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November 8, 2015 — Dr. John Brandenburg with Goggs Mackay


I really, really liked this episode. Great guest. One thing that I was confused about; I thought the face on Mars was bogus. When they were able to get sharper photo's, I thought it showed that it wasn't a face at all. Just in the low resolution photo's it appeared to be a face. But if I understood John correctly, he claims that it is a face. Again, I thought the higher resolution photo's proved it to be false. So it sounds like I'm missing something perhaps?
 
I really, really liked this episode. Great guest. One thing that I was confused about; I thought the face on Mars was bogus. When they were able to get sharper photo's, I thought it showed that it wasn't a face at all. Just in the low resolution photo's it appeared to be a face. But if I understood John correctly, he claims that it is a face. Again, I thought the higher resolution photo's proved it to be false. So it sounds like I'm missing something perhaps?
The jury is still out on the Cydonia face as far as I'm aware, CGL. NASA produced at least one later image which appeared to show it a lot flatter and rougher, indicating that the earlier face images were mere tricks of light and shadow. I think this will be what you're referring to. However, investigations have now shown that this later image had been put through several processing stages, and was so overcooked that a lot of the original image content was lost in the final over-processed version. The suggestion is, that this had been done to deliberately obscure the true form and details of the anomaly. Conspiracy!

I find Dr Brandenburg's Xenon isotope evidence interesting if not (yet at least) compelling. There is solid evidence that natural self-sustaining nuclear reactions occurred in Gabon, Africa, around 1.7 billion years ago, so the atmospheric fission by-products on Mars may yet turn out to have a natural origin, but it's definitely something worthy of further study.
 
The jury is still out on the Cydonia face as far as I'm aware, CGL. NASA produced at least one later image which appeared to show it a lot flatter and rougher, indicating that the earlier face images were mere tricks of light and shadow. I think this will be what you're referring to. However, investigations have now shown that this later image had been put through several processing stages, and was so overcooked that a lot of the original image content was lost in the final over-processed version. The suggestion is, that this had been done to deliberately obscure the true form and details of the anomaly. Conspiracy!

I find Dr Brandenburg's Xenon isotope evidence interesting if not (yet at least) compelling. There is solid evidence that natural self-sustaining nuclear reactions occurred in Gabon, Africa, around 1.7 billion years ago, so the atmospheric fission by-products on Mars may yet turn out to have a natural origin, but it's definitely something worthy of further study.
Thanks for the info. I personally don't buy that Mars was nuked. That's too outlandish to me. There's gotta be another explanation that we currently don't know or understand.

BTW - here is some detailed information on the Apophis asteroid that was mentioned in another post for those who are interested; 99942 Apophis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
I just started this episode, but one sentence in and he's already mentioned that he has a PhD. What is it with UFO guys always mentioning their credentials. Neil Degrasse Tyson never mentions his education.

It's like some sort self affirmation to counteract the nutty stuff some of them spout, although I'm necessarily referring to this particular guest.

EDIT: Face on Mars - I take that back, he's spouting nutty stuff. New drinking game - take a shot when he mentions his PhD.
 
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Angel of loren,
Now who cares about Dr Brandenburg states he has a PhD or not that's just a boring comment move on man. The link you provided is interesting and typical attack the person not the information with off hand use of words such as 'nutty' theories is another method of attacking the person and instead he has theories which like other SCIENTIST is asking questions. Good for Dr Brandenburg at least he uses footnotes.
 
It's like some sort self affirmation to counteract the nutty stuff some of them spout, although I'm necessarily referring to this particular guest.

Perhaps someone with a doctorate is putting you down at work? Why else be so sensitive to Brandenberg's mentioning his degree? Moreover, you yourself plainly recognize the reason why people working in this widely ridiculed field sometimes do state their credentials. It's in self-defense, duh, from dismissive and contemptuous put-downs, like the ones you often insist on issuing.
 
Actually that's not at all it - I just find it curious that Carl Sagan never flaunted his resume when he spoke, yet Brandenburg keeps having to reaffirm it. It's just an observation, and one that I tend to make often in the UFO field. Including some that love to flaunt fake credentials ( a certain guy named Phil), although Brandenburg is an actual scientist that has done good work in the past. It's just his Mars stuff is far fetched, and he can't prove it. If he can prove it one day though, I'll be happy to say I was wrong! That's what real science is.

