Hi Barry -

I can not get to your earlier post so I will make my note here.

It seems to me that you have identified a possible niche for life on Mars, but...

Notice below how the Mars Nuts have simply ignored the effects of Mars being pummeled by radiation for some 3,800,000,000 years - they just glided on by it, the same way they do much else - they focus on shielding, but not on the radiations' effects on that shielding

The radiation striking Mars should have produced lasting results, and I am beginning to suspect that these effects may have been cumulative. For example, even the C14 load should be very high, and the decomposition of all isotopes created from "shielding" previously irradiatied should add to the ongoing load -

It would strike me that any DNA would have to be short, and very hardy -the organism could provide some shielding with its structure, but the DNA itself would still need some kind of self-repair capability, or perhaps even some kind of redundancy-

It would also have to be short. The chances for any higher form of life, with a longer DNA chain, would have decreased constantly over time, as Mars cooled and its atmosphere outgassed -

Until the calculations on long term radiation effects are performed in full, Mitranov et al's claims as to the meanings of the spectrometer readings (Water!, yet once again) will be suspect - Sojourner's Gamma Ray Spectrometer also encountered "problems"

ep