I agree that people like Myers are more anti-science than not, and approach the issues much like their opponents do, looking for data that will validate their o

I agree that people like Myers are more anti-science than not, and approach the issues much like their opponents do, looking for data that will validate their own beliefs, not interrogating reality dispassionately. However, Brandenburg doesn't do himself any favours by saying things like "The Natural Nuclear Reactor Hypothesis had the merit that it provided a known source for a large nuclear explosion." Natural reactors, so far as we know, have to be slow-neutron moderated, and slow-neutron reactors are not sources of nuclear explosions. Even fast reactors--which if not actually impossible are certainly much rarer in nature than slow neutron reactors--aren't sources of nuclear explosions unless things go wrong in ways that no one has yet been able to imagine. I won't say it's impossible, but it is wildly, wildly improbable. Granted the distribution of radioactive elements on the Martian surface is anomalous (which I'm only aware of through this article, so I'm going to take with a grain of salt) the hypothesis that leaps to mind is a natural slow-neutron reactor that was close to a perfectly ordinary large meteor strike. We know that Mars was wet in the past (a requirement for natural reactors) and we know that the early solar system was richer in fissile isotopes, and we know that there was at least one natural reactor two billion years ago on Earth, and we know that meteoric impacts were common in the early solar system and that Mars got hit hard and often enough for us to be able to identify a whole class of meteorites that come from Mars. So a natural reactor that got hit by a large impact doesn't require anything wildly improbable, and is likely testable via detailed analysis of any impact structures and glass droplets from around the areas with high concentrations of uranium and thorium.