He was actually a really entertaining guest, despite the fact that I disagree with him on so much.

And Constance, what put downs do I often insist on issuing? Relax - I like to try an bring some levity to all the seriousness here sometimes. That's why Gene pays me the big bucks :)

For those without a humour filter: Gene does not pay me to moderate, especially since I can't always be in the forum since I work and do that whole being a dad thing.
 
The one big problem with Dr. Brandenburg's theory is that we will have to wait until someone reach Mars in order to prove it. Even if we do travel to Mars, is that going to be a priority on that first trip? I have a feeling we will all be in the ground before that happens.
 
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Hi, it's my first post on the forums, have been listening for half a year maybe? I generally like the discussion on the show. I think I'm a healthy skeptic, but I'm open to an alien presence on Earth among other things, but fringe science can either be thought-provoking or strikingly delusional. Occasionally I might turn into a full-on debunker if it really seems to be bunk.

And isn't the Mars face bunk?
ancmartian3.jpg


That's his evidence of archaeology? a city in Cydonia? And he says recent photos have corroborated this theory? How? Where? I could only guess someone very delusional clinging onto an old idea from the 80s would consider the image on the right to be a very eroded face.

He seems to be more of a believer than a scientist. Sounds like he early on accepted the hypothesis of Martian life (Vincent Dipietro and Gregory Molinar, NASA engineers?) and its nuclear destruction. I mean I've heard Whitley Strieber's claims of some war on ancient Mars, does anyone else know the history of this idea?

And JPL doesn't want to find evidence of life? That doesn't make sense to me.

BTW, I'm not a know-it-all. What do you all think?
 
Hi, it's my first post on the forums, have been listening for half a year maybe? I generally like the discussion on the show. I think I'm a healthy skeptic, but I'm open to an alien presence on Earth among other things, but fringe science can either be thought-provoking or strikingly delusional. Occasionally I might turn into a full-on debunker if it really seems to be bunk.

And isn't the Mars face bunk?
ancmartian3.jpg


That's his evidence of archaeology? a city in Cydonia? And he says recent photos have corroborated this theory? How? Where? I could only guess someone very delusional clinging onto an old idea from the 80s would consider the image on the right to be a very eroded face.

He seems to be more of a believer than a scientist. Sounds like he early on accepted the hypothesis of Martian life (Vincent Dipietro and Gregory Molinar, NASA engineers?) and its nuclear destruction. I mean I've heard Whitley Strieber's claims of some war on ancient Mars, does anyone else know the history of this idea?

And JPL doesn't want to find evidence of life? That doesn't make sense to me.

BTW, I'm not a know-it-all. What do you all think?
Welcome to the forums! If you saw my earlier post, that's exactly what my question was (about the "face" on Mars being debunked by higher resolution photos). He was a great, intriguing guest. But he speaks very matter of factly. As if all his claims have been 100% proven. Some seem outlandish (like somebody nuked Mars??). I listen with an open mind & he was a very good speaker. Way better than say....Margie Kay? :(
 
@yogu - I've followed the face on Mars stuff for a while and watched as newer and better res photos were released and the only thing I can say about it is that if you look at the newer shots, forget about facial features etc but concentrate on just the outline. The symmetry is staggering and almost perfect. On this point only would I argue for artificiality and you may have heard on the show that I referenced studies in which image analysis which looks for non-natural forms, when used on places like the face, seem to indicate strongly for there being shapes that are unlikely to be the result of natural processes.
 
@yogu - I've followed the face on Mars stuff for a while and watched as newer and better res photos were released and the only thing I can say about it is that if you look at the newer shots, forget about facial features etc but concentrate on just the outline. The symmetry is staggering and almost perfect. On this point only would I argue for artificiality and you may have heard on the show that I referenced studies in which image analysis which looks for non-natural forms, when used on places like the face, seem to indicate strongly for there being shapes that are unlikely to be the result of natural processes.
I forgot to mention this earlier, but more impressive then the face on Mars, IMO, is the 5 sided pyramid. What are the chances of triangle sides forming randomly from high winds, etc?
sheep2_small.jpg
 
A couple of major problems with Brandenburg's "Mars was nuked" scenario are expounded on below. You can find this, and more about his ideas, including the Cydonia stuff, talked about in great detail on Dr. Stuart Robbins excellent Exposing Pseudoastronomy podcast. Just food for thought, not trying to convince anyone of anything, but this particular hypothesis by Brandenburg should've been put out to pasture ages ago, imo.


