic Ocean during winter, and it’ll never have a chance to tell you that you’re not a very
nice person. Stick a human time traveler on Earth 800 million years ago, and he’ll hate you for it.
If our time traveler went back that far, he would have a bit of a shock to the system,
literally. This was a time when the atmosphere was mostly carbon monoxide,
along with methane and ammonia. Oxygen in the atmosphere might have been around 10 percent of
today’s current levels, not enough for us humans. The Earth was not hospitable to life for the first
two billion or so years. Earthquakes happened all the time, as did massive volcanic eruptions. It
was quite literally hell on Earth. Although many disagree with the time periods and what
exactly went down on Earth, the so-called “great oxidation event” didn’t happen until about 2.4
billion years ago. That’s when the Earth’s oxygen levels started to rise, making multicellularity
possible. Prior to that, there were microbes, but we were a long way off multicellular organisms.
When Earth got going 4.5 billion years ago, after cooling down from a huge cloud of dust and gas,
the place was totally uninhabitable for any form of life. Toxic gasses ruled the atmosphere,
and it was one great big mass of molten rock on the surface. The place started getting whacked by
asteroids and anything else space could throw at it during what we call the Late Heavy Bombardment.
This helped things to solidify. It created the crust we all know and love and can’t live without.
You needed to hear all of this fundamental stuff for two reasons. One, that you understand the rest
of what we’re about to say, and two, so you never become another person that believes every dodgy
thing they hear on social media applications. So, to reiterate, complex life on Earth just wasn’t
possible for billions of years, and it only got going when conditions made it possible.
It wasn't as if life was just biding its time. It happened because it could, nothing more than that.
Mars is about the same age as Earth, so, at first glance, you might think,
well, if complex life formed on Earth, then why didn’t that happen to our dear neighbor? Earth
and Mars are not even that far from each other in space terms. In the bigger scheme of things,
they’re pretty much cheek-to-cheek, locked in a great cosmic embrace. The distance changes,
of course, as the planets orbit the Sun, but when they are at their closest, they’re a mere
48 million miles (78 million kilometers) from each other. At the most distant, they’re a piddling 249
million miles (401 million kilometers) apart. Now we’ll come to the video that started all
this talk in the first place, which at last count, had close to eight million views.
The username of the person that posted the video was CrackheadJoedirt. Ok,
so this might not instill confidence, but let’s try not to discriminate here. Let’s
give Mr. CrackheadJoedirt a chance. In the video, he asks this question, “Mars isn't naturally red.
Want to know what can cause a planet to turn red and change after a couple of a million years?”
Drum roll… The answer:
“If enough nukes were to go off on a planet, the first thing that would happen is a nuclear winter.
A nuclear winter is an aftermath of nuclear blasts causing ash that is so thick that it
blocks out the sunlight. Nuclear winters can last anywhere between 100 years and a thousand
depending on how much ash is in the atmosphere.” That’s quite a lot to unpack, and it seems that
many people didn’t even bother to rip off the first layer of packaging. After listening to
what we’ve just told you in the first part of this show, you should be very skeptical.
What this guy is saying is we actually did live on Mars, but we made the mistake of
nuking the hell out of each other and making the place into the inhospitable dustbowl that
it is today. This theory, as you know, is a bit different from the one we’ve been told.
Scientists say life never formed on Mars as it did here because of its small mass and lack of
gravity; it was unable to have an atmosphere like we do here on Earth and keep in the heat. For that
reason, it didn’t ever retain the water very well, and water, dear viewers, was direly needed for the
formation of life on Earth. It’s also very cold on Mars these days, going down to something like
-220 degrees Fahrenheit. Mars also doesn’t have a really strong magnetic field as Earth does,
which protects us from solar radiation. Then there’s the oxygen problem, a significant
problem when it comes to sustaining life. Oxygen makes up 21 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere,
with 78 percent being nitrogen and others being carbon dioxide, neon, and hydrogen.
Mars, meanwhile, has a really, really thin atmosphere, about 1 percent the volume of Earth’s.
Mars can’t keep its atmosphere because the lack of gravity means it escapes into space. And to
make matters worse, 96 percent of Mars’ atmosphere is carbon dioxide. Only one-tenth of Mars's thin
atmosphere is oxygen. If you were somehow dumped there right now, you’d suffocate, and your blood
would boil, literally, although you might have a fraction of a second to get really
angry with the person that sent you there. Now some of you are thinking, wait a minute,
didn’t you just tell us that Earth used to be a big toxic bag of gasses in which humans could
not survive? Correct. You might also wonder if because Mars has gone through many atmospheric
changes in the past, and we mean distant past, humans might have diddled around there.
You might think this more possible when we tell you that on our jaunts to Mars, we’ve found
evidence of dried-out lake beds and gullies, which the experts tell us are signs that water
once flowed there. Just in 2020, an article in the esteemed Nature journal went a step further,
saying, “Researchers have detected a group of lakes hidden under the red planet’s icy surface.”
