Michael,

One thing that you should realise is that we all have limited time. I don't have time to write fully referenced primers about the geology of Mars. Those things have already been written by others and I've referred you to them. I was a little disappointed that I had to give you the details twice. Even then, you seem to be saying that you don't need them because you've found stuff on the internet. Unfortunately, you MUST read the detailed original material, not s simple summary of it.

Basing your knowledge on simple summaries is one reason why the basic "rules" of planetary science are so easy for you to discard - you don't understand the man-years of labour that have gone into the foundations of the science, and what aspects of it are relatively secure and which ones are more pliable.

You're right that nobody should get away with arguing from authority. OTOH, when you join a new BBS, you should spend a little while getting to know the people there and the existing social dynamics before launching into a massive multiple-layered post about something complex.

It simply is NOT good nettiquette to post multiple self-referential posts on the same theme. Instead, you should give your readers the respect that if your argument is neccesarily long and complex, that you lay it out in print, preferably on your own website, and post a brief introduction here and a link to the main text. In your introduction, you should, of course, cover the essentials and offer your new ideas as a "circuit breaker" for failures of existing theories to explain certain observations.

If you don't have access to your own website, then you should take the time, offline, to prepare a single coherent message and to post it.

We've had bad experiences here in the past with "Idiots-savant" who use us as the sounding board for their ideas, and post again and again and again in a short space of time, as their ideas vaguely evolve. I apologise if this sounds a little insulting, but it is frankly insulting to the reader to expect them to sit through your thought processes. Unfortunately, your posts came across as this style. Now this may not be the case, but it APPEARS to be the case, and on a BBS, appearance is what matters.

Take your time over the discussion - all ideas take time to mature. My CO2 ideas took several years to develop, have spent a while out in public, have encountered some prblems, and are due for some revision. But I haven't tried to do all this in a single pulse of frantic posting in the same thread.

Take time to LISTEN to the replies and think about them, and what the responder means. Often, you may need to do some work to understand and then refute the argument posed against you. Take the time to do this - it will test your model and either strengthen it or show that it can't work in quite that fashion.

Be careful of one basic problem with science - science is NOT about appearances, it is about causes. Unfortunately, many different causes can produce similar appearances. The difficult task of science is to work out which cause is most likely, in the prevailing circumstances, and to be open to question about alternative causes.

In the case of my CO2 models, I'm exploring the issues of fluid flows on Mars where more than one fluid may be responsible. Although we Earthlings are more familiar with water as an erosive fluid, it may be that the circumstances of Mars make it more likely that a less familiar fluid is responsible.

In the case of your lightning model, you're exploring the similarity of the "spiders" to electric discharge patterns. That's fine, but you must honestly and objectively approach the analysis of whether it is more or less likely that other causes have produced the appearances we see.

In particular, you need to be VERY careful in your arguments of similarity with other planets because that is a very two-edged sword. A decent grounding in planetary science will show you clearly WHY the magnetospheres of the planets are very different and WHY we have reasonable confidence in the age estimates of planetary surfaces,within a factor of two or four, anyway.

A Billion years is a hell of a long time, and the really amazing thing about Mars is that unlike dead worlds (Luna, Mercury) or active ones (Earth, Io), the surface features of Mars have evolved by slow and subtle processes over at least a billion years. Weak springtime effects can add-up to powerful landscape drivers over time.

IF lightning is responsible for the spiders on Mars, you need to think about recurrence rate of the lightning strikes, duration and nature of the visible features and physical scale (frankly, the spiders are just TOO large for any lightning I can reasonably conceive of - but I'm prepared to be persuaded by a GOOD argument).

So please, do some thinking, do some listening, do a lot of reading, and then bring your revised and enhanced model to us or to other venues (LPSC is open to all, but they're not an easy audience!).