Xenon-129 is a stable isotope of Xenon. According to Good-ol'-Wikipedia's "Isotopes of Xenon" and "Xenon" pages, the natural abundance of xenon-129 on Earth is around 26.4% of all xenon, and the ratio of xenon-129 to 132 is just slightly less than 1. Oh, and xenon is a gas, and it comes from a long line of Nobility.

With that intro, now to the claim of it being on Mars. From what I could find, there is a December 1976 paper in the journal Science entitled, "The Atmosphere of Mars: Detection of Krypton and Xenon." The third sentence of the abstract states, "the ratio of xenon-129 to xenon-132 is enhanced on Mars relative to the terrestrial value for this ratio." It goes on to say, "Some possible implications of these findings are discussed."

To be completely honest, I was surprised. I did not expect this to pan out, given perhaps some of my more recent podcast episodes. So, what Viking found is that the ratio of 129 to 132 is not 0.97 as on Earth, but 2.5(+2)(-1) -- significantly more 129 than 132. But, that's as far as I can follow Brandenburg. For a couple reasons. Well, two.

First, I can't find anything about xenon-129 being produced in nuclear explosions. In supernovae, sure, those produce pretty much everything. They're an alchemist's dream. But not a nuclear weapon. The only stuff I could find on the production of xenon-129 is from the decay of radioactive iodine-129 into xenon-129. Iodine-129 has a half-life of about 16 million years, meaning that within 160 million years, less than 0.1% of the original amount of iodine-129 will remain. Meaning that all the iodine-129 originally part of any planet will have decayed by now into xenon-129 unless you're a young-Earth creationist. So, again, problem #1 so far is that unless this is top-secret knowledge or Google has failed me, xenon-129 is not produced in nuclear bombs. Which pretty much is the foundation of his idea.

It's possible he got fooled by the term, "radiogenic" xenon-129, and thought that meant nuclear reactor ... it just means that it's produced by radioactive decay of something else, in this case iodine-129.

It's also possible that his actual claim - even though I've never heard him state it - is that it's iodine-129 that is what's produced in a nuclear bomb, and since that decays into xenon-129, then that's evidence of the iodine-129 which is evidence for his nuclear war. Though I really don't want to make his argument for him, that is one possible way to save his idea. But, the 16 million year half-life of iodine-129 means that this would have had to have happened hundreds of millions of years ago for there to be no iodine-129 left and for it to all have decayed. Possible? I suppose, and I've heard stranger things.

But, the second reason I stop following Brandenburg's ideas at this point is for the same reason that Lawrence Livermore National Lab stated: There are a lot of possible geologic reasons why xenon-129 is more abundant relative to 132 on Mars than on Earth. The Science article points out that some types of stony meteorites have ratios of 4.5 or as high as 9.6, which is much higher than the Mars value, indicating that Mars may be sourced from more of that primitive material than Earth was as those slowly degassed into Mars' environment.

Another model by Musselwhite, Drake, and Swindle from 1990 suggests that the iodine originally incorporated into Mars was outgassed after formation into an atmosphere, but iodine was incorporated into the crust while xenon, being a noble gas, just stayed in the atmosphere. Then, lots of impacts happened in the first 500 million years, eroding Mars' atmosphere significantly including ALL the isotopes of xenon, mostly evenly. Meanwhile, the iodine-129 in the crust is decaying into xenon-129 and very slowly outgassed. As opposed to Earth, where it would be recycled and buried in the mantle due to plate tectonics. And, ¡voilà!, Mars' atmosphere is enriched with xenon-129. No nuclear holocaust needed, and this fits with everything else we know about how the planets work and it's supported by the ratio of argon-40 to krypton-40. The only small issue for this is the timing given the fairly short half-life of iodine-129.

Because of that timing issue, others have come up with other models for how Mars' atmosphere could be enriched in xenon-129. A popular model was proposed by Swindle and Jones in 1997 that proposes Mars started not with an asteroid-like composition, but an atmosphere like the solar wind. This allows a contribution from plutonium-244 -derived xenon-136 to be present which I guess somehow helps the models more accurately produce the xenon observed. And yes, I did say plutonium. Plutonium-244 is a very heavy isotope of plutonium, has a half-life of about 80 million years, and it's plutonium-240 used in nuclear weapons ... 244 is the most stable isotope of plutonium and still found in nature and it is not abundant in nuclear reactors though some is produced in nuclear explosions. So again, while this *could* be sorta used in a very round-about way to support his claims, it's hard to get there from what we know. Not impossible, but very hard.

