More evidence of life on Mars but still no life (2025)

The article is good but the title is a bit too slippery a statement in my opinion. The article is saying more evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars. In astrobiology the massive problem is that geology can imitate biology. The presences of minerals formed by microbes on Earth does not prove microbes are involved in their production on Mars, it is a big jump to make.

Tangential, but really looking forward to what Europa Clipper[0] finds in its flybys.

The delay in communication makes ambitious manoeuvres challenging - perhaps advances in AI (and by extension robotics) helps build much more autonomous space rovers. This could enable us, for example, to evaluate the samples by sending wet microscopes with the rover itself.

[0]: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/

Viking 1 & 2 returned positive results in the seventies but these have been played down or hand waved. I think there is good evidence of microbial life in the soil or underground. We should be wary of bringing Martian microbes back to Earth, because they may find our environment too hospitable and end up invasive species.

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Mineral that can be only formed by life, or under special conditions when water flows over rock, has been found on Mars, where water had been known to flow over rock.

NASA doesn't want to find life on Mars. They want to find evidence, so that the next probe can be more complex and more expensive than the previous one.

NASA will never send wet microscope to Mars, you know, the kind you used in school to show bacteria in dirty water. As that would instantly prove life on Mars and make ever more expensive probes hard to justify.