Hello Nick -

I do not suffer from "paranoia" - aside from irritation at the attempts of a few to silence me through slander and invective.

What I essentially did over the last 5 years was to actually examine the historical record for impact events, and to try to isolate some of them in time and place. Other recent impacts were researched by others.

My expectation is that the recent historical trend will continue. Specifically, I am most concerned about "small" impact produced mega-tsunami - given current coastal populations, the next one of these should kill around 70,000,000 people, and in the recent past they have been occuring about once every 1,000 years. We can prevent these deaths with 2 to 3 days of warning, and essentially prevent deaths on the scale of the Second World War.

It is now time to spend more money on the investigation of impact sites - especifically Bazas in France, and La Venta in Mexico, along with the Stallings Island culture sites in the US. We need to find out what hit in each case.

You have earlier mentioned the preserved Australian plain (Nulabor?), and if I remember correctly Shoemaker was working there at the time of his death. This work also needs to be completed.

Now back to radioactive Mars. I can not get to the earlier posts, but if you read the DOE site you found that C14 can also be rarely produced from other elements besides nitrogen - that is, "rarely" on Earth, with its magnetic shielding from radiation. Mars lacks this shielding.

In any case, what the researchers are seeing is not water, but neutrons produced by earlier radiation. Mars is radioactive, and there is no abundance of water in Hellas.

As a last item, I note that the general populace has little desire to pay money to send men to Mars.

ep