At the very least, from this discussion of xenon-129, the conclusion that Brandenburg made - that it's only produced during big nuclear events, is not true. It's actually NOT produced in nuclear events - except supernovae - but it *can* be produced as a by-product of what is produced by nuclear weapons or reactors.

Natural Nuclear Reactors

Step 3 of his train of thought, that the xenon-129 could be produced by a natural nuclear reactor, was what he proposed to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference - also known as LPSC by those of us in the biz - back in 2011. Yes, he actually did submit an abstract about this.

But my point in bringing it up is not to discuss it on Mars, but on Earth. I was first introduced to this idea as an off-hand remark by someone when I was in grad school, and I didn't believe him at first. But yes indeed, nuclear reactors can happen on planets, naturally. This happened in Oklo in Gabon, Africa, about 1.7 billion years ago, it lasted for a few hundred thousand years, and it averaged about 100 kW of power during that time. To put that in context, my Mac setup from 2008 is currently using about 0.35 kW, or about 0.4% of that reactor. So it's not a trivial amount, but it's also not gargantuan.

How this happens is pretty neat, and it was first predicted in 1956, and the one in Africa was discovered in 1972 by French physicist Francis Perrin.

What happened was that a large deposit of uranium started to accumulate groundwater. Water acts as a neutron moderator, slowing down neutrons and making fast neutrons into thermal neutrons, capable of sustaining a nuclear chain reaction of uranium-235. So, uranium, plus water, and a nuclear chain reaction took place. Periods of the water boiling away, the reaction stopping, water coming back, and the reaction starting again happened and lasted long periods of times, each.

What let this happen 1.7 billion years ago and why this probably CAN'T happen today on Earth is that uranium-235 had an abundance of about 3.1% relative to all the uranium there. The rest was uranium-238, which isn't fissile. The 3.1% is around what we enrich uranium to today for use in nuclear power plants.

The reason this can't happen naturally on Earth today is that uranium-235 decays faster than 238, having a half-life of about 700 million years versus about 4.5 billion years. So, the natural abundance is only 0.7% today relative to 238, as opposed to the higher 3.1% about 2 billion years ago.

So that's a kinda neat aside.

Potassium and Thorium

The final piece of evidence claimed is the maps of potassium and thorium, though I'm really not sure why. Potassium is a common element, and while thorium might be rarer, and theoretically used in thorium reactors, but he doesn't really give a reason why these are important. Yeah, they're also sorta correlated in where they are on the planet, but a very, very length paper with over a dozen authors was published in 2007 using this as evidence for water carrying rocks to the lowest portion of the planet, draining into a northern hemisphere ocean, which is where the largest concentrations of potassium and thorium are.
 
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Dr. Brandenburg presented some interesting theories and, more importantly from my perspective, was consistent and principled about the importance of scientific research and observation.

That being said, I don't see a basis to support the "nuclear attack" theory. The levels of radiation Dr. Brandenburg discussed appear on multiple surfaces on Mars and there's no evidence to support the Red Planet was attacked in the way he suggests. Although he didn't present the theory in absolutes, he pushed it even in the face of some good questioning by Goggs.

Overall, this was a great show. At a minimum, I learned something about a topic that I wouldn't otherwise hear about anywhere else. Thank you, Gene and Goggs, for an excellent show.
 
A couple of major problems with Brandenburg's "Mar was nuked" scenario are expounded on below. You can find this, and more about his ideas, including the Cydonia stuff, talked about in great detail on Dr. Stuart Robbins excellent Exposing Pseudoastronomy podcast. Just food for thought, not trying to convince anyone of anything, but this particular hypothesis by Brandenburg should've been put out to pasture ages ago, imo.


Xenon-129 is a stable isotope of Xenon. According to Good-ol'-Wikipedia's "Isotopes of Xenon" and "Xenon" pages, the natural abundance of xenon-129 on Earth is around 26.4% of all xenon, and the ratio of xenon-129 to 132 is just slightly less than 1. Oh, and xenon is a gas, and it comes from a long line of Nobility.

