Thanks for responding, Nereid. I was expecting you to. We have crossed swords more than once on this forum and I see that you are still staunchly defending the faith. I hadn't, before last Thursday, posted anything in this forum for a little over a year because I found (and still find) the 30 day rule unjustified and unacceptable. What I found particularly significant in its timing and despicable in its principle, was that it came shortly after the memorable "bridges" debate which remains as an outstanding landmark in the ATM section of this forum. Commenting on the 30 day rule at the time in
this post,
dgruss23 pointed out that "Obviously we can either accept their rules or go elsewhere". I went elsewhere.
I don't intend to waste anyone's time by either restating the obvious or by attempting to answer the usual copy-and-paste questions above - it's ground that has been gone over sufficiently often in the past, in several other BAUT forums, as you yourself point out, some of which I contributed to myself, and in particular in the "Electric Comet" thread which was also closed around the same time as a result of the same 30-day rule.
The only really pertinent question in the above is the last one but I don't understand why you think it even needs answering. The question was:
Sorry if I seem to be labouring a point, but what is
objectively new (not just what I
consider to be new) is the latest research findings by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who claim, to quote
my initial post in this thread, that “as a whole, the samples look more asteroidal than cometary”, that "the Stardust material resembles chondritic meteorites from the asteroid belt", and that "the dust from Wild 2 also is missing ingredients that would be expected in comet dust".
The fact that it it is a startlingly
new (and in mainstream BB theory, an embarrassingly "surprising") development is precisely the reason why I have dropped back in on the BAUT forum. There has so far been absolutely
no explanation for it offered by mainstream contributers. Do you (and other mainstreamers) seriously think that the fact that the latest research findings concerning the dust brought back from comet Wild 2 show that, to all intents and purposes, it cannot be distinguished, in its physical or chemical composition, from a vulgar asteroid is of no significance in the ongoing debate about the nature of comets?