[ApplegateRanch]

I did notice that nugget, and was going to post it...then I saw your post about it...then I saw the time stamp.

Here it is again, anyway:

He points out that the reactions that produce oil and gas abiotically inside the crust could happen in the mantle,

I thought this concept was a major poo-pooing trigger from both mainstream scientists as well as environuts.

Sounds like Gold and the Russkies may be vindicated in the not so distant future.

[SunkenCiv]

imo he's been vindicated; Freeman Dyson wrote the foreword to "Deep..." and pointed out what a polymath Gold was, and how he'd made left-field predictions in various unrelated, uh, fields -- and been vindicated.

Thomas J Gold: "But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." and "What we can conclude from this is that we must think very widely as to what it takes to develop intelligence and not take us so much as a model of what is necessary." [Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence, p 123; Sagan editor -- CETI was the old acronym]