With that intro, now to the claim of it being on Mars. From what I could find, there is a December 1976 paper in the journal Science entitled, "The Atmosphere of Mars: Detection of Krypton and Xenon." The third sentence of the abstract states, "the ratio of xenon-129 to xenon-132 is enhanced on Mars relative to the terrestrial value for this ratio." It goes on to say, "Some possible implications of these findings are discussed."

To be completely honest, I was surprised. I did not expect this to pan out, given perhaps some of my more recent podcast episodes. So, what Viking found is that the ratio of 129 to 132 is not 0.97 as on Earth, but 2.5(+2)(-1) -- significantly more 129 than 132. But, that's as far as I can follow Brandenburg. For a couple reasons. Well, two.

First, I can't find anything about xenon-129 being produced in nuclear explosions. In supernovae, sure, those produce pretty much everything. They're an alchemist's dream. But not a nuclear weapon. The only stuff I could find on the production of xenon-129 is from the decay of radioactive iodine-129 into xenon-129. Iodine-129 has a half-life of about 16 million years, meaning that within 160 million years, less than 0.1% of the original amount of iodine-129 will remain. Meaning that all the iodine-129 originally part of any planet will have decayed by now into xenon-129 unless you're a young-Earth creationist. So, again, problem #1 so far is that unless this is top-secret knowledge or Google has failed me, xenon-129 is not produced in nuclear bombs. Which pretty much is the foundation of his idea.

It's possible he got fooled by the term, "radiogenic" xenon-129, and thought that meant nuclear reactor ... it just means that it's produced by radioactive decay of something else, in this case iodine-129.

It's also possible that his actual claim - even though I've never heard him state it - is that it's iodine-129 that is what's produced in a nuclear bomb, and since that decays into xenon-129, then that's evidence of the iodine-129 which is evidence for his nuclear war. Though I really don't want to make his argument for him, that is one possible way to save his idea. But, the 16 million year half-life of iodine-129 means that this would have had to have happened hundreds of millions of years ago for there to be no iodine-129 left and for it to all have decayed. Possible? I suppose, and I've heard stranger things.

But, the second reason I stop following Brandenburg's ideas at this point is for the same reason that Lawrence Livermore National Lab stated: There are a lot of possible geologic reasons why xenon-129 is more abundant relative to 132 on Mars than on Earth. The Science article points out that some types of stony meteorites have ratios of 4.5 or as high as 9.6, which is much higher than the Mars value, indicating that Mars may be sourced from more of that primitive material than Earth was as those slowly degassed into Mars' environment.

Another model by Musselwhite, Drake, and Swindle from 1990 suggests that the iodine originally incorporated into Mars was outgassed after formation into an atmosphere, but iodine was incorporated into the crust while xenon, being a noble gas, just stayed in the atmosphere. Then, lots of impacts happened in the first 500 million years, eroding Mars' atmosphere significantly including ALL the isotopes of xenon, mostly evenly. Meanwhile, the iodine-129 in the crust is decaying into xenon-129 and very slowly outgassed. As opposed to Earth, where it would be recycled and buried in the mantle due to plate tectonics. And, ¡voilà!, Mars' atmosphere is enriched with xenon-129. No nuclear holocaust needed, and this fits with everything else we know about how the planets work and it's supported by the ratio of argon-40 to krypton-40. The only small issue for this is the timing given the fairly short half-life of iodine-129.

Because of that timing issue, others have come up with other models for how Mars' atmosphere could be enriched in xenon-129. A popular model was proposed by Swindle and Jones in 1997 that proposes Mars started not with an asteroid-like composition, but an atmosphere like the solar wind. This allows a contribution from plutonium-244 -derived xenon-136 to be present which I guess somehow helps the models more accurately produce the xenon observed. And yes, I did say plutonium. Plutonium-244 is a very heavy isotope of plutonium, has a half-life of about 80 million years, and it's plutonium-240 used in nuclear weapons ... 244 is the most stable isotope of plutonium and still found in nature and it is not abundant in nuclear reactors though some is produced in nuclear explosions. So again, while this *could* be sorta used in a very round-about way to support his claims, it's hard to get there from what we know. Not impossible, but very hard.

At the very least, from this discussion of xenon-129, the conclusion that Brandenburg made - that it's only produced during big nuclear events, is not true. It's actually NOT produced in nuclear events - except supernovae - but it *can* be produced as a by-product of what is produced by nuclear weapons or reactors.

