Plain-looking, but important: Ferromanganese crusts collected by James Hein nearby Hawaii. [James Hein]
Plain-looking, but important: Ferromanganese crusts collected by James Hein nearby Hawaii. [James Hein]
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Fried prehistoric Wooly Mammoths or Sabertooth Tiger nuggets.
Interesting, tnx!
Iron 60 decays into Cobalt 60 (beta emission), which is pretty nasty stuff. The stuff that they would use as a jacket for a nuclear weapon if they wanted to sterilize a target. Fortunately it has a relatively short half-life and Iron 60 has a much longer half-life so Cobalt 60 is produced very slowly.
“... a series of supernovae, one after another..”
This is why advanced civilizations don’t live on the surfaces of planets, especially those located inside the bright region of the galaxy where there are neighboring stars which can create sterilizing events with a reach of hundreds of light years.
The vast majority of civilizations are probably completely virtual and hosted by computing complexes inside enormous shells built around red dwarfs (for energy) and moved to the dark outer fringes of the galaxy. Unless there is such a thing as free energy, in which case the red dwarf is optional.
Billions and billions of these shells are probably way out there in the darkness beyond the glowing section of the Milky Way, with their virtual civilizations safe from supernovas and magnetars and discovery by hostiles. The shells probably have no emissions or signature of any kind except for local gravity.
Obviously there has to be some non-virtual agencies which construct, maintain and program the computing complexes. Probably AIs and robots, from non-biological civilizations which very long ago “boot-loaded” from biological civilizations which are now extinct. We’re in the midst of the same process ourselves.
A non-biological civilization would no doubt exploit virtualization as the best way to make use of limited resources, in the same manner as we create a number of virtual servers inside one hardware server. So rather than exist as a planet of physical manufactured beings, a non-biological civilization would just build a big computer and everyone would live inside the software, in virtual form, while believing they are real beings living in a real world.
And the answer to the next logical question is probably...Yes. We ourselves are one of those virtual civilizations, by nearly insurmountable odds.
Thats the only signature of supernova blasts? How did the iron get under the ocean....shouldnt there be some on land? Or in recent uplifted mountain stratigraphic layers?
Those are the things that provided the cover for why Howard Hughes built the Glomar Explorer which was supposed to mine them from the sea floor.