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. The scientists say they think there might be water
underneath that ice. It’s not nailed on, not by a long shot. Still, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover not
too long ago came across evidence that billions of years ago, there was likely a lake in something
called the Gale Crater. Climate change on Mars put an end to that when it evaporated the lake.
Scientists are now saying that life on Mars was a thing. There is a distinct possibility
that microorganisms did bless Mars at one point, or at some points, in time.
They say that about 4.1 billion to 3.7 billion years ago, during something called the Noachian
period, the atmosphere wasn’t super thin like it is now and has been for ages. So there was water
everywhere and regular rainfall. There were rivers and lakes and even an ocean. They say things were
not too different from how they were on Earth, so yes, microbial life could have flourished.
CrackheadJoedirt isn’t wrong then when he says there’s a good chance that there was life on Mars.
There probably was, but everything else he says does indeed lead us to think this man was smoking
crack when he came up with the rest of his theory. As you know, life evolved on Earth because the
conditions were right. Earth was warmer than Mars. It began to have a thicker atmosphere.
It was protected from the sun’s radiation, and because water stuck around, we came into
being from those tiny single-celled organisms. So, the crack guy would be correct in saying
scientists say Mars might, for a long time, have had similar conditions to Earth, but those
conditions didn’t last. Scientists have never said they have. They know they didn’t. That’s
why Mars didn’t get tetrapods, or dinosaurs, or primates that, over millions of years,
got down from the trees to make weapons with which to kill animals and eventually invent TikTok to
post silly conspiracy theories on. For all our scurrying around on Mars, we’ve found nothing
to suggest anything close to this happened. But crack man is saying we developed nuclear
weapons. Here’s another blast of his masterful hypothesis:
“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.” He’s saying that we had a great big scrap on Mars
and what followed was a nuclear winter, which you’ll remember he said lasted “between 100
years and a thousand, depending on how much ash is in the atmosphere.” Both numbers are
very small, considering we are talking about billions of years of atmospheric changes.
As for Mars being red because of a nuclear fallout, that’s more humbug, according to
non-crack-smoking scientists. Mars is red because of the rust that comes from Mars’ plentiful iron
oxide. Mars has a lot of iron in its soil, which, when it met with the little oxygen on Mars, turned
into iron oxide. Earth also had a lot of iron when it was busy forming, but because of stronger
gravitational forces, it sank below the surface, whereas Mars’ iron hung about on top. Over many
millions or billions of years, it rusted. But even if this saddening bore of a TikTok
scientist was right about nuclear fallouts turning the surface red – which he definitely
isn’t – consider this. The first primates on Earth go back about 55 million years.
Maybe our earliest ancestor that started walking on two legs, Orrorin tugenensis,
goes back about six million years.
These guys were no Einsteins, far from it. About 2.5 million years ago, our two-legged friends
got a bit smarter when Homo habilis started making tools. This was a big breakthrough,
but it wasn’t quite splitting the atom. They were dumb as mud, those guys. Homo Sapiens,
modern humans, only got going somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. They might have
developed sophisticated speech around 350,000 to 50,000 years ago and may have headed out of
Africa between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago. So, Mr. Crack Fiend wants us to believe that
billions of years ago on Mars, when there was possibly abundant water,
at a time when there was nothing on Earth in terms of life other than microorganisms,
humans had already evolved on Mars and come up with the idea of nuclear fission. He’s saying that
somehow our life on Mars mirrored evolution on Earth but billions of years before. We destroyed
Mars billions of years ago, after which a nuclear winter lasting only a relatively short time
compelled us to switch planets. And yet, it seems after we did this switch, we somehow returned to
being microorganisms and had to evolve again. If this sounds confusing, it’s not you. It’s
because what this guy said doesn’t make any sense at all. We mean, if he’d just talked a fraction
of the bull and tried to say there was once a more complex kind of life on Mars that humans
on Earth have so far not managed to find any evidence of, that might have worked. Even so,
as we’ve explained, conditions on Mars likely made this impossible.
It’s good to be curious, but always better to arm yourself
with knowledge than be taken in by folks like CrackHeadJoeDirt.
Ever wondered how we decide what to make
videos about? We’re going to let you in on a little secret. It’s vidIQ. It lets us see
exactly how many searches per month a certain keyword gets. More searches,
means more potential viewers, But of course there’s more to it than that. VidIQ also shows
you the competition for that keyword. The less competition there is, then
the more likely it is that your video will stand out. Which means more views for your
video! I know, it sounds too easy, but it really is! You don’t need to have a genius IQ, you just
need to have vidIQ! But try it for yourself! Get a 30 day trial for only $1 by going to
vidiq.com/theinfoshow Now you need to watch “Why Flat Earthers
Are Dead Wrong.” Or have a look at “How Humanity Will Actually Colonize Mars (Year by Year).”