Natural Nuclear Reactors

Step 3 of his train of thought, that the xenon-129 could be produced by a natural nuclear reactor, was what he proposed to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference - also known as LPSC by those of us in the biz - back in 2011. Yes, he actually did submit an abstract about this.

But my point in bringing it up is not to discuss it on Mars, but on Earth. I was first introduced to this idea as an off-hand remark by someone when I was in grad school, and I didn't believe him at first. But yes indeed, nuclear reactors can happen on planets, naturally. This happened in Oklo in Gabon, Africa, about 1.7 billion years ago, it lasted for a few hundred thousand years, and it averaged about 100 kW of power during that time. To put that in context, my Mac setup from 2008 is currently using about 0.35 kW, or about 0.4% of that reactor. So it's not a trivial amount, but it's also not gargantuan.

How this happens is pretty neat, and it was first predicted in 1956, and the one in Africa was discovered in 1972 by French physicist Francis Perrin.

What happened was that a large deposit of uranium started to accumulate groundwater. Water acts as a neutron moderator, slowing down neutrons and making fast neutrons into thermal neutrons, capable of sustaining a nuclear chain reaction of uranium-235. So, uranium, plus water, and a nuclear chain reaction took place. Periods of the water boiling away, the reaction stopping, water coming back, and the reaction starting again happened and lasted long periods of times, each.

What let this happen 1.7 billion years ago and why this probably CAN'T happen today on Earth is that uranium-235 had an abundance of about 3.1% relative to all the uranium there. The rest was uranium-238, which isn't fissile. The 3.1% is around what we enrich uranium to today for use in nuclear power plants.

The reason this can't happen naturally on Earth today is that uranium-235 decays faster than 238, having a half-life of about 700 million years versus about 4.5 billion years. So, the natural abundance is only 0.7% today relative to 238, as opposed to the higher 3.1% about 2 billion years ago.

So that's a kinda neat aside.

Potassium and Thorium

The final piece of evidence claimed is the maps of potassium and thorium, though I'm really not sure why. Potassium is a common element, and while thorium might be rarer, and theoretically used in thorium reactors, but he doesn't really give a reason why these are important. Yeah, they're also sorta correlated in where they are on the planet, but a very, very length paper with over a dozen authors was published in 2007 using this as evidence for water carrying rocks to the lowest portion of the planet, draining into a northern hemisphere ocean, which is where the largest concentrations of potassium and thorium are.
Excellent post & points.
 
@Muadib (Hi, not seen you in a while:)) - Very interesting post. You probably heard me ask Dr Brandenburg if he knew of any other mechanism that could account for the increase in Xenon 129, which he answered in the negative. Whilst I did get a degree in Applied Physics a long time ago, I certainly cannot claim to have much knowledge on radioisotopes etc these days and I am surprised that Dr Brandenburg either seems unaware of the alternative explanations or more likely, he dismisses them for one reason or another.

I believe everyone is happy with his credentials and scientific work history etc, at least nobody has questioned any of that I'm aware of - so one would think especially that if someone works in respected laboratories, the alternative explanations would come up in conversation with colleagues because when you have a fair number of credible scientists working together the combined knowledge has to be extensive to say the least.

I suppose the way forward from here - if anyone cares, that is, is to ask Dr Brandenburg directly what he thinks of these alternate explanations for Mars having a different ratio of Xenon isotopes?
 
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Dr. Brandenburg presented some interesting theories and, more importantly from my perspective, was consistent and principled about the importance of scientific research and observation.

That being said, I don't see a basis to support the "nuclear attack" theory. The levels of radiation Dr. Brandenburg discussed appear on multiple surfaces on Mars and there's no evidence to support the Red Planet was attacked in the way he suggests. Although he didn't present the theory in absolutes, he pushed it even in the face of some good questioning by Goggs.

Overall, this was a great show. At a minimum, I learned something about a topic that I wouldn't otherwise hear about anywhere else. Thank you, Gene and Goggs, for an excellent show.

I appreciate your kind words AlienEsq - I'll let you into a secret..just after recording I felt it wasn't a great show due to technical issues stopping the flow etc but after the edit it always sounds better and at least people wish to discuss Dr Brandenburg's work etc.

Sometimes Gene and Chris are at a loss when what has felt to be a fantastic show has generated almost no posts and no discussion, whilst other shows generate huge amounts of emotion, praise and anger all together. There literally is no way to predict which ones will prompt people to write and discuss the most:eek:.
 
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