Barry,

Your exchange with Nick has been a noticable improvement from your usual
tactic of ignoring counter evidence. I have to give you credit for raising
some very good questions to counter Nicks conclusions, but in the end I
think he provided answers consistent with his conclusions despite my long
standing doubt as well. My main question remaining is where has all of
Mars' CO2 gone? It should have had a lot at one time. Forming farther from
the Sun I would think it should have started with more CO2 per unit mass
than the Earth and Venus originally did.

Your strong desire for finding life on Mars is quite obvious, but that
really isn't an issue as long as you don't pick and choose data in support
of it. I hope we find life on Mars too, but don't feel it is a long term
obstacle to human exploration and utilization of Mars. I think in the short
term it will assure a delay of a decade or so, but in the long term will
increase the odds and the support for a manned mission. Since the outlook
is so bleak right now, I'd say the overall outlook will improve with the
discovery of life. One of the Recent news articles notes as I've told you
many times that many scientists think it will require a human mission to
find life. I'm quite sure that humans will be needed even if life is found
robotically to comprehensively study it. Robotic collection and return to a
manned Martian lab is a relatively simple solution to your contamination
concern.

Regards,
Mark